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LAW, LEGAL CULTURE AND LEGAL TRADITION
Or the foundational concepts of comparative historical investigations
Csaba VARGA
By monitoring the way in which word uses and conceptualities behind them are changing, it is revealed that they may often hide different objects in different
contexts, and thus they are not even commensurable among themselves. However, in their own contexture, some of them may turn to be wholly justifiable only provided
that they have sufficient explanatory power in a sufficiently expanded system of arguments. In case of 'legal culture', in early occurrences the German separation of
natural and cultural sciences was a mere word-usage consequence. Later it was used to describe the material, linguistic, and customary environment of law; then it
served as a sociological exploration of one of the components of law; more recently as an indicator; and finally as an ideal type-but none of them has proved to be
sufficiently operative and theorisable. In law, separating any domain “external” from anything else “internal” is excluded from the very beginning. In fact, legal
culture is a sign of the idea and ideal of order that substantiates any given legal phenomena that have occurred in the history of our world, along with the specific
way of approaching to-whilst thinking and arguing in-them. Within this notional sphere, 'legal tradition' is a species of legal culture in which the past is
considered as having some kind of binding or justifying force. Or, 'legal culture' is thus neither a mere environmental element nor a surplus added to law, but an
ontic part of the law. Both the features and the modes of the law's operation are within and dependent on culture at the same time. In consequence, not even the
genuine meaning of law can be explained from within, but from the contextualising positions of its underlying culture exclusively, for "extra culturam nihil datur".
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