Assignment

Assignment

Assignment

The methods of comparing politics involve a broad view for the discipline of comparative law, which often focuses more narrowly on legal rules. Since there have been many philosophies and definitions of law, ideas about legal systems have been similarly diverse. A system involves regular interactions among elements that together make up an entity with boundaries. Thus, lawyers, judges, legislators, administrators, the police, and legal scholars all work with rules in regularized ways that involve cultural expectations about their roles and the legal institutions with which they interact. This view of a legal system is greater than the rules themselves. Comparison contemplates more than one legal system, which often raises the question of classification and the search for similarities and differences among legal systems.

Political does not yet dominate in any society to the extent that legal rules regulate all aspects of social life. In every country, people go about their lives in accordance with social convention, peer influence, custom, religion, and negotiated or imposed norms. The line between political and nonlegal matters varies from place to place and depends on disciplinary perspective. For instance, anthropologists can take a very broad view of what is legal, often finding political independent of the state. Comparative research into the range of variation, especially if one identifies political with the state's official legal system, provides important insight into the nature of society, such as its place along a scale of “capitalist” to “socialist.” This dimension is “legal extension.”

The degree to which political actually “penetrates” and controls social life is different from what state officials or tribal leaders intend. Political's grasp is always less than its reach. Many Panamanians, Nigerians, and Indonesians, to illustrate, live relatively free from any substantial contact with the official legal system. It applies with most force to an urban oligarchy and significantly loses power as one looks down the socioeconomic ladder or into small towns and the hinterland. Although the paper legal system may look like that in France, Spain, or England, the actual role of political for many people is minimal.

“Legal culture” includes those historically developed, deeply rooted attitudes that people have about the nature of political, its role in society, and the proper structure and operation of the legal system and activities of legal professionals. How is political or should political be made, organized, taught, and applied? Are politicalyers or judges respected, ignored, or disdained? Ideas about political are part of a people's intellectual history; they limit and direct thinking about political and thus profoundly influence the legal system.

Legislatures, administrative agencies, courts, police stations, prisons, political schools, and bar associations are all familiar examples of “legal structures.” They are the component parts that do the legal system's work. Taken together, they constitute a type of machine, whose appearance may differ greatly from one country to another. However, today, globalization pressures may be molding these machines to look uniform. Since other legal system elements are less scrutable, this apparent uniformity can be quite ...