About the Conference

Save the date: November 4, 2022; Iustinianus Primus Law Faculty, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, Skopje, North Macedonia (online)

The Annual International Conference will be held on November 4, 2022, via online platform. This year, the Conference will be devoted to the “Contemporary aspects of legal culture – contents and discontents”. Our Conference is a traditional event, organized to provide an international platform for academicians, researchers, and PhD students to share their research findings with global experts.

The concept of legal culture presents a continuous and recurrent field of academic interest, raising particular interest in the second part of the XX century. The concept of legal culture has amassed voluminous literature that focuses on the issue as well as great interest by legal scientists, political scientists, sociologists as well as academic from adjacent academic fields. One of the founders of the concept of legal culture, Lawrence M. Friedman, defines the term as “those parts of general culture-customs, opinions, ways of doing and thinking-that bend social forces toward or away from the law and in particular ways” (1975). Friedman`s concept of legal culture refers to “clusters of ideas” (Coterell 2006) and sentiments, since legal culture is composed of “ideas, attitudes, expectations and opinions about the law, held by people in some given society” (Friedman 1990). Examining the legal culture in the United States of America, Junker (2016) explores “cultural differences, employing history, social theory, philosophy, and language as “reference frames,” which are then applied to the rules and procedures of a specific legal system.” From the most general perspective, legal culture, is perceived as a specific part of political culture related to the legal system where “the interpretation of the legal system must be located within a legal culture (…) in turn located within a political culture that gives meaning to and draws meaning from the legal culture.” (Mark and Eisgruber 1988).

However, the coverage of legal culture as an academic and research topic is not evenly distributed globally, for several reasons. The different approaches to the concept of legal culture and the fluidity of the term is the first reason. The second reason relates to establishing measurable categories of legal culture that could be utilized in researching the phenomenon in similar legal environments. The third reason is related to the multidimensionality of the term legal culture, with the accent being on the most popular division of legal culture as “internal” and “external”. While internal legal culture refers to the attitudes, behavior, values and practices of lawyers, judges and other legal officials and experts, external legal culture refers to the behavior, opinion, knowledge and attitudes towards law and the legal system which is shared by ordinary citizens. Only researching both dimensions of legal culture, not necessarily simultaneously, gives a complete overview of a specific legal and political system and the culture it breeds, maintains, and eventually modifies.

The ambition of the 2022 Annual Conference of the Law Faculty “Iustinianus Primus” in Skopje named “Contemporary aspects of legal culture – contents and discontents” is to both contribute to the growing literature in the field as well as to stimulate focus on legal and political systems that have not been sufficiently researched from the perspective of legal culture. In that sense, legal culture could be viewed in a wider sense as to include its internal or external dimension, its appearance in different legal contexts and fields, national, regional or international environments.  Speaking of research in legal culture, in particular, Southeast Europe is one of the under-researched areas notwithstanding that some initial efforts in this academic area have emerged. Hence, the topics of the 2022 Annual Conference of the Law Faculty “Iustinianus Primus” in Skopje named “Contemporary aspects of legal culture – contents and discontents” relate but are not limited to:

• Approaches, paradigms and aspects of legal culture, both in its internal and external dimensions;
• The place of legal culture in the political and legal system in specific countries;
• Comparative case studies in legal culture (country reports);
• Legal subcultures in various political and legal environments;
• Methodological issues in research of legal culture;
• Jurisprudence and legal culture;
• Constitutionalism, rule of law and legal culture;
• The relation between legal and political culture;
• Psychological aspects of legal culture;
• The effects of legal culture on the judicial system (organization and practice);
• Qualitative and quantitative research in legal culture;
• Origins and emanation of external legal culture;
• Internal legal culture and its idiosyncrasies in different countries;
• Relations between internal and external legal culture;
• Historical aspects of development of legal culture in specific legal environments;
• Transformative effects of legal culture under the process of Europeanization – comparative analyses pre- and post- EU accession;
• Legal culture in SEE;
• Anomalies and deficiencies in legal culture in different countries (case studies or comparative studies etc.)

Authors are invited to submit papers on any subject related to and within the scope of the Conference topic. Submissions from academics, researchers and practitioners at any stage of their career, including PhD students, will be accepted.