Anggita

Reina (1806174540) Law and Society

Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

1. Legal Culture and the Welfare State
Legal culture is the ideas, attitudes, values and beliefs that people hold about
legal system. Usually there are many cultures in a country because societies
are complex thus it made up of all sorts of goeups, classes and strata. There
are two types of legal culture, which are internal legal culture (the legal culture
of lawyers and judges) and external (the legal culture of the population at large).
Social scientists started approached about legal systems firstly with a
hypothesis that social xhange will lead, inexorably, to legal change. So, how
the social change leads to legal change is with legal culture and social change
leads to changes in people’s values and attitudes so this sets up chains of
demands. Looking at the societies that keep changing, hence the people
demand normas from the state, from the collectivity, to guarantee the work of
those strangers whose work is vital to our lives, which we cannot guarantee by
ourselves.

Out of this cycle of demands, the modern state builds up a body of health and
safety law. The rules become denser, more formal. There are some informal
norms which clearly do nit work for many problems and in relationships in large,
complex, mobile societies, when the villages have shattered into thousands if
pieces, only to form again into the great ant-hills of our cities. Yet the more the
state undertakes, the more it creates a climate that leads to still further
increases in demand because of a fundamental change in legal culture, state
action creates expectations. It redefines what seems to be the possible human
limits of law; it extends the boundaries. From what’s possible comes to be taken
for granted such as taxes that creep forward slowly, benefit programs are added
on one at a time and many programs that are created. Demands on government
in the 19th century were restained by the feeling that there was nothing that
could be done. People expevted misfortune and injustice of an unjust world. In
the contemporary world, the situation has turned upside down. A great
revolution in expectations ha staken place of a general expevtation that the
state will guarantee total justice and general expectation that the state will
protect us from catastrophe.
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

2. American Legal Culture: The Last Thirty-Five Years
Legal institutions are reflections of social institutions. In the last thirty-five years,
there have been dizzying changes in every area of social life, technology, social
arrangement, legal culture and through these changes, in the very fabric of the
law itself. In legal culture change is so obvious that it comes to be accepted or
it comes to be taken as normal. At one time, law was treated as timeless,
immemorial: sacred custom, encrusted with tradition. No field of law has
remained static over the last thirty-five years. Constitutional law and the related
field of civil rights, have perhaps change most of all. The civil rights revolution
was enormously important in its own right. No problem in American law that has
been more important, more deepseated than the relationship between the black
and the white populations and the relationship between women and men is if
anything even more fundamental and pervasive. Changes in that relationship
dig very deep tino the society including the civil rights recilution and the feminist
movement are also indications of an even broader transformation in law and in
life.

It may seem peculiar to treat the struggle for the rights of blacks and Hispanics
as illustrations of radical individualism. But this proposition is misleading. The
essence of each liberation movement is the demand that society treat each
individual as gender or group. Individualism is a feature of character-formation
in the modern Western society. But it seems particularly strong in the United
States compare to the Europe that seems stagnant, hide-bound, traditional.
The techonological changes of the last thirty-five years have only strengthened
American individualism. They have further weakened the traditional authority
including family. Meanwhile in traditional societies, authority was vertical,
hierarchical. The family was in control of the personality and character of the
child, and the family, along with village notables transmitted values and ideas
to the child. In the television age, on the other hand, authority and power have
become much more horizontal thus the child is no longer isolated and the
parents no longer have the first and last word; their authority is no longer
exclusive.
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

The media serves as the medium which indoctrinates the mass, as it transmits
new concepts and ideas a large amount of audiences regardless of their
location. As a result of this fostering of information, communities of similar
interests and ideologies are easily formed horizontally. The media, therefore,
was perceived as a platform in advocating for social change - which in turn
establishes legal change.

Friedman believes that individualism serves as the basis of the civil rights
revolution, in which transformed the American legal system. He argued that
changes that one of the vital changes that occurred due at the time was the
escalated rate of divorce. Marriage was perceived as a mere contract between
two parties who had the liberty to enter and exit such marriage to their desire.
Friedman asserts that the increase of expressive individualism was a factor to
such liberty. This legal culture eventually leads to the legitimization of divorce
which was put into effect in 1970. Aside from this, Friedman added that legal
change occurred due to the decline of public trust towards the government. This
led to the increase of legal hurdles officials must endure in achieving national
objectives such as in the establishment of infrastructure. The developments
that took place due to the civil rights revolution were favorable, as it produced
laws that brought positive impacts to the American society. In spite of this,
Friedman argues that the revolution also widened the gap to poverty and other
social illnesses. He believed that social organization was produced as a “side-
effect” of expressive individualism. The culture of individualism hinders people
take part or contribute into the society to the extent where they feel discontent
and deviate to radical and criminal intents. The growth of deviance was caused
by the lack of authority, as well as the culture of oppression which in fact still
persists in the society in spite of the revolution.

Another legal change that occurred was in regards to technological

developments in which inflicted changes within the scope of business law.
Friedman implied that the growth of technology introduced new legal prospects
such as patents and copyrights. He also conveyed on the idea that globalisation
and international trade led to the development of laws regulating such
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

practices. This includes the legislation of laws in regards to intellectual property,
immigration, anti-trust and many others as a means to cope up with
developments. In addition to this, the communications’ revolution shaped
American federalism in such that the federal government was able to grow
gradually. The New Deal further excelled the federal government at the
expense of the state and local government. However, this was ultimately
affected by the transmission of political doctrines through mediums such as
radio broadcasts by figures like Franklin Roosevelt. This being said, every
branch of law is subject to federal intervention.

3. The Impact of Society On Law

Ewick and Silbey first discussed two vies of legal consciousness. The first is
"ideas and attitudes of individuals which determined the forms and texture of
social life. It focused on individuals. Others callers take a quite different approach.
For them consciousness is a result, not a cause. It is derived from social structures.
This view is held by Marxists and Structuralists, who argue that individuals are
the only bearer of social relations and consequently, social relations, not
individuals, are the proper object of analysis. in other words, the law itself are
produced by the shape of society. we conceive conciousness as part of a reciprocal
process in which the meanings given by individuals to their world. Conceptualized
in this way, Conciousness in this way, consciousness is neither fixed, stable,
unitary, nor consistent. Instead, we see it as something local, contextual,
pluralistic, filled with conflict and contradiction. Ewick and Silbey report that they
found three different pervasive frames for popular understandings of law. They
talk about popular understandings of law as “Legality”. According to Ewick and
Silbey, these frameworks affect how people conceive of themselves, and thus
affect how they act. Their own consciousness can create constraints, or rule out
certain kinds of choices. Conversely, the framework within which they approach
law can also bring people to make choices that actually change the constraints of
law, albeit in small or subtle ways. Sometimes we can trace the way change
continues to reverberate through society and law, so that a shift in society may
influence law to change, but that legal change then has a further effect on society,
Anggita Reina (1806174540) Law and Society
Mikaila Jessy Azzahra (1806229180)
Rafie Vito Juliano (1806174465)

and on and on. In the following excerpt, Edelman, fuller and mara- drita trace a
continuing interaction between institutions regulated by law and the law that is
regulating them. Institutional structures and cultures “receive” the message sent
by legal change in characteristic ways, altering the import of the message in some
ways. On the other hand, when courts are asked to assess whether institutions
have adequately responded to legal mandates, they incorporate some aspects of
institutional logic into their ongoing reframing of the law.