Law Commons^™

Cultural Paradigms In Property Institutions, Taisu Zhang

Faculty Scholarship

Do “cultural factors” substantively influence the creation and evolution of property institutions? For the past several decades, few legal scholars have answered affirmatively. Those inclined towards a law and economics methodology tend to see property institutions as the outcome of self-interested and utilitarian bargaining, and therefore often question the analytical usefulness of “culture.” The major emerging alternative, a progressive literature that emphasizes the social embeddedness of property institutions and individuals, is theoretically more accommodating of cultural analysis but has done very little of it.

This Article develops a “cultural” theory of how property institutions are created and demonstrates that such …

How Does Culture Count In Legal Change?: A Review With A Proposal From A Social Movement Perspective, Setsuo Miyazawa

Faculty Scholarship

We have in this volume four articles on legal change in China and Japan written by four distinguished authors. These articles vary with regard to subject state, specificity of issues, and breadth of analytical scope. They commonly discuss one factor, however: culture. The purpose of this Comment is to examine the way each article uses culture in its explanations of legal change. The Comment concludes with a brief suggestion, from a social movement perspective, on employing culture as an explanatory tool in a non-essentialist way.

Taking Kawashima Seriously: A Review Of Japanese Research On Japanese Legal Consciousness And Disputing Behavior, Setsuo Miyazawa

Faculty Scholarship

This paper discusses Japanese research on legal consciousness (ho-ishiki) and civil disputing. The author presents a recent explication of Takeyoshi Kawashima's concept of legal consciousness as a cultural factor and also proposes to explore the possibility of treating it as an individual, attitudinal factor. He also reviews large-scale surveys of aggregate-level culture and studies on individual-level disputing behavior. The need and possibility of a longitudinal study of individual disputing behavior that uses individual-level attitudes and regional culture as explanatory variables is suggested.