Despite many doubts and criticisms, the use and popularity of the term legal culture have been growing steadily since 1969, when Lawrence Friedman first coined it. Regardless of the difficulties in conceptualising and operationalising legal culture, it is widely used in research and theoretical work. This paper investigates how researchers are overcoming conceptual issues, as well as the similarities and differences in approaches to legal culture and their effects on the comprehensibility and coherence of the concept. Through a systematic literature review of scholarly papers published in two citation bibliographic databases – Web of Science and Scopus – that contain the term legal culture in the title, this paper identifies definitions of legal culture, theoretical assumptions, research methods and specific topics depicted within the field of legal culture. The analysis indicates heterogeneous approaches to legal culture, accompanied by inconsistency in understanding and applying the concept. The notion of legal culture is related to various topics but mainly used as an intervening variable; without empirical research, authors use the term as hypothetical and self-evident, assuming its impact on law and society. Besides, the analysis identified various forms of defining and explaining the legal culture and different methodologies, amongst which a descriptive approach prevails. Based on the insight into scholarly articles on legal culture, the review concludes with suggestions for improving future research and the explanatory power of legal culture.

There is plenty of research on media framing of marginalized and “othered” groups, including refugees and migrants. A lot has been said about the 2015– 2016 refugee crisis, but much less scholarly interest has been put on the 2018– 2019 re-emergence of refugees and migrants on outer borders of the EU and the ways member states have responded to the problem. This paper is focused on analysing similarities and differences in framing of refugees and migrants in the Croatian media in two distinct time periods: 2015–2016 and 2018. The paper is based on applying content analysis and descriptive statistics to articles from four daily newspapers in order to find out how the people coming to Croatia were presented in the media; what they were called, in which sense (positive, neutral, negative) they were presented to the public, and how the media presentation changed over time. The analysis has shown a certain degree of specific political, economic, and societal contexts mediated to, and in turn mediated by, the media’s framing of refugees/migrants. While the predominant frame remained neutral, as per norms of journalistic profession, the change in ideological stance of the government - from social democrats, who put humanitarian elements first, to conservatives, whose focus was security-based - coincided with the relative rise in the number of articles with a negative portrayal of the migrant issue.