Cultura giuridica. Contenuti e funzioni di un concetto

This introduction to the volume tries to reconstruct the most important elements which are at least implicitly present in current definitions of the concept of legal culture. In order to adapt this concept to the requirements of socio-legal research the article defines a typology which extends the fundamental distinction between internal and external legal cultures to the main aspects of legal orders (contents, criteria of decision, actors). Starting from these presuppositions the article underlines the necessity of developing a more flexible concept of legal culture which could be oriented neither to mainly normative points of view represented by the internal legal culture of legal professionals, nor to external points of view as the needs of social actors, but to both perspectives within a cluster of intersystemic relations regulated by combinations of cognitive and normative attitudes and by mixed criteria of relevance.