Using The Concept of Legal Culture

DAVID NELKEN*

I. The Meaning of Legal Culture

Legal culture, in its most general sense, is one way of describing relatively
stable patterns of legally oriented social behaviour and attitudes. The
identifying elements of legal culture range from facts about institutions such
as the number and role of lawyers or the ways judges are appointed and
controlled, to various forms of behaviour such as litigation or prison rates,
and, at the other extreme, more nebulous aspects of ideas, values,
aspirations and mentalities. Like culture itself, legal culture is about who
we are not just what we do.
Enquiries into legal culture try to understand puzzling features of the
role and the rule of law within given societies. Why do the United Kingdom
and Denmark complain most about the imposition of European Union
(‘EU’) law but then turn out to be the countries which have the best records
of obedience? Conversely, why does Italy, whose public opinion is most in
favour of Europe, have such a high rate of non-compliance? Why does
Holland, otherwise so similar, have such a low litigation rate compared to
neighbouring Germany? Why in the United States and the United Kingdom
does it often takes a sex scandal to create official interest in doing
something about corruption, whereas in Latin countries it takes a major
corruption scandal to excite interest in marital unfaithfulness!? Such
contrasts can lead us to reconsider broader theoretical issues in the study of
law and society. How does the importance of ‘enforcement’ as an aspect of
law vary in different societies? What can be learned, and what is likely to
be obscured, by defining ‘law’ in terms of litigation rates? How do shame
and guilt cultures condition the boundaries of law and in what ways does
law help shape those self-same boundaries?

Distinguished Professor of Legal Institutions and Social Change, University

of Macerata, Italy; Distinguished Research Professor of Law, University of
Wales Cardiff; and Visiting Professor of Law, LSE. This is a revised version
of a paper that was presented as a keynote address to the Australian Society
of Legal Philosophy Conference (18-20 July 2003). I should like to thank
Professor Peter Cane and Professor Tom Campbell for their kind invitation,
Professor Dimity Kingsford-Smith for graciously suggesting the idea, and
Professor Jeremy Webber for his ‘reply’ to the paper.
2 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

These few examples are enough to suggest that findings about legal
culture can have both theoretical and policy implications. But there may
even be more straightforwardly practical advantages. Knowing more about
differences in legal culture can actually save your life! One well-travelled
colleague who teaches legal theory likes to tell a story of the way crossing
the road when abroad requires good knowledge of the local customs. In
England, he claims, you are relatively safe on pedestrian crossings, but
rather less secure if you try to cross elsewhere. In Italy, he argues, you need
to show about the same caution in both places; but at least motorists will do
their best to avoid actually hitting you. In Germany, on the other hand, or so
he alleges, you are totally safe on the zebra crossing. You don’t even need
to look out for traffic. But, if you dare to cross elsewhere, you risk simply
not being ‘seen’.
The sort of investigations in which the idea of legal culture finds its
place are those which set out to explore empirical variations in the way law
is conceived and lived rather than to establish universal truths about the
nature of law; to map the existence of different concepts of law rather than
establish the concept of law.1 In employing the idea of legal culture in
comparative exercises geared to exploring the similarities and differences
amongst legal practices and legal worlds the aim is to go beyond the tired
categories so often relied on in comparative law such as ‘families of law’
and incorporate that attention to the Taw in action’ and ‘living law’ which
is usually missing from comparative lawyers’ classifications and
descriptions.*2
But the concept of legal culture is certainly not a simple one. Not
only is it used in a variety of ways, some authors have even suggested that it
is so misleading that it should be abandoned. In this paper I shall first
address two of the key issues surrounding the use of this term. Firstly, what
should we consider to be the unit of legal culture? In a period of increasing
globalisation is it still appropriate that it be the nation state? Secondly, how
should the term legal culture figure in our explanations? Is it a separable
variable to be set against other causal factors, or is it a rather an invitation to
interpret what is distinctive about the way law works and is experienced in
different places? After summarising some of the general literature on these
issues I shall then re-examine them with reference to empirical research I

See Brian Tamanaha, A General Jurisprudence ofLaw and Society (2001).

See, eg, David Nelken, ‘Understanding/ Invoking Legal Culture’ in David
Nelken (ed), Special Issue on Legal Culture, Diversity and Globalization
(1995) 4 Social and Legal Studies 435-52; David Nelken (ed), Comparing
Legal Cultures (1997) 58-88; and David Nelken, ‘Comparative Sociology
of Law’ in Reza Benakar and Max Travers (eds), Introduction to Law and
Social Theory (2002) 329^14.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 3

am engaged in which concerns court delays3 in Italy. Italian drivers may

indeed be relatively quick witted in avoiding accidents, but if we should
ever be so unfortunate as to be caught up in one it is important to know that
we may have to wait as much as 14 years for a verdict. In many other
European countries waiting time tends to be measured in months rather than
years; yet despite this apparently creaking court system Italy is a leading
economic power. How far can using the concept of legal culture explain or
make sense of such differences in the heart of Europe? I shall conclude by
saying something about what legal delay can tell us about the relationship
between legal culture and general culture in Italy. Any study of this sort can
at best provide only part of the picture. But hopefully even this will be
sufficient to remind us of the ethnocentricity of many of our ideas regarding
the role and the rule of law.
(a) The Unit of Legal Culture
Articles,4 and books,5 very interesting ones, continue to identify legal
culture within the nation state, and collections of studies of legal culture
likewise use this as their organising theme.6 But rather than limit ourselves
to the state level, patterns of legal culture can and must also be sought both
at a more micro as well as at a more macro level. At the sub-national level
the appropriate unit of legal culture may be the local court, the prosecutor’s
office, or the lawyer’s consulting room. Differences between places in the
same society may often be considerable. Legal culture is not necessarily
uniform (organisationally and meaningfully) across different branches of
law.7 Lawyers specialising in some subjects may have less in common with
other lawyers outside their field than they have with those abroad. At the
macro level, historical membership of the continental or common law world
transcends the frontiers of the nation state. And, increasingly, the
implications of these memberships are being challenged and reworked by
globalising networks of trading and other interchanges. We also need toI

I shall have to leave to another occasion the problems in using the term
delay as if it were a self-evident fact, rather than a contested and contestable
label implying that someone finds a length of waiting time unacceptable.
Likewise, I shall not discuss here the harm caused — even in Italy — by
legal procedures that are over too quickly.
Eric Feldman, ‘Patients’ Rights, Citizen Movements and Japanese Legal
Culture’ in David Nelken (ed), Comparing Legal Cultures (1997) 215; and
Eric Feldman, ‘Blood Justice, Courts, Conflict and Compensation in Japan,
France and the United States’ (2001) 34 Law and Society Review 651.
See, eg, John Bell, French Legal Culture (2002); Ehrhard Blankenburg and
Freek Bruinsma, Dutch Legal Culture (2nd ed, 1994); David Johnson, The
Japanese Way ofJustice (2002).
See Volkmar Gessner, Armin Hoeland and Casba Varga (eds), European
Legal Cultures (1996).
Bell, above n 5.
4 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

explore what have been described as the ‘third cultures’ of international

trade, communication networks and other trans-national processes.8
Given the extent of past and present transfer of legal institutions and
ideas, it is often misleading to try and relate legal culture only to its current
national context.9 For example, some American authors have mistakenly
tried to explain, as examples of ‘Japanese’ legal culture, standard features
of Continental European systems which date back in Japan only to their
borrowing of these legal institutions in the last century. Many aspects of
law are the result of colonialism, immigration and conquest. Non-European
countries frequently have mixed or pluralistic legal systems which testify to
waves of colonial invasions or imitations of other systems.10 *Deliberate
attempts at the socio-legal engineering of so called ‘legal transplants’ can
range from single laws and legal institutions to entire codes or borrowed
systems of law.11 Law may be remade by wider national culture; but it can
also itself help mould that culture. Many current legal transfers can be seen
as attempts to bring about imagined and different futures, rather than to
conserve the present (as the transplant metaphor might suggest). Hence ex­
communist countries try to become more like selected examples of the more
successful market societies, or South Africa models its new Constitution on
the best that Western regimes have to offer rather than on constitutional
arrangements found in its nearer neighbours in Africa. The hope is that law
may be a means of resolving current problems by transforming their society
into one more like the source of such borrowed law; legal transfer becomes
part of the effort to become more democratic, more economically
successful, more secular — or more religious. In what is almost a species of
sympathetic magic borrowed law is deemed capable of bringing about the
same conditions of a flourishing economy or a healthy civil society that are
found in the social context from which the borrowed law has been taken.

