Legal Consciousness Studies Research Articles

Raising relational legal consciousness through co‐production research? Making law more accessible

AbstractThis article offers co‐production as a new methodology for relational approaches to legal consciousness studies that allows for deeper analysis of and engagement with the everyday experience of law. We argue that the inherent relationality of co‐production has the potential to both expose and change legal consciousness. As an approach that equalizes status in the co‐production of knowledge, social structures and hierarchies are reproduced in real time, allowing the relational networks through which legal consciousness is formed to emerge. We demonstrate both the possibility and the value of this approach through a discussion of early findings from a co‐produced project focused on accessible legal information for disabled people with cognitive impairments. Our emerging data show that disabled people's experience as ‘outsiders’ in their communities, and the barriers to justice that they encounter through being not believed or information being given in inaccessible formats, creates uncertainty and distrust of the utility of legal professionals as routes for resolution – even as they express a desire for formal legal process. These data also show that engaging with co‐production work can increase the legal confidence of people from marginalized groups.

Moralization of law, heavy-penaltyism, and retributive justice: A corpus-assisted study of legal consciousness on Chinese social media

Previous studies on legal consciousness have primarily focused on individual-level interactions with legal institutions or personnel. However, this perspective may overlook the indirect experiences that citizens gain through social media and the social normative consensus behind individual experiences. To address this gap, this study examined the shared legal consciousness expressed by citizens on a social media platform. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis and sentiment analysis, we analyzed 284,792 danmu comments from the most popular legal channel on Bilibili in China. Our findings provide a contemporary perspective on legal consciousness in Chinese social media, uncovering three prevailing ideologies: moralization of law, heavy-penaltyism, and a predilection for retributive justice over restorative justice. Through our mixed-methods approach using big data, we demonstrate the potential for expanding research on legal consciousness. Our findings enable a deeper understanding of how legal consciousness is expressed and shared among citizens in the digital age.

Legal awareness of the individual: a view from the standpoint of cultural, historical and activity methodology

The article is devoted to the theoretical understanding of the phenomenon of legal consciousness of personality from the standpoint of L.S. Vygotsky's cultural and historical theory and A.N. Leontiev's general psychological theory of activity. The regularities of the formation of the legal consciousness of the individual are presented, the psychological properties and functions of the legal consciousness of the individual are described, the hypothesis of the systemic and semantic structure of the phenomenon under consideration is theoretically substantiated. The content of the legal consciousness of the individual is described at the level of "meanings", "personal meaning" and "sensory tissue" of consciousness. The process of formation of the system of legal consciousness of personality is considered through the application of the principle of unity of affect and intelligence, formulated by L.S. Vygotsky, according to which the will of the subject is a single basis and an intermediary link in the formation of consciously controlled processes (the formation of arbitrariness), where in the process of development there is a change in the relationship between affect and intelligence. The theoretical propositions formulated by the authors can form the basis for extensive empirical studies of the legal consciousness of the individual in line with the national psychological tradition, laid down in the cultural-historical approach and the general psychological theory of activity. The regularities of the formation of the legal consciousness of the individual are presented, the psychological properties and functions of the legal consciousness of the individual are described, the hypothesis of the systemic and semantic structure of the phenomenon under consideration is theoretically substantiated. The theoretical propositions formulated by the authors can form the basis for extensive empirical studies of the legal consciousness of the individual in line with the national psychological tradition, laid down in the cultural-historical approach and the general psychological theory of activity. The theoretical analysis of the phenomenon of legal awareness from the standpoint of the national cultural, historical and activity methodology allows us to draw the following conclusions and generalizations. The process of formation and development of legal awareness is a transition from simpler semantic generalizations about law to more complex ones, in the course of general personality development. Thus, the system of meanings of the "language of law" (with different levels of generalizations) determines the content of the components of the structure of legal consciousness, the "development" of these generalizations may indicate the level of development of legal consciousness. A deep study of legal consciousness is impossible in isolation from the categories of "personal meaning", "sensual fabric", as well as those "meanings" in which law finds its objective expression in culture and in a specific person, a subject of law.

