Criminal Laws and prostitution: The legal experience challenge for the concept of Legal Culture

Abstract

This study, taking as its starting point Lawrence Friedman’s and David Nelken’s contribution to the elaboration of the concept of “Legal Culture”, interprets some convergent judgments made by the Constitutional Court of three European countries—Italy, France, and Portugal—from the perspective of “legal culture”. To avoid the tautology of explaining culture by invoking cultural norms, it seems possible either to leave “legal culture” in the background in empirical research or to refer to a more succinct concept, such as “legal experience”. This approach is consistent with the theory of legal pluralism and projects the law into the broader field of cultural problems. From this perspective, the apparent uniformity and rationality of the decisions offered by the structural-functionalist analysis, especially its European version, is called into question. In the cases analyzed, we tried to focus on the legal experience, and we have found that the legal background to those rulings allows the formation in neo prohibitionist and abolitionist Countries, a common internal legal culture, which conveys a public ethic, defending human dignity, that has its roots in a common European civilization.