Adapting to Workplace Changes in Professionalism - Essay Example

432). This is because the meaning of culture is said to represent different ethnic, tribal and racial groups leaving the part that addresses how the unique norms, values and beliefs influence the usage of the law or the attributes of the lawyers and the unique traits they share in law practice (Bracey, 2006). In 1975, Lawrence Friedman devised ‘legal culture’ as a concept that emphasized the notion that law is more implicit when described as a product of social forces, a system and a conduct of the same social forces.

Friedman moves from the common notion that focuses on law as a set of rules and norms which can either be written or unwritten about the rights and duties of people as well as prescribing the right or wrong behavior, to advocate for a model or a ‘system’ which has a set of processes inputs and structures that send outputs to the environment. The legal culture is based on three components which are; the legal and social forces, the ‘law’ itself such as the rules and the structure, and the effects the law has on the outside world.

As such, the legal culture essentially covers the social study of law (Rosen, 2006). The unique attributes shared by the legal practitioners across the globe can be traced to the traditional study of law. Initially, the social scientific study of law was mostly marginalized in universities in America in departments such as social science and law schools. However, the notion of legal culture was introduced by working with a tradition that had little connection to the American universities but some lawyers and jurists from parts of Europe such as Germany.

For instance, a German jurist described the practice of law as a manifestation of the ‘spirit of the people’ and described it as an evolving culture. Though describing it from a pragmatic and rather romantic perspective, an American jurist known as Oliver Wendell Holmes also described law as a culture by referring to it as an anthropologic document