Анализ зарубежных подходов к изучению правового сознания

The duration of the process of formation of legal values and legal behavior of an individual emphasizes the importance of taking into account attitudes mediated by national traditions, religious ideas, value-semantic orientations in the study of the level of legal consciousness. In our opinion, also for a comprehensive study of the individual legal consciousness of the individual, and in general, in the analytical assessment of the study of the category of legal consciousness, it is worth considering not only the dynamics of professional self-determination, but also belonging to the profession, including adherence to all those moral and ethical beliefs and principles associated with her. Such a multidimensional, complementary approach will allow taking into account the professional features of legal awareness, can contribute to a more complete picture of the understanding of the mechanisms of reflection of legal reality, applicable both to the sphere of one professional community and society. The advantage of the article is the disclosure of the main key points of development of the study of legal consciousness of foreign researchers.

“I Don’t Think That’s Something I’ve Ever Thought About Really Before”: A Thematic Discursive Analysis of Lay People’s Talk about Legal Gender

This article examines three divergent constructions about the salience of legal gender in lay people’s everyday lives and readiness to decertify gender. In our interviews (and survey data), generally participants minimised the importance of legal gender. The central argument in this article is that feminist socio-legal scholars applying legal consciousness studies to legal reform topics should find scrutinizing the construction of interview talk useful. We illustrate this argument by adapting and applying Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) ‘The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life', ‘before’, ‘with’ and ‘against’ typology to interview talk about legal gender, and critique their cognitivist approach by offering a constructionist alternative. In our analysis, we offer a detailed discursive explication of three key legal consciousness themes. These themes offer a balanced representation of a dataset problematically ‘skewed’ towards sex-based rights feminist perspectives, namely that ‘before’ legal gender is an anti-decertification account, decertification would be risky for natal females; a ‘with’ legal gender construction is neither for nor against decertification per se, though the impact of decertification is produced in accounts as limited and unimportant; and ‘against’ legal gender is a pro-decertification classification, as not abolished legal gender is constructed as harmful to already marginalised groups. In concluding, we explore the reasoning for the lack of readiness for decertification currently, and return to the value of examining the construction of lay discourse about legal matters as talk is a form of social action. We suggest that applying discursive analysis to themes in legal consciousness studies enables a refocusing on the how rather than purely the what of divergent legal consciousnesses, and that this approach is a fruitful addition to feminist socio-legal studies.

“We’re not there yet” but it’s not “pie-in-the-sky”: Legal Consciousness, Decertification and the Equality Sector in England and Wales

Drawing on 38 in-depth, qualitative interviews, this article explores how people working in the equality sector in England and Wales view and use the current law around sex and gender, and how they imagine law’s future, particularly potential decertification, where the state would withdraw from certifying and regulating a person’s sex/gender. Whilst situated in the bureaucratic strand of the literature, the paper also contributes to wider legal consciousness studies. This literature has generally focused on people’s relationships to law in terms of domination, alienation and game-playing. Drawing on idioms and the language of touch, the paper unpacks the way in which equality actors talked about law not as remote or alienating, but as close and familiar; not as oppressive, but as “precious” and hard-won. Some also regarded law as a place of safety in unsafe times. These proposed ‘attached to law’ and ‘protective of law’ strands of consciousness enrich and extend Ewick and Silbey’s classic ‘before the law’ narrative. The findings are also useful for critical legal and feminist scholarship. Combined with the equality sector’s pragmatic and tactical use of law to problem-solve, this close and protective orientation towards law reproduces its hegemony. The paper concludes by exploring a recurrent refrain that, in relation to decertification, “we’re not there yet” and that gender equality would need to be achieved before decertification would “fly”.

Constitutional interpretation and legal consciousness: Out of the courts and onto the ground

Abstract This article examines the relevance of the study of legal consciousness, particularly that of ordinary people, to constitutional interpretation. It draws on sociolegal scholarship to explain how empirically informed, ground-up research on legal consciousness can make important contributions to the study of constitutional law away from elite actors and formal political institutions. Statutes, regulations, and court opinions that restrict the exercise of constitutional rights, and political discourse that is averse or friendly to activism and rights claims are conditions that shape the legal consciousness of ordinary people—their willingness and ability to make constitutional claims of their own in the courts, as well as their self-perceptions, social interactions, and relationships. Constitutional interpretation by ordinary people—their legal consciousness—in turn influences the development of constitutional law as it is interpreted by courts and other branches of government. By studying the words, thoughts, feelings, and (non)actions of citizens as a means of revealing how they perceive, think, and behave toward the constitution, scholars can produce a different type of study about constitutional interpretation—one that emerges from the ground up. Adopting the approach of legal consciousness research can contribute much-needed empirical insights into typically normative debates in legal scholarship about constitutional legitimacy and developments.

