Sunde and Skodvin on the Rendezvous of European Legal Cultures

Dirk Heirbaut posted the following notice on the Juris Diversitas Blog on 30 March 2010

This book deals with the rendezvous of European legal cultures that results from and spurs forward the ongoing harmonization of European law. It neither thoroughly presents nor analyses legal culture in a changing Europe. Rather, the book is an introduction to this vast topic, aimed at present and future lawyers in need of a crack and a chisel to make a hole in the Berlin Wall dividing the old legal Europe, dominated by national legal cultures with stable boundaries, from the new legal Europe, where these national legal cultures are being harmonised and subordinated under a new European legal culture.

The rendezvous of European cultures are dealt with from the perspective of an imagined periphery. Europe looks different from the imagined centres of London, Paris, Berlin and Rome than from the imagined peripheries of Moscow, Bucharest, Lisbon or Bergen. Too often the perspective of the imagined centres of Europe is adopted, when the continent is depicted. If these centres have ever been anything but images, the emerging new Europe is slowly doing away with them. In this process, the perspective of an imagined periphery is to bring balance into the picture, and that is a second aim of this book.

This book also has a third aim: To be fun and provide thought-provoking reading. Enjoy!