Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society

Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)

Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

1. Legal Culture and the Welfare State

Legal culture is the ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that people hold about
legal system. Usually there are many cultures in a country because societies
are complex thus it made up of all sorts of goeups, classes and strata. There
are two types of legal culture, which are internal legal culture (the legal culture
of lawyers and judges) and external (the legal culture of the population at
large). Social scientists started approached about legal systems firstly with a
hypothesis that social xhange will lead, inexorably, to legal change. So, how
the social change leads to legal change is with legal culture and social change
leads to changes in people’s values and attitudes so this sets up chains of
demands. Looking at the societies that keep changing, hence the people
demand normas from the state, from the collectivity, to guarantee the work of
those strangers whose work is vital to our lives, which we cannot guarantee
by ourselves.

Out of this cycle of demands, the modern state builds up a body of health and
safety law. The rules become denser, more formal. There are some informal
norms which clearly do nit work for many problems and in relationships in
large, complex, mobile societies, when the villages have shattered into
thousands if pieces, only to form again into the great ant-hills of our cities. Yet
the more the state undertakes, the more it creates a climate that leads to still
further increases in demand because of a fundamental change in legal
culture, state action creates expectations. It redefines what seems to be the
possible human limits of law; it extends the boundaries. From what’s possible
comes to be taken for granted such as taxes that creep forward slowly, benefit
programs are added on one at a time and many programs that are created.
Demands on government in the 19 th century were restained by the feeling that
there was nothing that could be done. People expevted misfortune and
injustice of an unjust world. In the contemporary world, the situation has
turned upside down. A great revolution in expectations ha staken place of a
general expevtation that the state will guarantee total justice and general
expectation that the state will protect us from catastrophe.
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

2. American Legal Culture: The Last Thirty-Five Years

Legal institutions are reflections of social institutions. In the last thirty-five
years, there have been dizzying changes in every area of social life,
technology, social arrangement, legal culture and through these changes, in
the very fabric of the law itself. In legal culture change is so obvious that it
comes to be accepted or it comes to be taken as normal. At one time, law was
treated as timeless, immemorial: sacred custom, encrusted with tradition. No
field of law has remained static over the last thirty-five years. Constitutional
law and the related field of civil rights, have perhaps change most of all. The
civil rights revolution was enormously important in its own right. No problem in
American law that has been more important, more deepseated than the
relationship between the black and the white populations and the relationship
between women and men is if anything even more fundamental and
pervasive. Changes in that relationship dig very deep tino the society
including the civil rights recilution and the feminist movement are also
indications of an even broader transformation in law and in life.

It may seem peculiar to treat the struggle for the rights of blacks and
Hispanics as illustrations of radical individualism. But this proposition is
misleading. The essence of each liberation movement is the demand that
society treat each individual as gender or group. Individualism is a feature of
character-formation in the modern Western society. But it seems particularly
strong in the United States compare to the Europe that seems stagnant, hide-
bound, traditional. The techonological changes of the last thirty-five years
have only strengthened American individualism. They have further weakened
the traditional authority including family. Meanwhile in traditional societies,
authority was vertical, hierarchical. The family was in control of the personality
and character of the child, and the family, along with village notables
transmitted values and ideas to the child. In the television age, on the other
hand, authority and power have become much more horizontal thus the child
is no longer isolated and the parents no longer have the first and last word;
their authority is no longer exclusive.
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

The media serves as the medium which indoctrinates the mass, as it

transmits new concepts and ideas a large amount of audiences regardless of
their location. As a result of this fostering of information, communities of
similar interests and ideologies are easily formed horizontally. The media,
therefore, was perceived as a platform in advocating for social change - which
in turn establishes legal change.

Friedman believes that individualism serves as the basis of the civil rights
revolution, in which transformed the American legal system. He argued that
changes that one of the vital changes that occurred due at the time was the
escalated rate of divorce. Marriage was perceived as a mere contract
between two parties who had the liberty to enter and exit such marriage to
their desire. Friedman asserts that the increase of expressive individualism
was a factor to such liberty. This legal culture eventually leads to the
legitimization of divorce which was put into effect in 1970. Aside from this,
Friedman added that legal change occurred due to the decline of public trust
towards the government. This led to the increase of legal hurdles officials
must endure in achieving national objectives such as in the establishment of
infrastructure. The developments that took place due to the civil rights
revolution were favorable, as it produced laws that brought positive impacts to
the American society. In spite of this, Friedman argues that the revolution also
widened the gap to poverty and other social illnesses. He believed that social
organization was produced as a “side-effect” of expressive individualism. The
culture of individualism hinders people take part or contribute into the society
to the extent where they feel discontent and deviate to radical and criminal
intents. The growth of deviance was caused by the lack of authority, as well
as the culture of oppression which in fact still persists in the society in spite of
the revolution.

Another legal change that occurred was in regards to technological

developments in which inflicted changes within the scope of business law.
Friedman implied that the growth of technology introduced new legal
prospects such as patents and copyrights. He also conveyed on the idea that
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

globalisation and international trade led to the development of laws regulating

such practices. This includes the legislation of laws in regards to intellectual
property, immigration, anti-trust and many others as a means to cope up with
developments. In addition to this, the communications’ revolution shaped
American federalism in such that the federal government was able to grow
gradually. The New Deal further excelled the federal government at the
expense of the state and local government. However, this was ultimately
affected by the transmission of political doctrines through mediums such as
radio broadcasts by figures like Franklin Roosevelt. This being said, every
branch of law is subject to federal intervention.

3. The Impact of Society On Law

Ewick and Silbey first discussed two vies of legal consciousness. The first is
"ideas and attitudes of individuals which determined the forms and texture of
social life. It focused on individuals. Others callers take a quite different
approach. For them consciousness is a result, not a cause. It is derived from
social structures. This view is held by Marxists and Structuralists, who argue that
individuals are the only bearer of social relations and consequently, social
relations, not individuals, are the proper object of analysis. in other words, the
law itself are produced by the shape of society. we conceive conciousness as part
of a reciprocal process in which the meanings given by individuals to their world.
Conceptualized in this way, Conciousness in this way, consciousness is neither
fixed, stable, unitary, nor consistent. Instead, we see it as something local,
contextual, pluralistic, filled with conflict and contradiction. Ewick and Silbey
report that they found three different pervasive frames for popular
understandings of law. They talk about popular understandings of law as
“Legality”. According to Ewick and Silbey, these frameworks affect how people
conceive of themselves, and thus affect how they act. Their own consciousness
can create constraints, or rule out certain kinds of choices. Conversely, the
framework within which they approach law can also bring people to make
choices that actually change the constraints of law, albeit in small or subtle ways.
Sometimes we can trace the way change continues to reverberate through
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

society and law, so that a shift in society may influence law to change, but that
legal change then has a further effect on society, and on and on. In the following
excerpt, Edelman, fuller and mara- drita trace a continuing interaction between
institutions regulated by law and the law that is regulating them. Institutional
structures and cultures “receive” the message sent by legal change in
characteristic ways, altering the import of the message in some ways. On the
other hand, when courts are asked to assess whether institutions have
adequately responded to legal mandates, they incorporate some aspects of
institutional logic into their ongoing reframing of the law.