The Centre

The Käte Hamburger Centre "Law as Culture" sought to advance our understanding of legal systems during an era marked by the accelerating globalization of normative frameworks. Unlike traditional legal scholarship, particularly legal doctrine with its focus on the quid-juris question, our approach examined law as a fundamental dimension of an increasingly interconnected world, employing the conceptual tools and methodological approaches of the humanities. In this respect, law represents—contrary to nineteenth-century academic discourse—a legitimate and vital subject for cultural studies in addressing central challenges of contemporary society.

Just as knowledge of religious worldviews and their evolution provides insight into a world marked by conflict, legal systems possess an indicative function for understanding both the successes and failures of global modernity—a modernity whose center can no longer be empirically or normatively determined. Only through examining religiously influenced, decentralized legal cultures do the distinctive features of Western legal traditions emerge within the globalization process, features paradigmatically analyzed in Max Weber's scholarship. Their interconnection with fundamental assumptions of respective cultures—for instance, the Arab-Islamic world—necessitates utilizing the analytical potential of cultural science disciplines. This includes a historically comparative legal analysis that emphasizes the symbolic-ritual and organizational dimensions of law, drawing upon German humanities traditions to deepen, apply, and expand them through scholarly dialogue with representatives of other legal cultures. Since this form of legal analysis is freed from the quid-juris question that typically occupies the energies of practicing or applied jurisprudence, new insights into fundamental aspects of social life in the globalization process can be anticipated.

In contrast to Max Weber's reconstruction of legal cultures, which emphasized the profiling of difference, the interweaving, hybridization, and partial fusion of legal cultures creates both potential for conflict and reconciliation. Literature, film, and architecture narrate this constitutional state of law, whose negation in regimes of injustice demonstrates what a precious asset law represents in the civilization process. This becomes particularly evident in light of a latent culturalization of law, when achievements of modern legal cultures are questioned "in the name of culture."