Law from a Cultural Perspective: course description
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Menachem Mautner, Tel Aviv University
The past two decades witnessed the "cultural turn" -- adoption of the concept of culture as an important working tool for gaining insights in the various disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities. The purpose of this course is to employ the concept of culture as a tool for gaining insights on the phenomenon of law. 
We shall first acquaint ourselves with the contemporary discussion of the concept of culture. We shall then discuss the historical school in jurisprudence that perceived the law of the state as a product of the culture and customs of the people. We shall then discuss the constitutive approach to law and culture which sees law as playing a major role in constituting the minds, self-perception and social interactions in which individuals are involved (in the workplace, the family, etc.). The devastating critical attack launched against legal formalism by the American Legal Realists in the 1920s created a severe crisis in the law. The claim was made that non-formalistic law is indeterminate and uncertain. We shall discuss the attempt of Karl Llewellyn, the intellectual leader of the Realists, to address this crisis by developing a rudimentary perception of the law of the courts as a cultural system and by claiming that as a culture, this law restrains the jurists socialized in it and creates uniformity of thought and conduct among them. This discussion will be followed by James Boyd White's perception of the law of the courts as "constitutive rhetoric", i.e., as a medium for communal normative buildung in which society's constituting values are clarified and adopted.
In the next section of the course we shall discuss Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of the legal field that analyzes the dynamics of law as an arena for the creation of cultural products. We shall acquaint ourselves with Bourdiue's sociology of culture and its three major concepts: "habitus", "capital" and "field". The basic text for the next section will be an article by Clifford Geertz on common sense as a cultural system. The claim will be made that legal doctrine is saturated with common sense knowledge and that it is impossible to employ any legal doctrine without widely resorting to common sense knowledge. The final sections of the course will deal with the role played by law as a means of social and political control. In this context, works of Karl Marx (law in the hands of ruling classes) and Antonio Gramsci (law as a tool for the propagation of hegemonic world-view) will be discussed. Teaching method: The students will be asked to read xeroxed materials to be discussed in class. The students will also be asked to submit a short "reaction paper" ahead of each meeting of the course. 