See, eg, Francis Snyder, ‘Governing Economic Globalisation: Global Legal

Pluralism and European Law’ (1999) 5 European Law Journal 334;
Guenther Teubner, ‘Global Bukowina: Legal Pluralism in the World
Society’ in Guenther Teubner (ed), Global Law Without a State (1997) 3;
Guenther Teubner, ‘Legal Irritants: Good Faith in British Law or How
Unifying Law Ends up in New Divergences’ (1998) 61 Modern Law Review
11; Yves Dezalay and Bryan Garth, Dealing in Virtue (1996).
David Nelken, ‘Comparativists and Transferability’ in Pierre Legrand and
Roderick Munday (eds), Comparative Legal Studies: Traditions and
Transition (2003) 437.
Andrew Harding, ‘Comparative Law and Legal Transplantation in South
East Asia’ in David Nelken and Johannes Feest (eds) Adapting Legal
Cultures (2001) 199.
David Nelken, ‘Towards a Sociology of Legal Adaptation’ in David Nelken
and Johannes Feest (eds), Adapting Legal Cultures (2001) 4.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 5

The adoption of dissimilar legal models is perhaps most likely where

the legal transfer is imposed by third parties as part of a colonial project
and/or insisted on as a condition of trade, aid, alliance or diplomatic
recognition. But it has also often been sought by elites concerned to
‘modernise’ their society or otherwise bring it into the wider family of
‘civilised’ nations. Japan and Turkey are the most obvious examples.12
Even in Europe some of the laws and legal institutions that people think of
as most typically their own are the result of imitation, imposition or
borrowing.13 Much domestic law in the 19th century, such as the law of
copyright, was mainly invented as a response to its existence elsewhere.
There are Dutch disputing mechanisms which are in fact a result of German
imposition during the occupation, and which have been abandoned in
Germany itself.14 Hence, in advance of empirical investigation it would be
wrong to assume any particular ‘fit’ between law and its environing
national society or culture. In addition, the nation state has now to come to
terms with the impact of globalisation.15 For some writers, we inhabit a
‘deterritorialised world’; we can participate via the media in other
communities of others with whom we have no geographical proximity or
common history.16 Hence, ‘all totalising accounts of (a) society, (a)
tradition, or (a) culture are exclusionary and enact a social violence by
suppressing continuing and continually emergent differences’.17 Instead we
must face the ‘challenges of transnationalism and the politics of global
capitalism or multiple overlapping and conflicting juridiscapes’.18
Claims about the decline of the nation state can no doubt be taken too
far. Given the boundaries of jurisdiction, politics, and language, the nation
state does make a convenient starting point for comparing legal culture. It is
an empirical question how far legal culture at the national level is modified
by what happens at other levels. Common influences, cultural interchange

See the contributions to Andrew Harding and Elsin Orucu (eds),

Comparative Law for the 21st Century (2002) and Michael B Likosky (ed),
Transnational Legal Processes (2002).
13 See Brad Sherman, ‘Remembering and Forgetting: The Birth of Modem
Copyright Law’ in David Nelken (ed), Comparing Legal Cultures (1997) 2,
237.
14 Alex Jettinghoff, ‘State Formation and Legal Change: On the Impact of
International Politics’ in David Nelken and Johannes Feest (eds), Adapting
Legal Cultures (2001) 99.
15 Antoine Garapon, ‘French Legal Culture and the Shock of “Globalization”’
in David Nelken (ed), Special Issue on Legal Culture, Diversity and
Globalization (1995) 4 Social and Legal Studies 493.
16 Rosemary J Coombe, ‘Contingent Articulations: A Critical Cultural Studies
of Law’, in Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns (eds), Law in the Domains of
Culture (1998) 21.
17 Ibid 31.
18 Ibid 43.
6 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

and increasing economic interdependence (or in many cases just

dependence) can all produce similarities. But, simultaneously, ‘increasing
homogenisation of social and cultural forms seems to be accompanied by a
proliferation of claims to specific authenticities and identities’.19 We also
need to take care that our comparisons do not fall into the vices of
Occidentalism or Orientalism, of making other cultures seem either
necessarily similar or intrinsically ‘other’.20 Given that culture is, to a large
extent, a matter of struggle and disagreement, the purported uniformity,
coherence or stability of given national cultures will often be no more than
a rhetorical claim projected by outside observers or manipulated by
elements within the culture concerned. Much that goes under the name of
culture is no more — but also no less — than ‘imagined communities’ or
‘invented traditions’, though these may of course be real in their effects.
There is therefore some danger of reifying national stereotypes, (as in the
earlier examples of driving practices in different societies?) as there is of
failing to recognise that legal culture, like all culture, is a product of the
contingencies of history and is always undergoing change.21 It is enough to
think of the transformations in attitudes towards Taw and order’ from
Weimar to Hitlerian Germany. In terms of the case study that follows it is
worth remembering that Italian judges in the 1920s and 30s had virtually no
backlog of cases.
One of the most pressing tasks of the comparative sociologist of law
is to try and capture how far in actual practice what is described as
globalisation in fact represents the attempted imposition of a one particular
legal culture on other societies. Some leading authors argue that we are now
seeing convergence towards a modem type of legal culture,22 and in
particular the recent growth of prestige of the Anglo-American model
which is spread by trade and the media. The Anglo-American model is seen
to be characterised by its emphasis on the care taken to link law and
economics (rather than law and the state), procedures which rely on orality,
party initiative, negotiation inside law, as well as more broad cultural
features such as individualism and the search for security through legal

Marian Strathem, Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological

Knowledge (1995) 3.
Maureen Cain, ‘Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Sociology of Crime’
(2000) 40 British Journal of Criminology 239.
See Nelken, ‘Understanding/ Invoking Legal Culture’, above n 2.
Lawrence Friedman, ‘Is there a Modem Legal Culture?’ (1994) 7 Ratio
Juris, 117. See also David Garland, The Culture of Control (2000), who, in
the admittedly restricted area of criminal justice, argues that American legal
responses epitomise those required by Tate modem society’, and are bound
to arrive to other advanced democracies if they have not already done so.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 7

remedies.*23 20
Others
* * insist that nation states remain recognisably distinctive,
with the extreme of ‘adversarial legalism’ located only in the United
States.24 It has been observed that much of the ‘ideal’ model does not
accurately describe how the law operates at home, for example the
American legal and regulatory system in practice often relies on
inquisitorial methods. National versions of the Continental legal system
embodied in ready packaged Codes are also being exported, especially to
the ex-communist world. In addition, the ideals represented by the ‘rule of
law’ itself, as a way of providing certainty and keeping the state within
bounds, seem increasingly outdated for the regulation of international
commercial exchange by computer between multinationals which are more
powerful than many of the governments of the countries in which they
trade.25
What does seem undeniable is the extent to which legal culture is
becoming ever more what we could call ‘relational’. With increasing
contact between societies there are ever more opportunities to define one’s
own legal culture in terms of relationships of attraction to or repulsion from
what goes on in other societies. For example, when comparative European
prison rates first began to be published in the 1980s, Finland, which came
high in the list, decided to cut back on prison building, whereas Holland felt
entitled to build more. What mattered was to stay within the norm.
Likewise, for many European countries the continued use of the death
penalty in the United States serves as a significant marker of the superiority
of their own legal culture.
(b) What is the Concept of Legal Culture good for?
Let us assume that we can identify which unit — or, better, units — of legal
culture we want to study. Our second set of questions concern how we
should employ the concept in the context of our investigations. What is the
point in calling a particular pattern of behaviour or ideas legal culture, and
what follows from this? We could use this term, like others such as ‘legal
system’ or ‘legal process’, as no more than scholarly shorthand for pointing
to a set of activities or problems. But if we want to utilise legal culture in
explanatory enquiries we shall have to go further than this. The question is

