Legal culture, in its most general sense, is one way of describing relatively stable patterns of legally oriented social behaviour and attitudes. The identifying elements of legal culture range from facts about institutions such as the number and role of lawyers or the ways judges are appointed and controlled, to various forms of behaviour such as litigation or prison rates, and, at the other extreme, more nebulous aspects of ideas, values, aspirations and mentalities. Like culture itself, legal culture is about who we are not just what we do. Enquiries into legal culture try to understand puzzling features of the role and the rule of law within given societies. Why do the UK and Denmark complain most about the imposition of EU law but then turn out to be the countries which have the best records of obedience? Conversely, why does Italy, whose public opinion is most in favour of Europe, have such a high rate of non compliance? Why does Holland, otherwise so similar, have such a low litigation rate compared to neighbouring Germany? Why in the United States and the UK does it often takes a sex scandal to create official interest in doing something about corruption, whereas in Latin countries it takes a major corruption scandal to excite interest in marital unfaithfulness!? Such contrasts can lead us to reconsider broader theoretical issues in the study of law and society. How does the importance of 'enforcement' as an aspect of law vary in different societies? What can be learned, and what is likely to be obscured, by defining 'law' in terms of litigation rates? How do shame and guilt cultures condition the boundaries of law and in what ways does law help shape those self-same boundaries? These few examples are enough to suggest that findings about legal culture can have both theoretical and policy implications. But there may even be more straightforwardly practical
The Jewish people comprise two major groups, one encompassing the Jews of Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European) origin and the other including those of Sephardic (Middle Eastern and North African) descent. To the latter belong the Jews of Moroccan stock, who form the largest Jewish subgroup among the non-Ashkenazi population living in Israel. As the members of each of these groups differ in physiognomy and life style, it was of interest to investigate whether these differences are also reflected in their respective HLA compositions. To this end, 132 subjects of Ashkenazi and 113 individuals of Moroccan origin residing in Israel were tested and the results compared with data for other populations made available by the 11th International Histocompatibility Workshop. Comparison between their HLA profiles and those of non-Jews revealed that the Jewish groups in some aspects resembled one another but in others showed disparities. The dissimilarities between the various groups are expressed in terms of gene and haplotype frequencies, as well as in HLA-disease associations (as for example rheumatoid arthritis, erosive lichen planus, primary Sjögren's syndrome, pemphigus vulgaris). However, both Jewish groups shared some unique features with respect to HLA class II allelic frequencies, pointing to a common ancestry.
Sociology of law often seems to be marked by a form of intellectual apartheid. Whilst social theorists refine their conceptual frameworks, those with more practical concerns robustly set out to investigate the ‘law in action’. Mixing of the two approaches is thought likely to impede their necessary separate development. One recent survey of the field concluded that:‘The trend is likely to be a continuing divergence between its theoretical and practical branches: the theoretical consisting mainly of re-analyses of old sociological approaches to law, and the practical continuing with its problem-solving approach without confronting the theoretical problems implicit in what it accepts as problems and solutions’.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Wiley and Cardiff University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Law and Society. Before the 1990s, many in the West saw corruption as a problem limited to 'underdeveloped' countries with fledgling political institutions, or else at least as being something more typical of Mediterranean, Asian or other similar cultures. However, political scandals in most Western European countries mean that there is now no escaping its systematic presence in developed democracies.' Why should this be happening, what is being done about it, and what are likely to be the limits of the current wave of anti-corruption campaigns?There are many disciplines which have relevant insights to bring to the study of political corruption: we could think for example of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, organizational and administrative theory or development studies. In this volume, we have invited case-studies authored by scholars who draw primarily on the contributions of criminology and political science two disciplines whose type and level of enquiry into this phenomenon can be treated as usefully complementaryplus one essay (on China) by a development studies scholar. In this overview, we shall attempt to justify the choice of these disciplines by indicating how they help us tackle important questions about changes in corrupt behaviour, in the relationship between corruption and anti-corruption campaigns, and the problems of prevention and control in a variety of societies. Indeed, we have chosen as our title 'The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption' in order to emphasize the connection between the causes and the (non-)regulation of political corruption. CRIME, LEGITIMACY, AND CORRUPTIONWithin criminology, the analysis of corruption is most closely associated with the study of state crime, white-collar and organized crime, and its regulation.2 The modus operandi of occult financing of political parties, for example, normally requires the use of bribes, kickbacks, and other forms of payoffs, tax evasion, fraud, undeclared slush funds, and planned bankruptcies. In some European countries, this in turn relies, to an extent perhaps unimaginable in Britain with its different bureaucratic traditions, on the massive production and acceptance of false invoices. So it is fruitful to examine links between political financing, fraud, and money-laundering.But our understanding of corruption can also be enriched by using concepts found in the wider literature of criminology and the sociology of deviance, such as labelling theory. Even if corrupt agreements are often in breach of the criminal law, we must still ask whether corruption is devia...
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