Popular culture and law exist in a symbiotic relationship. Recently, however, the line between the two realms has been vanishing, which may create a legitimacy crisis for modern, developed legal systems.

The Legal Culture Approach

High Culture and Low Culture

There is a well-established distinction between high and low culture for matters of taste or aesthetics. In this area, high and low culture separate when the former becomes the domain of experts and elites. Experts mainly control the supply side of high culture, while educated people and the upper strata of society control the demand side links. For legal culture, there is no simple analogy to this high and low culture distinction. Lawrence Friedman introduced the distinction between internal and external legal cultures, a distinction that is ...

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