See Wolf Heyderbrand, ‘Globalization and the Rule of Law at the End of the
20th Century’ in Alberto Febbrajo, David Nelken and Vittorio Olgiati (eds),
Social Processes and Patterns of Legal Control: European Yearbook of
Sociology ofLaw, 2000 (2001) 25.
Robert Kagan, Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law (2001);
David Nelken, ‘Beyond Compare? Criticising the American Way of Law’
(2003)28 Law and Social Inquiry 181.
See William Scheuerman, ‘Globalization and the Fate of Law’ in David
Dyzenhaus (ed), Recrafting the Rule of Law: The Limits of Legal Order
(1999)243-66
8 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

how much further? Culture is one of those words which it is particularly

difficult to define and easy to abuse.26 Within anthropology the process of
producing accounts of other cultures is increasingly contested.27 How can
we avoid the ever-present danger of circular argument? (eg they do it that
way because that is how they do it in Japan, in Holland or wherever). Is it
best to use the term legal culture only as a residual explanation when other
explanations run out?28
Roger Cotterrell has argued that the term legal culture is too vague
and impressionistic a concept to be useful in constructing explanations.29
Lawrence Friedman, the acknowledged father of the term, replies that it is
no worse than other overarching social science concepts. Even if the
concept as such is not measurable it covers a wide range of phenomena that
can be measured.30 In its role in explanations, legal culture can serve to
capture an essential intervening variable in influencing the type of legal
changes which follow on large social transformations such as those
following technological breakthroughs.31 More generally, legal culture
determines when, why and where people turn for help to law, or to other
institutions, or just decide to iump it’.32 It would be a finding about legal
culture, he says, if French but not Italian women were reluctant to call the
police to complain about sexual harassment.33 The issue of legal delay, as
we shall see also lends itself to analysis for this purpose.
Friedman is also the author of the classic distinction between
‘internal’ and ‘external’ legal culture. On the one hand, ‘internal legal
culture’ refers to the ideas and practices of legal professionals; ‘external
legal culture’, on the other hand, is the name given to the opinions,
interests, and pressures brought to bear on law by wider social groups.
Friedman has increasingly argued that the importance of ‘internal legal
culture’ as a factor in explaining socio-legal change tends to be
exaggerated, usually by legal scholars who have an investment in doing so.

Adam Kuper, Culture: The Anthropologists Account (1999).

James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics ofEthnography (1986).
Tony Prosser ‘The State, Constitutions and Implementing Economic Policy:
Privatisation and Regulation in the UK, France and the USA’ in David
Nelken (ed), Special Issue on Legal Culture, Diversity and Globalization
(1995) 4 Social and Legal Studies 507-516.
Roger Cotterrell, ‘The Concept of Legal Culture’ in David Nelken (ed),
Comparing Legal Cultures (1997) 13.
Lawrence Friedman, ‘The Concept of Legal Culture: A Reply’ in David
Nelken (ed), Comparing Legal Cultures (1997) 33.
Friedman, Law and Society: An Introduction (1977).
Ibid.
Friedman, ‘The Concept of Legal Culture’, above n 30, 35.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 9

He has preferred to concentrate on the importance of external legal culture

and has given especial attention to the increasing public demand for legal
remedies — what he calls the drive to ‘Total Justice’34 — producing legal
and social change. Some of the most stimulating if controversial work in
this field, however, has been designed to show, pace Friedman, that patterns
of legally related behaviour are less the result of the way ‘folk culture’
shapes the demand for legal relief and more the consequence of the
institutional possibilities provided. There has been considerable debate for
example about how far the comparatively low use of courts in Japan should
be explained in terms of a specifically widely felt Japanese (and, more
generally Asian) religious based, cultural reluctance about going to law, or
whether it is more a result of a deliberate set of government created
disincentives to litigation.35 An important study of litigation rates in Europe
seeks to explain why the Netherlands has one of the lowest, and Germany
one of the highest, litigation rates, despite being so similar culturally and
even interdependent economically.36 The answer given is that these rates
depend less on what people want from law than on the availability of other
institutional possibilities for dealing with their disputes and claims. The
Netherlands, it is argued, as compared to Germany, possesses a much wider
range of ‘infrastructural’ avenues for disposing of cases in ways that do not
require court litigation.37
The mainstream social science explanatory approach to legal culture
typically seeks to assign causal priority between competing hypothetical
variables. The interpretative approach, on the other hand, is more concerned
to understand how aspects of legal culture resonate and fit together. It sees
its task as faithfully translating another system’s ideas of fairness and
justice and making proper sense of its web of meanings. In the search for
holistic meaning the insistence on distinguishing internal from external
legal culture, or the ‘demand’ for law from the ‘supply’ of law, is likely to
obscure more than it reveals.38 Whereas the first approach uses various
aspects of legal culture to explain variation in levels and types of legally
related behaviour such as litigation or crime control, the second approach

Lawrence Friedman, Total Justice (1985), and see also Lawrence Friedman,
The Republic of Choice: Law, Society and Culture (1990).
See, eg, Valerie Hamilton and Joe Sanders, Everyday Justice: Responsibility
and the Individual in Japan and the United States (1992).
Ehrhard Blankenburg, ‘Civil Litigation Rates as Indicators for Legal
Culture’ in David Nelken (ed), Comparing Legal Cultures (1997) 41.
As an illustration of the lack of conceptual clarification in this field we may
note that the infrastructural alternatives that Blankenburg, ibid, calls ‘legal
culture’ others would describe as ‘structural factors’, precisely in contrast to
cultural ones.
David Nelken, ‘Puzzling out Legal Culture: A Comment on Blankenburg’ in
David Nelken (ed) Comparing Legal Cultures (1997) 69.
10 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

seeks to use evidence of legally relevant behaviour and attitudes as an

‘index’ of legal culture. It aims at providing ‘thick descriptions’39 of law as
‘local knowledge’.40 *In testing its hypotheses the mainstream approach
seeks a sort of socio-legal Esperanto which abstracts from the language
used by members of different cultures, preferring for example to talk of
‘decision-making’ rather than ‘discretion’. The rival strategy, concerned
precisely with grasping linguistic nuance and cultural packaging, would ask
whether and when the term discretion is used and what different nuances it
carries. 41
•

Scholars who adopt the interpretative approach contrast the different

meanings of the ‘Rule of Law’, the ‘Rechtstaat\ or the ‘Stato di diritto\ the
Italian term ‘garantismo’ versus ‘due process’, or ‘law and order’ as
compared to the German ‘ innere sicherheit’; they unpack the meaning of
‘lokale justiz’ as compared to ‘community crime control’.42 They try to
grasp the secrets of culture by focusing on key local terms, which are
almost, but not quite, untranslatable. Blankenburg himself explores the
meaning of the term ‘beleid’ in Holland that refers to the more or less
explicit policy guidelines followed by trusted government, criminal justice
personnel and public organisations in general.43 They examine the idea of
the state in common law and continental countries so as to understand, for
example, why litigation is seen as essentially democratic in the United
States and as anti-democratic in France. For this approach, concepts both
reflect and constitute culture; as in the changes undergone by the meaning
of ‘contract’ in a society where the individual is seen as necessarily
embodied in wider relationships,44 or the way that the Japanese ideogram

Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of

Culture’ in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (1973).
Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive
Anthropology (1983).
‘Legal culture’ is not itself an indigenous term. But in Italy it is very
common (especially when referring to the South) to speak of the ‘culture of
legality’, by which is meant the project of extending ‘jurisdiction’ and the
difficulty of gaining social acceptance of the need to live life within the
constraints of legal rules.
Lucia Zedner, ‘In Pursuit of the Vernacular: Comparing Law and Order
Discourse in Britain and Germany’ in David Nelken (ed), Special Issue on
Legal Culture, Diversity and Globalization (1995) 4 Social and Legal
Studies 517.
See Blankenburg and Bruinsma, above n 5.
Jane K Winn, ‘Relational Practices and the Marginalization of Law:
Informal Practices of Small Businesses in Taiwan’ (1994) 28 Law and
Society Review 193.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 11

for the new concept of ‘rights’ came to settle on a sign associated with ‘self
interest’ rather than morality.45
An interpretative stance is more ready than the mainstream
explanatory approach to treat culture as part of a flow of meaning, ‘the
enormous interplay of interpretations in and about a culture’46 to which the
scholar herself also contributes. It is also less interested in drawing a
definitional line between legal culture and the rest of social life because it
sees this less as a problem for the observer to solve than an aspect of the
way legal culture actually works as it reflexively constructs the boundaries
of law-in-society. Common law systems, for example, tend to focus more
on the link between law, economics and society; civil law systems
principally on that between law, politics and society.47 In some civil law
legal regimes, as compared to the Anglo-American pragmatic-instrumental
view of law, law may be deliberately treated as more of an ideal aspiration
than as a blueprint for guiding behaviour, either because of deference to the
state project of representing the collective will, or under the influence of
religious traditions and philosophical idealism. This may partly explain the
successful spread of Anglo-American lawyering.48

II. Legal Delay in Italy: A Case Study

Civil cases in 1999 took on average five years to go through the first trial
stage, and over nine years for both the first and appeal stages (which is
essentially a retrial of the facts).49 There is also a further and regularly used

Eric Feldman, ‘Patients’ Rights, Citizen Movements and Japanese Legal

Culture’, above n 4.
Jonathan Friedman, Cultural Identity and Global Process (1994).
This is one reason why it is difficult to accept the Luhmann-Teubner
systems theory of law which tries to posit a constant relationship between
the legal and other social sub-systems in all modem societies, see David
Nelken, ‘Beyond the Metaphor of Legal Transplants? Consequences of
Autopoietic Theory for the study of Cross-Cultural Legal Adaptation’ in Jiri
Priban and David Nelken (eds), Law's New Boundaries: The Consequences
of Legal Autopoiesis (2001) 265.
See Maria-Rosaria Ferrarese, Le Istituzioni della Globalizzazione (2000).
It is difficult to find an Archimedean lever for studying legal culture.
Explanations of legal culture cannot just be based on explaining ‘rates’ of
legal activity since knowledge of how culture works is required to make
sense of these ‘rates’ and decide their significance for comparative purposes.
See David Nelken, ‘Puzzling out Legal Culture’, above n 38, and David
Nelken, ‘Comparing Criminal Justice’ in Mike Maguire et al, The Oxford
Handbook of Criminology (3rd ed, 2002) 175. These official figures
therefore obviously need considerable interpretation. For some purposes
they overestimate the time required, whereas for others they may even
underestimate it! The figures report the average time taken by all cases in
12 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

final appeal stage on legal points that can be taken to the numerous sections
of the Supreme Court. Penal cases can take only a little less time. At the
start of 2000 as many as 3 500 000 civil cases and 5 400 000 penal cases
were awaiting trial. Can the idea of legal culture help us make sense of all
this? What can this case study show us about the value of the concept? As
promised, I shall be concentrating in particular on the intersections amongst
different units — or levels — of legal culture, as well as on the role of the
concept as an explanatory tool and an invitation to explore meaning. I shall
take these two issues in turn.
(a) The Need for a Multi-level Analysis
The problem of legal delay in Italy is largely perceived and presented as a
national problem. But there is certainly also considerable variation at the
local court level around the country. The time courts took to dispose of civil
cases from their case loads ranged from around six to eleven years, and the
courts in the South were almost always consistently longer. For example,
according to the Ministry of Justice statistics for the civil courts in 1999, the
shortest period was found in the small town of Bolzano in the (Austrian
influenced) far North of the country, where first stage trials took on average
around four and half years and the process of appeal court hearings took
around a further year and half (making a total 6.20 years). The court with
the record for the longest trials was Caltanisetta, a small town in Sicily
where, on average, cases took seven and half years for the first trial stage,
and a further five and a half for the appeal stage (total time 13.15 years). In
some, mainly southern, courts bankruptcy or inheritance disputes can still
involve more than one generation of lawyers. In others, legal culture may be
‘behind’ the level of efficiency reached in those parts of the country. The
small university town where I work is situated in a wealthy and peaceful
part of Central Italy. But the head of the local lawyers association was
reported in June 2003 as protesting about the fact that after initial hearings
the following hearing date for civil trials can only be fixed for dates

each tribunal. They also include those that finish before a sentence is
delivered (either by agreement between the parties or for other reasons). Yet
further time is required for ‘depositing’ the sentence of the judge, and even
more for actually carrying out the court’s judgment and getting your money
and property back. For a series of reasons, that have to do with the lack of
court bailiff resources and the competition from private and even illegal
actors, the actual ‘recovery’ of the debt is the most problematic stage of the
legal process. After the 1995 civil justice reform designed to shorten waiting
time hundreds of thousands of cases, some of which are quite legally
complex ones, awaiting trial at the time of the reform, were assigned to a
sort of legal bureaucratic limbo (the so called ‘sezione stralcio') where they
are still slowly being disposed of by poorly paid lawyers deputising as
honourary judges.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 13

between 2007 and 2011 (!) (And in most normal cases six hearings are
required.)
Nonetheless, these national differences do not negate the existence of
a relatively high level of court delay in Italy, as compared to other European
countries. And, if anything, there is more in common in legal culture across
the country than in many other aspects of national culture. As a relatively
young state there are significant differences in many other aspects of
national culture between the North, the Centre and the South. The
similarities in legal culture, on the other hand, derive from the sharing of
common rules, procedures and nationally appointed judges as well as
aspects of institutional practice and law in action, such as the way lawyers
are paid. Indeed, law is often deliberately used as a nationalising and
centralising force to correct for the ‘backwardness’ of outlying areas.
On the other hand, it is impossible to understand the factors that
shape court delays in Italy without looking beyond national boundaries. The
current working of Italian criminal justice is moulded by doctrinal
scholarship which reflects, on the one hand, the long standing hegemony of
German penal law, which is still unchallenged amongst the law professors
of substantive criminal law, and, on the other hand, the more recent
influence of Anglo-American ideas which have come in as a result of the
introduction of a large number of accusatorial elements in the penal process.
This certainly complicates any effort to characterise Italian criminal justice
merely in terms of other aspects of the same culture. Proposed remedies for
court delays are more likely to come from abroad than from within Italy.
This is true, for example, for the introduction of so called ‘Justices of the
Peace’ as a more rapid jurisdiction for first level civil cases, which again
drew on the Anglo-American tradition.
Sometimes such ‘borrowing’ may even exacerbate delay For
example, this was true of the effects of the 1989 new code of criminal
procedure on delays on the penal side. This famous reform was the first to
introduce a fully-fledged accusatorial system into a continental legal
system. But it came up against the reluctance of the judges and prosecutors
working in the system to lose control of the trial. It was modified early on
by a restrictive decision handed down by the constitutional court, which
feared that organised crime would otherwise be able to exploit the
considerable new procedural advantages it gave to the accused.50 Part of the
justification for the reform was the stimulus it would give to speeding up
trials by allowing a variety of quicker alternatives including plea
bargaining. But alternatives to full trial are adopted in less than a third of
cases. The main problem is that the new protections for the accused that

