Legal Culture or Social Legal Consciousness?

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the conceptual relations of legal culture and social legal consciousness. The first  section surveys the appearance of the notion of legal  culture on the horizon of the Hungarian legal history, comparative law and legal sociology. The second introduces a working definition of legal culture using a general  concept of ‘culture’, based on cultural anthropological  findings, and a sociologically founded concept of ‘law’ as a  differentia specifica. For a demonstration of the idea, the  study presents a conceptual analysis of the Hungarian attorneys’ professional selfimage used in a recent empirical study. Recognising the inconsistencies and shortcomings of the conceptualisation, the train of thoughts returns back to  its starting point for a critical revision of the earlier outlined concept of legal culture in the last part. The survey of the scientific debate surrounding Lawrence Friedman’s concept grounds the conclusion that we have to ‘retrieve’ the concept of social legal consciousness and re-interpret it in relation to the notion of legal culture, tearing it out from the neo-Marxist ideological context in which it rooted  originally.