Американская правовая культура: родовая специфика и отраслевые разновидности.

AMERICAN LEGAL CULTURE: GENERIC CHARACTERISTICS AND SUBGENERIC PERMUTATIONS

As a species of Western legal culture, American legal culture shares common generic characteristics with other national legal cultures within Western legal tradition.A taxonomic analysis of American legal culture reveals that it is an Americanized (constitutionalized) variety of English legal culture with which it teams us to form an AngloAmerican subgenus within the family of Western legal culture. As a social phenomenon, American legal culture crystallized through an evolutionary process which synthesized three organic elements,i.e., the moral princiles of protestantism, the philosophical postulates of puritanism and the core doctrines of the U.S. Constitution. The quintessence of American legal culture is encapsulated in its two axioms, i.e., «equal justice under law» and «ours is a government of laws and not of men».Within this legal culture there are various subspecies with their own divisional (sectorial) permutations of the common subspecies. In addition to fleshing out the twelve philosophical cornerstones of Western legal culture and highlighting the fundamental differences between AngloAmerican and RomanoGermanic legal cultures, this article also examines the substance of two illustrative subspecies within American legal culture, i.e., American tort and contract subcultures.