50
Elisabetta Grande, ‘Italian Criminal Justice: Borrowing and Resistance’
(2000) 48 American Journal of Comparative Law 227.
14 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

characterise the adversarial system were simply added to the previous ones
characteristic of the older inquisitorial type of system. The system now
seeks to incorporate protections designed to foreground the forensic heat of
the adversarial trial together with reliance on double checking by different
judges in the three stages of trial that include the right to a full rehearing of
the facts on appeal. Even relatively trivial criminal cases can need to be
viewed by as many thirty people with legal training. Bureaucratic
procedural requirements include complex notification rules for all parties to
the trial that can be easily manipulated if the accused changes his address or
lawyer regularly. What this means is that there is little incentive for lawyers
to use any of the alternatives to trial. By holding out and exploiting all
procedural rights there is a good chance that the case will be time-blocked
before it runs its full course of all three trial stages.
At the macro level, however, it is the role played by the super­
national Strasbourg Court of Human Rights that is of particular interest for
our purposes. The right to a trial within a reasonable period is one of the
fundamental rights of the Convention of Human Rights (Art 6) that this
Court seeks to protect. In 1999, when there were over forty signatories to
this convention, there were no less than 6885 appeals from Italy awaiting
decision, almost all of which concerned legal delay. This represented over
20% of the total from all countries for breaches of all the various provisions
of the Convention. Italian representation at later stages was even higher.
Thirty six per cent of all sentences handed down were findings of guilt
against Italy for cases involving unreasonable delay in its trial processes.
The Italian state was condemned to pay so called moral damages to almost
all the successful applicants. The Strasbourg Court itself got into difficulty
in handling all these appeals within a reasonable period and set up
committees to overhaul its machinery in an attempt to catch up with its
backlog!
The cases that reach Strasbourg are not necessarily representative of
Italian court cases in general, but it is by no means only the extreme cases
that arrive there. To provide some empirical evidence on these matters I
carried out an analysis of a sample of 50 court cases handed down by the
court in the late 1990s. This revealed that delays ranged from four to 18
years. Most cases were on the civil side. Penal cases tend to end by the case
becoming time bound (‘prescription’) and the accused person often tends to
leave it there. But interestingly, no more than a seventh of the sample
involved anything like commercial disputes. Most cases involved
individuals in dispute with large organisations. The Italian state usually
tried to defend the cases at Strasbourg on the grounds of court overload, but
this defence was always rejected. At a conservative estimate as many as a
fifth of court cases in Italy take longer than the time Strasbourg considers
reasonable. Absent particular reasons of legal complexity a good part of the
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 15

Italian system could in theory automatically just be transferred to

Strasbourg after a certain period of normal waiting time! The Court has
responded to the annual assault of cases by treating the Italian state as a
‘persistent offender’, placing it under surveillance and threatening to
exclude it from the Council of Europe. The only other signatory treated in
this way is Turkey, for its continuing maltreatment of the Kurds. Justice
delayed is often justice denied, but it is questionable whether excessive
court delay is the same sort of breach of human rights as torture.
The role of the Strasbourg Court well illustrates the complexities of
charting the relationship between the local and the global in studying legal
culture. Because Taw’ is at the same time both agent and object of
globalisation it becomes difficult even for participants in legal systems to
know where the boundaries of the jurisdiction stop. On the one hand the
Strasbourg Court is an institution whose jurisdiction allows it override local
legal regimes. In the Italian case the court even seems be engaged in
something like an attempt to standardise modem court systems and
‘normalise’ Italy’s deviant approach to legal procedure and court practice.
On the other hand, because Italy was a willing signatory to the Convention
we could consider the European Court as no more than a higher level court
of appeal of the same legal culture. Importantly, even if not as such an
element of the legal system, this idea of resorting to law as the antidote to
abuse of power is also a central part of the belief system of many judges,
lawyers and jurists within the Italian legal culture itself. But Strasbourg is
still a rather special court. According to one Italian ‘human rights’ lawyer
who specialises in taking cases to Strasbourg who was interviewed in 2000
the European Court, the Court is almost a ‘Court of Miracles’
because it seems to be an organisation which is outside time and
space. You can go there to punish the powerful. Because that is what
it is all about we could say that what it offers is revolutionary, even
anarchic justice.

The lawyer went on to add that the actual damages that the Strasbourg
Court awards to someone ‘crushed by the national legal system’ were far
too low to compensate for what can have been lost.
It would be premature to conclude that European harmonisation of
court delay is round the comer or that Italy is about to get its house in
order.51 Some home-grown remedies have been introduced. There have
been significant ‘managerial’ type reforms aimed at combining different
levels of the criminal court and reducing the number of hearings in civil
cases. Gains in speed in new civil cases did result from the re-routing of

51
Other case studies, for example of the implementation of International
Monetary Fund standards or international conventions etc, would likely turn
up similar dialectics of change and resistance.
16 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

pre-1995 cases to be dealt with by honorary judges. Judges who are found
responsible for breaching bureaucratic time limits in writing their
judgments now risk having to pay damages and not, as previously, only
criticism, as a result of internal disciplinary hearings by the Supreme
Judicial Council. But the basic weaknesses of the system have not been
touched. In addition, however, Italy has also taken more questionable
measures to stave off criticism from Strasbourg. In 1999 the so-called Pinto
Law (Legge Pinto) was passed. As a result cases of alleged delay now have
first to be submitted to the court of appeal of the nearest district, where
decisions are then supposed to be provided within four months. This holds
back recourse to Strasbourg and aims to prevent parties from seeking
remedies that place Italy in a bad light internationally and cost the
government money in moral damages. But this new trial stage of course
itself adds to delay, and there are additional limits to the remedies provided.
At a conference on legal delay in the criminal courts held at Padua that I
attended recently, the way the courts are applying the Legge Pinto was
described as ‘diabolical’.52 For example, unlike actions before the
Strasbourg Court it is necessary within Italy to prove that delay has led to
material damage and the expenses of bringing the action are not reimbursed.
So cases are still going to go to Strasbourg.
More recently, a new constitutional right to reasonable length trials
was included in the framework of the so-called ‘just trials’ revision of the
Constitution. Significantly, however, this does not give rise to private
actions against the state as with the Strasbourg Court.53 No thought was
given to how to make this right effective, nor how to ensure its priority in
relation to the other rights and procedural protections being introduced
simultaneously whose tendency was actually to lengthen court processes.
Judges have told me that they have begun to use this new principle as a
means of ‘closing’ stale cases where, from a strictly formal point of view
this would have been problematic. Lawyers defending politicians and
organised criminals also try to invoke this as a right when their clients have
been waiting a long time (often because of their own delaying tactics) for
their trials to end. But any real commitment to the aim of ‘speedy trials’
must be suspect in the light of the continuing and even increasing emphasis
on multiplying points and methods of procedural rights and controls. For
most of the trial lawyers I have been interviewing in the course of my

