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The Making of Global Legal Culture and International Criminal Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

KIRSTEN CAMPBELL
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Abstract

It is commonly agreed that international criminal law (ICL) is a ‘hybrid’ legal culture, which mixes the legal traditions of the common law and civil law. However, the precise nature of this legal culture remains a contentious legal and theoretical issue. The paper identifies the two dominant models of ICL within these debates as either a clash of cultures or a sui generis system, and shows how neither satisfactorily engages with the concept of legal culture itself. To address this problem, the paper develops a new account of ICL as a global legal culture. The paper first identifies the distinctive ‘cultural logic’ of ICL, drawing on the example of recent developments in sexual violence offences. It then examines how ICL takes a global legal form, which ‘globalizes’ liberal legal culture. Finally, the paper shows how this process of making the legal culture of ICL ‘global’ creates its cultural contradictions, but also enables the possibility of making a new legal culture at the international level.

Keywords

international criminal justiceinternational criminal lawlegal culturesexual violencewar crimes
Type
INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURTS AND TRIBUNALS
Information
Leiden Journal of International Law , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 155 - 172
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation of the Leiden Journal of International Law 2013

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References

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