The concept of culture of legality is a concept that is used to refer to the attitude that a society or community has towards its group of norms, laws and rules. The culture of legality is the level of adaptation or compliance that the members of that community have towards the laws and that, therefore, make the entire community take a profile that is more or less close to legality.
When speaking of legality, reference is made to the entire system of laws and norms that has been explicitly but also implicitly established in a society to organize daily life and regulate different situations. The culture of legality is, then, the set of traditions, values, attitudes and forms that characterizes a society and that makes it closer or not to compliance with those laws. The culture of legality of a community can vary over time depending on different facts or events that happen inside or outside the social group. For example, it is common to think that the culture of legality of the first decades of the 20th century was much stronger than that of the final decades of the same century in many communities.
Respect for legality is what supposedly allows a society to run smoothly and to carry out its different tasks in the most appropriate way. The culture of respect for that legality will be visible in compliance with the laws, in the presence of values of altruism, order, foresight and respect, as well as in the maintenance of those own social traditions. However, many societies that focus very deeply on a culture of legality that can seem repressive and exaggerated end up turning many times into authoritarian, aggressive and very traditionalist societies in the sense that they do not accept the changes typical of modernity and, therefore, Therefore, they lag behind in terms of global integration.
