This handbook is the first to comprehensively present selected national legal cultures based on a very specific set of structural elements which can be found in all legal cultures. Looking at these elements separately enables the reader to identify similarities and differences and to explain them contextually. Understanding general features of legal cultures can help avoiding misunderstandings or misinterpretations of foreign law and its application. Thus cooperation across boarder requires both knowledge of and understanding for different cultures. This is especially valid when it comes to law. Legal cultures are a product of and impacted by some fundamental and commonly shared ideas and expectations to law. In all modern societies these ideas are to a certain degree institutionalized or at least embedded in an institutionalized practise. These practices determine the way lawyers are educated and apply the law, how they engage with the ongoing internationalisation of law and what kind of values they adhere to.weiterlesen