Flexible Structures: Using the Legal Culture Concept to Study the Law of Society

Many of Kurkchiyan’s ideas of legal culture are further amplified by Carlo Pennisi. For him, legal culture goes beyond the mere study of the cultural embeddedness of certain legal practices or how laws are legitimised. Instead, he defines the concept as repeated patterns of legal behaviour that are reproduced in a taken-for-granted manner by officers of the law or by ordinary citizens. Pennisi regards legal and culture as specifically linked both at the conceptual, theoretical level and empirically by the institutionalisation processes within which the normative and legal structuring of action mirror each other and differ depending on contexts. This linkage requires a research design about legal phenomena that is expressly sociological because it shifts attention away from institutions to institutionalisation processes, thus focusing on the way in which the legal structures are elaborated and differentiated from other normative structures.