Legal Culture and empirical research: Improving the socio-legal character of the sociology of law

The aim of this special issue is to present empirical research outcomes and theoretical works that use the concept of legal culture to characterize the approach of the sociology of law. The papers presented were called for at the Oñati Workshop on Legal Culture and empirical research, originally planned for May 2020, but actually held in May 2021, on the initiative of the International Institute of Sociology of Law, and the Sociology of Law Section of the Italian Sociological Association. After an intense meeting, papers were submitted for the standard review process of the Iisl series. We considered that including the concept of legal culture into the research design and insisting on this focus for debate, could be a way of improving the socio-legal character of our research and settling the many disputes in a continuous debate. So, we looked for research experiences in which the concept of legal culture was used to configure legal phenomena in a specifically socio-legal way.