Social Science Research Council

The Working Group on Law and Culture (formerly called the Working Group on Ethnic Customs, Assimilation and American Law) has studied how the United States and other liberal democracies accommodate cultural practices that depart from social norms codified within their legal systems, such as child marriage, corporal punishment, and female circumcision. The group has examined the extent to which Western legal systems presuppose and codify the beliefs and values of the cultural mainstream, as well as how minority groups react to attempts to force compliance with dominant norms.

The findings of the working group have been published recently by the Russell Sage Foundation Press in a volume entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies, (2002), and in the Fall 2000 issue of Daedalus (Vol. 129, no. 4, fall 2000). Both are edited by working group members Richard Shweder, Martha Minow and Hazel Markus.

The Law and Culture working group is now undertaking a series of field studies that examine in greater detail the way conflicts between cultures might be worked out in practice. Two field studies are on the drawing board: one focusing on the Islamic community in the United States and its encounters with officials in schools, law enforcement, child protection, and in the workplace, and another on the management of diversity in American workplaces. These field studies are currently in the planning stage and will be conducted over the next several years.

The group will continue as a creative interdisciplinary community of scholars that addresses analytically the issue of "what shape can and will multiculturalism take in liberal democratic societies?"