The Padua Conference on Reasonableness in the Length of Trials, 30-31

May 2003.
Italian legal (and political) culture is one where rights are often not related
to effective resources. For example female judges (an ever increasing
proportion of the magistracy) are guaranteed excellent paid maternity leave
but no substitute is supplied for them at this time and the cases they are
responsible for are usually just put on hold.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 17

research on this topic the average time taken for court cases in Italy is
something they have adapted to and take for granted. The exceptional cases
for them are the ones that overrun the Italian norm, because of more than
normal problems in the availability of judges, administrative errors by the
cancelleria, the number of parties involved, the need for complicated expert
evidence, difficulties in obtaining the collaboration of parties or witnesses,
unfair tactics used by the other side, legal complexities and so on.
(b) Explaining and Interpreting Legal Delay in Italy
What happens in Italy is not merely a result of Italian culture and legal
culture. But it is certainly also very much connected to other aspects of the
Italian context. What (other) aspects of culture and society explain court
delay in Italy? What can an interpretative approach tell us about the
attitudes and behaviour which help produce such delays? As we shall see,
one strategy of explanation concentrates on identifying the possible causes
of delay and giving each the weight it deserves. The second seeks more to
understand different ways of thinking about law.
To a degree the length of legal processes is the result of purely legal
factors. The requirement of three court stages (two of these on ‘the facts’),
the number of supreme courts (which often in practice re-try cases), the
length of judge’s verdicts (‘motivations’ as they are called on the
continent), and the prestige of jurists’ commentary as a potential source of
law, all encourage legal uncertainty. The judge’s role in civil trials is
central, as it is in France, but in Italy they are expected to write much longer
‘motivations’ of their decisions. Judges explain that they can only get
around to thinking about the case and writing their sentences once all the
facts have come in. Lawyers who used to write brief requests now use their
computers to state their claims at great length. Moreover, once it has
accumulated, delay itself produces more delay and uncertainty.
Media discussions attribute the ‘blame’ to the way people abuse the
system. Either the problem is the laziness, arrogance or managerial
ineptitude of judges, or it is the avidity of lawyers, the litigiousness of
disputants or the disinterest or self interest of politicians. In academic
discussions the most cited cause is undoubtedly the fact that the number of
judges has nowhere near kept pace with the increasing rate of litigation in
the post war period. In terms of what Friedman calls ‘external legal culture’,
the argument is that the ‘supply’ of law has simply not kept up with public
demand. Since the last world war there has been a seven fold increase in the
number of civil cases filed whereas the number of judges has less than
doubled.54 Many more cases arrive at the courts than can possibly be dealt

Sabino Cassese, ‘L'esplosione del Diritto: II Sistema Giuridico Italiano dal

1975 al 2000', in (2001) 28 Sociologia Del Diritto 55. Cassese, a leading
authority on public law, links this to both economic change and the
18 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

with by the number of judges available, and court hearings are for this
reason scheduled well into the future for the earliest court calendar date
available. Crucially, then, delay is not a result of the time actually spent on
dealing with the cases, but is instead the accumulated product of all the
‘dead’ periods (calculated in months or even years) that are allowed to pass
between the relevant court sessions.
A second important cause of delay is said to be the large increase in
the number of lawyers which has grown up to satisfy, but which may also
stimulate, this public demand. According to some statistics there are now as
many as 150 000 lawyers though not all of them are in practice. Entrance
examinations for becoming lawyers, in contrast to those for judges, are
extremely easy. The way that lawyers are paid, on the basis of each legal act
they perform, is also said to encourage drawing out cases.55 On the one
hand, there is no state financed legal aid, and hence no possibility for
limiting cases litigated with public subsidy to those considered meritorious.
On the other, the costs for litigation, especially in a comparative context,
can be considered relatively low and do not serve as much of a deterrent to
litigation. Once cases are under way lawyers rarely aim at settlements
before the case reaches court, in part because delay comes to represent a
goal in itself. On the civil side, delay for one person is stay of execution for
another, and, in both the civil and penal process, postponement of the day of
reckoning is exactly what at least one party is seeking to obtain. The
relatively low proportion of cases which lawyers settle before trial is also
said to be explained by the fact that in Italy there is ‘no culture of
compromise’. The last chapter of a recent review of alternative dispute
arrangements in Italy has the title (in Italian) ‘Conciliation as set out by the
Code — a ruined past, a bankrupt present and a highly uncertain future’.56
Other background institutional factors are also worth noting. In terms
of government spending the Italian court system is starved of resources and
those that are available are sometimes skewed by political considerations
and by the difficulty in rationalising the distribution of tribunals across the
country in terms of effective demand. The court administration struggles to
cope with its workload often relying on antiquated information technology,
and at least some of the generally poorly paid employees are affected by the
formalistic ethos which characterises much public employment in Italy. The
self governing judicial parliament has its work cut out to defend judicial

‘explosion’ of law. An earlier empirical study argued that patterns of

economic growth and court overload in Italy were not well correlated and
that aspects of internal legal culture seemed to be better predictors, see
Stefania Pellegrini, La Litigiosita in Italia, un Analisi Sociologica-Giuridica
(1997) 24.
Daniele Marchesi, Avvocati, Magistrate, Litiganti (2002).
Stefania Pellegrini, La Giustizia Civile Dentro e Fnori dal Tribimale (2000).
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 19

autonomy from political attack and has neither the resources nor the know
how to run the courts as a public service. There is little support amongst
judges for a managerial approach to running Italian courts. The heads of
courts are never chosen for managerial ability and often lack it, and for
those who are, formally speaking, their subordinates have a high level of
constitutionally guaranteed independence. There is no small claims court,
though recently Justices of the Peace have been recruited and given a role in
dealing with low value cases. But they too are now accumulating a backlog.
These weaknesses at the formal level are made up for by the existence of
what Blankenburg called ‘infrastructural alternatives’.57 Only the very rich
can afford judicial arbitration and there are still only relatively few
mediation schemes set up by local chambers of commerce.
In addition, however there are also what we could call structural
factors. Here the major argument would be that legal delays are in the
interest of the powerful. But the evidence for this is equivocal. Take first
the politicians. Governments save money by not spending on the courts,
and, indirectly, the voters benefit in lower taxes — assuming they pay them.
Delay, and its consequence, queuing, is then one way to ration a scarce
resource. Some of the cases of worst delay actually involve government
trying to avoid cashing pension or other promises. In general, Italian
governments tend to govern through leniency rather than efficiency and
order.58 Yet, on the other hand, governments pay a high price in legitimacy
for the poor functioning of the courts, especially after the procession of
cases going to Strasbourg. And the court system has a high degree of
political, though not financial, autonomy from the executive. Even the
Ministry for Justice relies on judges seconded to the Ministry for drafting
and supervising legal reforms.
Working out the relationship between delay and economic interests is
similarly complicated. For Weber (and his modem followers) a predictable
and well functioning legal system is an essential part of the infrastructure of
capitalism. Yet economic interests in Italy put up with a high level of
disorganisation and delay. The largest businesses, it is true, can and do have
recourse to arbitration, using judges and/or distinguished jurists, as a way of
resolving their disputes. But this is a costly solution as a percentage of the
value of the case has to be paid in return for quick justice. The large
majority of Italy’s economy, however, relies on small business, and they
would surely benefit from a more expeditious and responsive court system.
Delay mainly helps those in the wrong who can use court delay as means to
postpone payment (or prison), especially, as has happened, when the

Blankenburg, above n 36.

