Legal Culture as a Primary Resource for Rule of Law Resilience

RESILIO-ACCESS Snapshot Series

The Snapshots are a series of comprehensive analyses on how to study the resilience of the rule of law in EU accession countries. Using concrete empirical examples from the candidate countries, they use the RESILIO-ACCESS model as an analytical framework to explain how the resilience of the rule of law can be measured.

The Snapshots cover primary and subsidiary resilience resources.

This Snapshot examines the role of legal culture as a resource for rule of law resilience. The RESILIO-ACCESS model conceptualises legal culture itself as a primary, core resilience resource.1 Institutionally, legal culture functions as an internalised set of values and practices within the legal system that determines whether legal professionals will uphold standards of procedural justice and professional integrity, even when they are faced with political threats. Socially, legal culture can positively affect the rule of law’s resilience capacity through promoting and sustaining liberal democratic values, including law-abidingness,
popular legitimisation of the legal order, public trust in the legal system, and civic engagement against autocratic encroachment.

Read the report:
Legal Culture as a Primary Resource for Rule of Law Resilience

About the RESILIO-ACCESS: Resilience Observatory on the Rule of Law in EU Accession Candidates project: How resilient is the rule of law in the EU enlargement countries? RESILIO-ACCESS uses an interdisciplinary approach to answer this question and identifies how EU enlargement policy can contribute to resilient democratic structures in the region.

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