Legal Culture and Legal Consciousness

Abstract

The phrases ‘legal culture’ and ‘legal consciousness’ are used analytically to identify the understandings and meanings of law that circulate in social relations. Culture refers to an aggregate level (macro or group) phenomenon involving both local practices and systemic effects; legal consciousness usually refers to micro level social action but is not limited to attitudes, or merely by-products of other social forces. Constitutive conceptions of consciousness respond to debates concerning determinism, structure and agency by identifying consciousness as participation in the processes of social construction, a phenomenon that is both productive and produced in a continuously interactive process. In studies of legal culture or consciousness, scholars trace both the forms of participation (legal consciousness) in contests about the substantive representations of law and legality, and the content of those representations (legal culture). Although many studies have been conducted in formal legal settings, researchers often move away from the formal settings of law to identify both legal consciousness and legal culture in everyday life. Comparative studies are growing, but are sometimes limited by competing or undertheorized analytical conceptions of legal culture and consciousness.