4 - Legal Consciousness

Summary

Legal consciousness refers to the ways in which people think and act in relation to law, including situations in which they view law as relevant and useful and those in which they reject law or never consider it at all. Some of the earliest law and society research in Asia—in Japan, Korea, and Indonesia, for example—attempted to explore the phenomenon of legal consciousness at the national level. Typically, such research depicted Asians as law-averse and non-litigious, but subsequently those characterizations were challenged and revised by scholars who proposed more complex explanations for the infrequency of litigation in some Asian societies. The readings in this chapter follow the evolution in legal consciousness research, from efforts to identify national traits to studies that examine the interaction of globalization and customary practices to produce unique forms of consciousness within different social groupings. The readings also explore the ways in which official definitions of rights are refracted through the lens of legal consciousness. The chapter concludes with a look at recent law and society studies that take a less individualistic approach to rights and emphasize instead the relational dimensions of legal consciousness.