58
Dario Melossi, The Economy of Illegalities: Normal Crimes, Elites and
Social Control in Comparative Analysis’ in David Nelken (ed), The Futures
of Criminology (1994) 202.
20 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

interest on funds that can be obtained in the market place is higher than the
legal interest which has to be paid when the case is eventually settled.
Of course, once this type of system exists, those working within or
alongside it, and those caught up as parties, may all sometimes have vested
interests in delay. Having found ways to benefit from it they may also
willingly perpetuate the current situation. Judges and lawyers, sometimes in
implicit collusion, may gain advantages by taking things slowly; the judge
can postpone the moment of writing the sentence, the lawyer can keep more
cases on the go than could possibly be handled in a system with more
stringent temporal requirements. What is more, the consequent
unpredictability of legal remedies provides a niche for intermediaries or
mediators, such as politicians and professionals, debt collection agencies,
accident specialists, in the North, and, in addition, organised criminals the
South. These play a vital role in bringing parties together, acting as
guarantors,59 and resolving at least some cases of non-compliance for
example by taking over or recovering debts. Banks gain from acting as
depositors in long drawn out bankruptcy cases. For their part large
corporations get around court inefficiencies by taking independent action to
disconnect supply or reclaim debts owed. Those who are "repeat players’60
in the legal system can choose when it suits them to engage in litigation and
can opt for delaying tactics or early settlement as it suits them. They have
the power to make others wait and have time on their side. It is often said,
though usually without any direct evidence to back it up, that economic
actors also tolerate the current inefficient system because they feel it could
be to their advantage if they were ever to find themselves on the side with
the weaker case. Certainly, there is ample proof that some powerful actors,
including leading politicians and businessmen, do fear that they might one
day come within the reach of the criminal courts and so have an interest in a
trial system which offers room for manoeuvre and delay. It is hard (if not
impossible) to envisage a legal system that on the one hand had long drawn
out criminal trials but rapid civil ones. Nonetheless to argue that the present
delays are more in the interests of economic actors than otherwise still
seems to be going too far. The widely read and authoritative financial daily,
II Sole 24 Ore, which is owned by the Confindustria employers’
association, certainly treats delay as a serious problem and it regularly
denounces the inefficiency of Italy’s courts. Indeed this newspaper is the
main public source of information about court delay.

In continental systems the profession of notaries plays a vital

institutionalised role in guaranteeing the validity of documents and
transactions such as those involved in the sale or purchase of property and
the construction of companies.
60 Marc Galanter, ‘Why the Haves Come out Ahead’ (1974) 8 Law and Society
Review 95.
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 21

In Friedman’s terms, the question remains, why does the pressure of

‘external legal culture’ not produce a more responsive and efficient system?
To explain this we must focus more carefully on the ‘internal legal culture’
of jurists and practitioners and try to make sense of their attitudes and
actions. From the President of the Republic down, public discourse is
uniformly and repetitively critical of legal delay. At each ceremonial
opening of the legal year the head judge of the legal system and the heads
of individual court districts ritually deplore delay. Indeed they use the level
of backlog as a measure of the progress they have (or have not) achieved in
the running of their courts. Ministers of Justice likewise underline this
problem as their priority. But most of the jurists who construct and debate
procedural reforms are opposed, as a matter of principle, to treating law as
only or mainly a matter of good management. Many such jurists see it as a
pre-eminent task for law not to compromise its ideals and procedures. For
example, The Padua Conference on Reasonable Trial Lengths, was
punctuated by unflattering references to Bentham, utilitarianism,
managerialism, and pragmatism. And mention of some trials in Denmark
taking no more than twenty three days were greeted with laughter!
Legal processes are seen to need lawyer’s expertise. By comparison
with Anglo-American legal cultures lay participation in judicial matters is
highly restricted and even Justices of the Peace are required to have law
degrees. Sometimes delay is admitted to be just an unfortunate side-effect
of what fair procedure requires. But, more often, ‘Law’ and ‘administration’
are presented as potentially competing discourses, and the transformation of
law into administration a danger to be exorcised. A distinction is sometimes
made between ‘effectiveness’ (which is relative to aim) and acceptable, and
‘efficiency’ which is assumed to sideline questions of ideal aims into sordid
questions of costs and benefits. Because the law must be equal for all, there
is resistance to introducing special procedures for different types of cases at
either a formal or informal level. Greater effort is dedicated to maintaining
the greatest possible right to trial before a professional judge than in any
other comparable common law or civil law systems. Interestingly, delay
itself may even be seen as valuable. One experienced family lawyer whom I
interviewed said it was right for family separation cases to take the time
they did because of all the emotions involved.61 And a speaker at the Padua
conference on legal delay offered a variety of reasons why delay could be
considered valuable in criminal cases.62

By contrast the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights sees delay in cases

involving personal status as particularly heinous.
He argued that delay could help the victim get over the effect of the crime;
that the trial is (and should be) the punishment for the offender; and that the
passage of time allows the judge to see the effects of the crime on the victim
and society. In general, delay creates a necessary distance to both the victim
22 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

Jurists become highly learned in the arts of procedure. Some even

snub their colleagues who deal with mere substantive law! When practising
in the courts as lawyers they are skilled in using the time factor as one of
the key pragmatic and practical considerations which facilitates the
exchange and compromise needed to gain advantage in the cases they
defend. But they almost never discuss these practicalities when engaged in
politico-legal debate. By contrast, on the criminal side especially, at the
level of actual practice many judges and prosecutors do try to indicate
priorities and introduce ‘virtuous’ organisational practices so as to prevent
what they see as distortions of legal procedure from leading to paralysis of
the system. These include the use of ‘do it yourself techniques that hide
behind the ‘myth of obligatory prosecution’ of all reported crimes, in an
effort to avoid falling foul of time-limitation rules.63 Rather than being
credited with keeping the system going, however, resort to these practices is
seen as bordering on the employment of legally improper and discreditable
discretion.
As this suggests, it would be a mistake to draw too sharp a contrast
between ‘external legal culture’ with its demand for accessible and speedy
justice, and a unified ‘internal legal culture’ with its disdain for other than
self regarding legal values. Apart from the interests in greater through-put
of some of those in the system (especially those in directive roles),
accessible and speedy justice are also legal values in themselves which can
and do find some way of being recognised by the system. The question is
rather how the Italian legal system defines acceptable and unacceptable
delay through its rules, jurisprudence and everyday practice. At the level of
legal doctrine, for example, there are different time limits for penal and civil
cases, special rules for urgent civil cases, and special procedures for certain
types of cases. In Italy the legislator has given priority to cases where
workers risk losing their jobs. By contrast, in the New York courts, which
were the first to be studied socio-legally, priority was given to business
cases, and it was this which allegedly led to increasing delay in other kinds
of cases.64 If any remedies for delay are to take effect they will have to
engage with the autopoietic definitions of the system, both in doctrine and
the Taw in action’, for it is these that determine how it allocates its scarce
resources.65

and the offender and may make conciliation and mediation possible. Where
appropriate it allows the victim and society to see that they were ‘co-
responsible’ for the crime.
David Nelken and Letizia Zanier, ‘Tra norme e prassi: durata del processo
penale e strategic degli operatori del diritto’ forthcoming in Sociologia del
Diritto.
Harry Kalven and Harry Zeisel, Delay in the Courts (1959).
Reducing legal delay requires an understanding of how to co-ordinate the
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 23

