Law’s Pluralities

Special Issue
Law’s Pluralities: Arguments for Cultural Approaches to Law

The German Law Journal is proud to announce the publication of the special issue “Law’s Pluralities:  Arguments for Cultural Approaches to Law” (Volume 18, No. 2), which has been edited by Professor Greta Olson with Professor Franz Reimer.

This remarkable collection serves as a call for transdisciplinary and culturally-oriented research on law in Germany. That project, the editors explain, has its roots in a German discussion of the pluralistic nature of legal authority that predates the twentieth-century. Then, as now, research in the law should engage with its inherent plurality and affectivity.  With this in mind, the collection of nine articles argues in favor of the culturally-embedded and -mediated nature of legal phenomena.  That position, in turn, suggests that critical cultural methods and concepts are needed to comprehend current processes such as the so-called Europeanization of law, and the increasing heterogeneity of legal systems and cultures.  More fundamentally, cultural methods of legal analysis are needed to critically bracket the idea of “legal culture” in and of itself.  On one hand, the articles gathered in this special issue contribute to the thesis that law is pluralistic and has to be investigated interdisciplinarily, using a plurality of methods. On the other hand, all of the contributions make a different kind of claim for how law transpires and is transported through theatrical, visual means, narratives, and affects.