Legal Consciousness Studies: Law as a Cultural Practice and Its Constraints and Enablements in Structures of Power and Inequality

Legal Consciousness Studies: Law as a Cultural Practice and Its Constraints and Enablements in Structures of Power and Inequality

When activists speak law to powerholders: comparative insights

ABSTRACT This paper examines the extrajudicial use of legal norms by activists. It aims to show how law serves as a useful symbolic resource for activists to strengthen their strategies for political pressure outside the courts. It does this through a qualitative investigation of six citizen debt audit groups from three European countries (France, Belgium, and Spain). Based on an analysis of legal provisions mobilised by activists in public documents, when addressing decision-makers, and in interviews, we identify several common uses of the law: the ‘legal call to order’; the ‘contradiction game between norms of the same legal order’; the ‘call to derogation of certain norms’; and, the ‘call to produce new norms’. This work is a valuable contribution to legal consciousness studies. We assert that activists have a complex legal consciousness, being neither completely enchanted (‘before the law’), nor completely withdrawn (‘against the law’). In their political interventions, the citizen audit groups under study rely on certain legal norms that they consider legitimate to make claims, while they seek to disqualify others of the same legal order. One can thus contest positive law without being against the law per se.

Legal worldview as an attribute and component of legal consciousness

The object of the study is legal awareness as a phenomenon of the sphere of positive law. The subject of the research is the legal worldview as a legal category and a phenomenon of legal reality. The author examines in detail the terminological aspect, analyzes various approaches and formulates an integrative definition of the legal worldview. Special attention is paid to the modern determinants of the formation of a legal worldview and the definition of key criteria for a socially acceptable legal worldview. The theoretical basis of the research is post-non-classical concepts of legal understanding, considering law as a means of social communication. The system, axiological and formal legal methods were used. The purpose of the study is to develop directions for the formation of a socially acceptable legal worldview.The approach applied by the author to the study of legal consciousness through the prism of the legal worldview, taking into account the determinants of legal reality, ensures the novelty of the research results. The author, in line with a broad understanding of the legal worldview, suggests considering it as a dominant value-normative component of legal consciousness, examines the factors of state-legal reality that influence public legal consciousness, among which he highlights the diversification of modern legal understanding, crisis phenomena in the field of positive law, the actualization of self-regulation in the legal sphere. On this basis, the key features of a socially acceptable legal worldview are formulated and a conclusion is made about the need to modernize the legal component of educational programs at various levels.

Legal consciousness and migration: towards a research agenda

AbstractThis paper reviews scholarship regarding migrants’ legal consciousness. After discussing the personal, geographic and methodological scope of the reviewed studies, the conceptualisation of legal consciousness is examined in light of evolutions in general legal consciousness studies. Thereafter, factors emerging as shaping migrants’ legal consciousness are analytically clustered at four levels: individual characteristics, relational factors, cultural dynamics, and public policies and discourse. Future research on legal consciousness could shift its gaze towards understudied migrant groups as well as places. We suggest being more explicit regarding the conceptualisation of dimensions of what is ‘legal’ and of ‘consciousness’, and adopting a pluralist approach to law. The analytical grouping of the factors impacting migrants’ legal consciousness may serve as a useful reference point for future research and facilitate a more comprehensive appraisal of the various dynamics shaping migrants’ legal consciousness.

ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЕ ОБЫДЕННОГО И НАУЧНОГО ЗНАНИЯ В ФОРМИРОВАНИИ ПРАВОСОЗНАНИЯ

The study of legal consciousness from the position of cognitive approach is due to the idea of the existence of mental constructs, the role of which is to maintain a holistic and meaningful picture of the world. The study of the phenomenon of law as applied to human consciousness allows us to talk about LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS - gestalt reflection of legal norms in the mind of an individual, a form of social consciousness. In accordance with the above mentioned argument the aim of the research is to cognitively analyze linguistic representations of the concept to study the interaction of scientific and ordinary knowledge. The object of the research is the interaction of ordinary and scientific knowledge in the gestalt structure. During the study, using the method of cognitive modeling, we identified two aspects (localization of legal consciousness, detailing of legal consciousness). The analysis of two aspects confirms the fact that this knowledge is assimilated and formed with the participation of stable cognitive structures, which have arisen on the basis of human bodily experience. It showed the representation of the phenomenon with the help of conceptual metaphors. Theoretical scientific knowledge is a part of the considered gestalt, it can be unsystematic and fragmentary, as it does not determine the integrity of the gestalt.

Investigating gender in a world of gender consciousness

For better or worse, it has become difficult to conduct research in the social sciences without encountering gender, even well beyond fields that specifically focus on it. Since the advent of gender studies as a discipline, the concept has gained momentum both as a social fact and structure of social action, and as the analytic category through which these are conceptualised. This special issue of the BMS is embedded in the idea that the analysis of gender itself is indissociable from the history of the concept, and that the increasing spread of this notion throughout society has an impact on the way(s) gender is investigated. In the space of just a few decades the world has evolved from one in which researchers were working to give consistency to a nameless force, to one which is now gender conscious, where gender is mobilised, criticised, claimed, resisted, and debated. In a gender conscious world, the rules of research are changing. The notion of gender consciousness that is proposed here borrows carefully from research in the sociology of law developed under the name legal consciousness studies (LCS). The fact that there are different definitions of gender that compete with each other does not prevent us from considering that there is gender, and we may even consider that the proliferation of definitions participates in the stability of the social phenomenon we are studying, just as, for the theorists of LCS, the multiple representations of the law contribute to its hegemony. One of the central issues here is the problematization of the dialectic between categories of practice and categories of analysis, with a focus on the methodological and epistemological questions of these studies. This ‘return to the field’ will provide answers to these questions, beginning with a personal summary overview of what feminist epistemologies (I) and feminist methodologies (II) have contributed to social sciences, before moving on to contemporary research questions that emerge through the prism of gender consciousness (III).

Апробация новой методики изучения правового сознания для сотрудников правоохранительных органов

<p>The work is devoted to the development of a new diagnostic tool for the study of legal consciousness as an essential competence of law enforcement officers as part of solving practical problems of their professional-psychological selection and accompaniment. The author’s “Scale of legal consciousness” (46 questions) was developed; the emphasis was placed on revealing the commitment to “conventional” values, as opposed to both egoistic and “universal” values. The research sample: the personnel of the National Guard of the Russian Federation (504 people). High one-step reliability (α=0,824) of the new Legal Awareness Scale was revealed; the distribution of the indicator corresponds to normal. Correlations of high significance and expected sign with personality variables (L-Profile, MLO Adaptivity), with indicators of propensity to addiction (“ODA-2010” questionnaire) moderate positive relations with results on intellectual tests were revealed. Thus, satisfactory psychometric properties of the new Law Consciousness Scale were confirmed, and the expediency of its further validation with the prospect of introduction into the practice of psychological support of law enforcement agencies was substantiated.</p>

Talk about Legal Gender: Thoughts on what legal consciousness studies and discursive psychology together can reveal

Talk about Legal Gender: Thoughts on what legal consciousness studies and discursive psychology together can reveal

Legal Consciousness and the Sociology of Labour Law

Abstract Building on recent calls to expand the field of empirical labour law research, this article seeks to delineate a special place for legal consciousness research within a new sociology of labour law. The idea that employment relations have become increasingly juridified has been used to justify important policy interventions such as reforms to the employment tribunal system, restricting the ability of workers to bring claims. Yet, we know remarkably little about work-related legal consciousness in order to assess the purported growth of ‘litigiousness’ in society and its implications for policy. This article provides an extended critique of a recent text in the field of legal consciousness studies, Nobody’s Law by Marc Hertogh.1 What began as a straightforward review of Hertogh’s book became a defence of an earlier, seminal work by Ewick and Silbey,2 which Hertogh seeks but ultimately fails to discredit. Ewick and Silbey’s critical approach stands up well against close scrutiny. The debate centres upon issues of legal hegemony, and on epistemology and ontology in the sociological study of labour law.