Equally, the legal procedural values which help produce delay are
shared by political elites and many others in the wider society. This is
particularly clear on the penal side. In fact, no analysis of legal culture in
Italy would do more than scrape the surface if it did not reckon with the
historically shaped mutually interlocking distrust of the state found both on
the right and the left. After the war there was an understandable reaction
against the role of state-run courts during the excesses of Fascism. In
addition it was unclear whether it would be the Communists or the Christian
Democrats who would prevail electorally, and hence which of these would
be obliged to endure the hegemony of their ideological enemies. The post
war Constitution granted judges and prosecutors a high degree of
constitutionally entrenched autonomy and self-government and over the
next thirty years an ambitious scheme of self-governing autonomy of the
judges was put into place. Increasingly this autonomy from the state came
to favour the Communist party that was permanently excluded from the
changing government coalitions put together by the Christian Democrats.
And eventually it allowed prosecutors and judges to bring down all the
parties of government simply by applying established criminal law.66
The fear of placing discretion in the hands of political opponents
continues to justify the maintenance of unrealistic, redundant and mutually
controlling institutions with high procedural safeguards. At the Padua
conference a leading law professor sympathetic to the Berlusconi
government and active in politics said in his presentation that he would not
feel ‘protected’ if Italy was to remove the appeal stage in criminal cases,
even though it is functionally redundant under the newly introduced
accusatorial system. ‘In this culture and at this time’, he said, ‘we do not
benefit from the settled political consensus characteristic of Anglo-Saxon
polities’. A law professor on the left, on the other hand, argued that, in order
to avoid the power to prosecute coming under the control of (corrupt)
governments it was necessary to maintain the rule of obligatory

times of all the actors involved, legal and otherwise. The process cannot
move faster than that of its slowest component. But there is no reason why
the courts have to be the slowest of these. See Thomas Durkin, Robert
Dingwall and William L F Felstiner, Plaited Cunning: Manipulating Time in
Asbestos Litigation (1990).
See, eg, David Nelken, ‘A Legal Revolution? The Judges and
Tangentopoly’ in Stephen Gundle and Simon Parker (eds), The New Italian
Republic: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to Berlusconi (1995) 191; David
Nelken, ‘Judicial Politics and Corruption in Italy’ in David Nelken and Mike
Levi (eds), The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption, (1996)
Special Issue of 23 Journal of Law and Society 95, and David Nelken, ‘II
Significato di Tangentopoli: La Risposta Giudiziaria alia Corruzione e i Suoi
Limiti’ in Luciano Violante (ed), Storia d'ltalia 14: Legge, Diritto e
Giustizia (1997) 597.
24 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

prosecution, despite the fact that this is either a fig leaf for discretionary
decision-making or the cause of unmanageable delay. Better that delay
serve as the ‘functional equivalent’ of discretion than allow one’s political
rivals the choice of who to prosecute, or let off. In this as in so many other
ways structure and culture are symbiotic.
It could be objected that delays in the civil courts have less to do with
the degree of autonomy possessed by prosecutors and more to do with the
general weaknesses of the public administration. But it is what happens in
the criminal courts that sets the agenda for court reform. Moreover, criminal
courts handle a far wider range of issues than is true in Anglo-American
polities. As just one example, lawyers in tort claims in road accident cases
regularly rely almost entirely on the evidence collected by the public
prosecutor in connected criminal proceedings. And criminal courts have
regularly drained resources from the civil courts as they responded to the
emergencies of terrorism, organised crime, and, more recently political
corruption.

II. Legal Delay, Legal Culture and General Culture in

Italy

What else can legal delay tell us about the connection between legal culture
and other aspects of daily life in Italy as compared to elsewhere? Certainly,
the rhythms of law and life are in some ways similar. From a comparative
perspective, many aspects of social life also move more slowly in Italian
culture than in Northern Europe or the United States. Relationships
typically depend on family or family-like group allegiances that take a long
time to build up. People are slow to leave home, they like to live near where
they grew up and to keep very close contact with their families. Ties that
are slow to build are also difficult to end. For the groups that occupy key
roles in social, economic and political life, co-option is the norm, seniority
is of considerable importance, and merit is gained to a large extent simply
by waiting one’s turn. In matters which involve government or public
agencies queuing is inevitable, the case file must be followed through all its
stages, and it may sometimes be necessary to intervene, personally or
preferably through an important intermediary, to secure a successful
outcome. There is much in common between the inefficient and over­
bureaucratised justice system and the cumbersome and deliberately
unresponsive bureaucratic machine that takes refuge in legal formalities and
is uninterested in outcomes. Many of the delays attributed to inefficient
courts, so called ‘malgiustizia\ in fact represent efforts by the courts to deal
with the results of poor administration or so-called ‘maladministrazione\
Using the Concept of Legal Culture 25

On the other hand, we should be wary of treating the slowness of

court processes in Italy as just an extension of patterns in the wider culture.
In its private sector, Italian firms provide fierce international competition on
delivery dates and service; the delay of the courts therefore seems rather to
be indicative of the much complained of differences between the ‘public’
sector and the ‘private’ sector, another aspect of the poor infrastructure that
Italian business has to tolerate. Even more than is the case in many other
modem societies everyday social and economic life follows its own patron-
client logics behind a veneer of state legal norms. Social actors may resort
to law as a weapon so as to challenge or at least delay decisions that would
otherwise take place according to these other norms. For the weak — as
well as for the powerful — delay may sometimes be a solution and not
always a problem.
But those who have only legal remedies to rely on can in some senses
be held ‘to blame’ for not being in sufficiently good standing in wider
social hierarchies or groupings as to be able to use more privileged routes or
alternatives to vindicate their claims. It is appropriate that those using legal
remedies put up with the considerable time these take to bear fruit. An
important consequence, even if not necessarily the cause, of court delay is
thus the way it reinforces such dependence on social hierarchy,67 and
maintains the importance of group allegiances as compared to the
individualistic assertion of rights. Whatever other benefits they might bring,
more effective court dispute mechanisms might replace or attenuate such
bonds. Delay may also be integrative in other, yet stranger, ways. In the
Italian context for example it allows everyone, including politicians and
state employees, to blame ‘the state’ and feel united against it!
Legal delay in Italy should therefore be treated not just as an
indicator of waiting times but also as a measure of the distance between
legal culture and general culture. This ‘gap’ is in part deliberate, as in the
way the criminal law tries to maintain principles of impersonal equality
before the law at all stages of the penal process precisely because elsewhere
clientilistic and other particularistic practices are so widespread. But it
means more generally that the courts are often quite out of touch with
widely accepted practices. Thus in Italy a central issue of late has been the

Douglas Hay, in Albion's Fatal Tree (1976), provides a brilliant

interpretation of the reason why the increasing passage of legislation
carrying the death penalty in 18th century England was accompanied by
relatively low implementation of this penalty (especially after the possibility
of transportation). He explains that, because avoidance of the death penalty
required the obtaining of a ‘pardon’, its ‘latent function’ was to reinforce the
systems of hierarchical dependence by which those of lower status were
reminded that they might one day need to turn for help to their social
superiors.
26 (2004) 29 Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy

question of where the role of the judges does (and should) stop and that of
other authorities begin. This has led to a running battle between the
judiciary and the politicians. Every day the newspapers carry stories about
allegedly improper interference by one side with the prerogatives of the
other. On the one hand the judges see themselves as preventing the
powerful escaping the exercise of ‘jurisdiction’, as they term the boundaries
of law’s empire; on the other hand, some politicians complain of the
exercise of political biased interventions by the judges.68
In the end, the lengthy court delays of the Italian legal system may be
one price to be paid for what is an extreme form of legal independence from
political control. Courts in this type of polity (and the legal culture which
goes with it) can, if needs be, take action against the most powerful in the
land. But, clearly, this level of activism cannot be sustained on an everyday
basis without upsetting those social norms that are geared to the
reproduction of social hierarchies. The Tangentopoli anti-corruption
investigations themselves demonstrate both the exception and the rule as far
as the place of legal delay within legal culture is concerned. In the special
political circumstances of the early 1990s (in particular the collapse of the
Iron curtain), ruling politicians lost legitimacy as soon as the newspapers
released the information that they had been sent ‘advice’ that legal
proceedings were being taken against them for corruption. But most of
these cases then took a large number of years to actually run their course
and virtually no one went to jail. The cycle of corruption scandals has now
come to an end. The current Berlusconi government has found that there is
much to gain from exploiting and increasing the possibilities of postponing
cases where its own legitimacy and interests are at stake. At the same time,
however, it regularly accuses the judges of being the major cause of
disgraceful delays.69

68
David Nelken, ‘Legitimate Suspicion? Berlusconi and the Judges’ in Paulo
Segatti and J Blondel (eds), The Second Berlusconi Government (2003) 112.