SOC323H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: I Dreamt I Dwelt In Marble Halls
Document Summary
The concept of legal consciousness is used to name the understandings and meanings of law circulating in social relations. Legal consciousness refers to what people do as well as say about law. The study of legal consciousness documents the forms of participation and interpretation through which actors sustain, reproduce or amend the circulating (contested or hegemonic) structures of meanings concerning law. Legal consciousness has developed as a notion among scholars to help explain how law sustains its institutional power across wide spans of time, space and variable performance. Legality is imagined and treated as an objective realm of disinterested action, removed and distant from the lives of individuals. The law is majestic, operating by known and fixed rules in carefully delimited space. Role of law: to recognize, legitimize and protect individuals via the highest moral order. Role of people: people should not invoke law for everyday messiness.