Oral history as a tool of legal analysis: women in the margins of Israeli society

Researchers in the field of legal consciousness have traditionally relied on surveys, ethnographies, or in-depth interviews to gauge the ways in which individuals engage, avoid, or resist the law. This paper explores how oral history is able to enrich the study of legal consciousness in ways inaccessible to other methodologies. Oral history offers an intertemporal perspective, allowing researchers to trace the development and evolution of legal attitudes and interactions over time. To illustrate the unique function of oral history, I examine the oral history narratives of three Palestinian-Israeli women as they relate their experience with the law over the course of their lifetime. I suggest that combining the oral history technique with the more targeted approach of in-depth interviewing can most aptly capture individual legal consciousness. Research through oral history can further be used in the field of critical legal theory by drawing attention to collective historical grievances of marginalised groups.

A interdisciplinaridade nos estudos sociojurídicos: a experiência editorial da revista Droit et Société

Este artigo tem o intuito de analisar a questão da interdisciplinaridade nos estudos sociojurídicos a partir da expressiva experiência editorial da revista Droit et Société. Para tanto, em primeiro lugar, realiza uma concisa alusão à proposta de André-Jean Arnaud de desenvolvimento dos estudos sociojurídicos como um “campo de pesquisa interdisciplinar” e à “sociologia política do direito” de Jacques Commaille. Em seguida, com o propósito de explicitar uma das razões fundamentais da escolha dos trabalhos de Susan Silbey como objeto do dossiê do centésimo número da referida publicação, o artigo faz uma breve incursão pela obra da autora americana ressaltando, fundamentalmente, o seu contorno interdisciplinar. Por fim, o artigo consigna um sucinto exame da recepção dos Legal Consciousness Studies e, em particular, do pensamento de Susan Silbey, no âmbito dos estudos sociojurídicos na França, com especial ênfase nas afinidades existentes entre eles e a “sociologia política do direito” proposta por Jacques Commaille.

RESEARCH OF LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PERSON

the article presents a personal approach to the study of legal consciousness. Legal consciousness develops in accordance with the stages of age development in stages, in the following sequence: undifferentiated moral and legal ideas, legal ideas, basic legal concepts, scientific concepts. Legal consciousness is considered from the psychological point of view in the context of the development of a positive attitude to the law not only through the interiorization of legal knowledge, but also through reflection and anticipation. Reflection determines the awareness of the right, allows you to select from the socio-cultural space of the values and meanings of the right, available for perception and understanding of the individual at different age stages. Anticipation allows you to build a generalized image of the world in the legal reality, to predict the necessary-transformation to achieve the ability to realize the right to interiorservice knowledge of law and practice in good behavior. The psychological mechanism of functioning of legal consciousness is social learning reflection and anticipation in the analysis of the legal reality of the student in the education system. Legal consciousness develops as a realistic view of not only the acquisition of legal knowledge, and in the process of social learning, reflection and analysis of personality legal reality, decentration and understanding of the legal field of other people, and based on them build in the process of anticipation of the image of "I – legal person". For the correct process of social learning is necessary purposeful work in the educational environment, starting with primary school age. The study shows that the teaching of legal concepts is quite productive in the educational environment and the cognitive component of legal consciousness is activated at a high level. However, for a positive attitude to the right of the individual and the development of the need for lawful behavior, it is necessary to use the evaluative, moral, creative and regulatory components of legal consciousness. This study revealed significant differences in the influence of external and internal factors on the development of legal consciousness of the younger student. Childhood is the most sensitive period for the beginning of the development of legal consciousness. Legal consciousness of personality of Junior schoolboy is the sphere of individual consciousness, reflects the surrounding reality in the process analysis and mapping of phenomena and events of life with the basic ideas and initial concepts on the law, generating a personal relationship to the events through the prism of perception that lead the consciousness on the fulfillment of legal norms and regulating the child's behavior. In adolescence, legal nihilism appears under unfavorable conditions of development. Types of legal consciousness of a Mature person are: legal realism, legal infantilism, legal nihilism, legal indifference.

Legal Consciousness Studies as a Laboratory of a Renewed System of Knowledge About Law. Presentation of the Special Report

Legal Consciousness Studies as a Laboratory of a Renewed System of Knowledge About Law. Presentation of the Special Report