Popular Legal Culture: An Introduction

Abstract

The Storrs Lectures at Yale have produced sharply differing views of law.In 1974, Grant Gilmore said "[t]he function of law. . . is to provide a mechanism for the settlement of disputes in the light of broadly conceived principles on whose soundness, it must be assumed, there is a general consensus among us."'Seven years later Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist, objected to Gilmore's concept of law. 2 Law, Geertz argued, "is not a bounded set of norms, rules, principles, values, or whatever from which jural responses to distilled events can be drawn, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real." 3 Geertz pointed to legal sensibil-"