CROSSROADS IN CULTURAL STUDIES
Fourth International Conference
June 29 - July 2, 2002, Tampere, Finland

Culture and the Rule of Law

Organiser: Koray Tutuncu

Sabuktay, Aysegul (Public Administration Institute for Turkey and Middle East, Turkey) VALIDITY OF CULTURAL APPROACHES TO RULE OF LAW : INTERPRETING THE DEBATES ON RULE OF LAW IN THE CONTEXT OF THE SUSURLUK CASE
A political scandal disclosing some illegal activities of the state, which was called the 'Susurluk Case', has promoted debates on rule of law in Turkish public opinion since 1996. Almost all arguments about the Case emphasize that it was an outcome of the deficiency in rule of law and in culture of democracy in general. I will inquire into the appropriateness of these arguments and interpret the Case from the perspectives of 'rule of law' and 'reason of state'. Furthermore, I will question the validity of the concept of rule of law and cultural frameworks in criticizing the state affairs and inquire into some other conceptual frameworks.

Luci, Nita (University of Michigan, USA) REGULATING PROPERTY: HOUSING CLAIMS, PROPERTY AND POWER IN KOSOVA
The so-called "transitions" of post-socialist East Europe have been characterized by the centrality of issues regarding privatization, restitution, and "democratization". The creation of new property regimes, and the delegitimation of old ones, is a crucial component of these transformation. Currently in Kosova some of these projects are explicitly connected to policies whose aim is to adjudicate and regulate property, particularly in regard to rights and claims to housing. I will argue that it is exceedingly pertinent to identify processes and practices regarding definitions of rights and claims to housing in Kosova, as constitutive of exclusionary nationalist politics. Arguing against a universal definition of property, I would like to show how discussions about, and definitions of property are embedded in specific political and social processes which give rise to different forms of property relations. I will thus compare these relations as they existed in the Yugoslav ethnocracy, and how they continue to exist in concert or conflict with current attempts to articulate "international standards" in property regimes.

Gozlukaya Tutuncu, Fatma (University of Michigan, USA) LAW FOR ALL, JUSTICE FOR WHOM?
In his search for a just society, Rawls assumes that we all become autonomous and our society becomes just so as to be ruled by the law accepted by all of us on the basis of a public use of our reason. In arguing so, he ratifies law as the expression of the reason, as the guarantor of justice and, in a sense as justice. Can law as a system of regulated and coded prescriptions promise justice that is infinite, incalculable, heterogeneous and singular? Keeping this question in mind, in this paper, I will analyze the novel, 'Buzdan Kiliclar' by Latife Tekin. Tekin narrates the magical world of the poor who incessantly murmur with a specific system of silent signs and a hidden language that is unknown to non-poor, that exposes the limits of dominant language, that resists the so-called public use of reason. How is justice possible, then? As a political responsibility, the murmurs, Tekin mentions, representing the particularity of the life, existence, and struggle of the poor need to be 'translated'. This is also a responsibility to justice that is claimed in more than one language, the claims for justice to be heard, to be read, to be interpreted wherever they come from as Derrida argues. To put it briefly, this paper presents a modest search for the limits of formal, universalist, and proceduralist postulations of the rule of law as oppose to the singularity of justice.

Tutuncu, Koray (Yale Law School, USA; Middle East Technical University, Turkey) AN ETHNOGRAPHIC AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL INQUIRY INTO THE PRACTICE OF THE RULE OF LAW IN TURKEY
In this study, I aim at exposing and discussing the results of an ethnographic study on the responses of two different groups of men to a discourse of the rule of law which dominates the social, political and intellectual climate of Turkey during 1990s. It is a well-known belief that, at a time of global mobilization of the rule of law, as claimed by many Kantian liberals, universal adoption of the rule of law creates a common and similar experience all over the world. But again, as claimed by some others, universal adoption of the rule of law would not necessarily lead to the production of the same culture of legal meanings in societies that lack Western traditions and institutions. As a matter of fact, the meaning making process is so complex that different conceptualisations of authority, time, space and state should compel us to view phenomena of the rule of law in a more context-bounded manner. Having in my mind this consideration that emphasizes the importance of the phenomenological inquiry that offers the investigation of the conceptual conditions of the 'rule of law', this study proceeded with an ethnographic analysis including a simple questionnaire, some participatory observation and indepth-interview with two different groups of men in Turkey. Interpretative elaboration of their imaginative relation with authority, time and space will demonstrate the possibility of a different structure of conceptual conditions that affects the practice of the rule of law in Turkey. The real issue here is not to take the idea of universal rule of law as taken for granted but to take into consideration the existence of different conceptual conditions in which different social meanings of the rule of law appear.

Winger, Stewart (The American University in Cairo, Egypt) LINCOLN, CULTURE, AND THE RULE OF LAW
Most legal theorists assume that American Law has always operated within a liberal paradigm. The U.S. Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights has led most to the immediate assumption that Americans have always thought of the law as morally, religiously, and culturally neutral. Law in the United States has been thought to take its legitimacy from the consent of the governed strictly, while the Bill of Rights, divided government, and an independent judiciary protected minorities from majority tyranny. In fact, recent scholars of American law point out that law in the antebellum period cannot be described as "liberal" at all. There was almost no Bill of Rights jurisprudence in the U.S. prior to the Civil War and the 14th Amendment, and at the state level where virtually all actual lawmaking took place, the Common Law dominated. Under the Common Law, all law was thought to be the expression of community moral standards. Recent scholarship has also revealed that Abraham Lincoln was one of the most important lawyers in Illinois during this Common Law period. In fact Lincoln took for granted a non-liberal, non-Jeffersonian conception of the law in which the moral aspirations of the community were the giver as well as interpreter of all law. All law was rooted in what we now call "culture." Lincoln's thinking on law as it related to slavery, his acceptance of relatively pro-slavery community moral standards during his early career, as well as his attempts both to change public opinion and to make sure that the law enshrined the new antislavery public opinion, reveals this non-liberal, common law conception at work. Modern legal thinkers skeptical of liberal legal theory will find in Lincoln's common law conception of the rule of law an intriguing intellectual resource.