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-" Malcolm Pitman Sharp Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison.Dr. Jacqueline Macaulay took time from her law practice to comment on this paper.She attributes the popularity of L.A. Law among lawyers to its portrayal of their fantasies of competence and power.

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