Journal of Law and Society

vLex
Publisher:
Wiley
Publication date:
2021-02-01
ISBN:
0263-323X

Issue Number

Latest documents

  • Issue Information
  • Preface
  • Situating legal consciousness and legal compliance: how Dutch welfare clients think and act in relation to the law

    How does legal consciousness matter for compliance? Thus far, this issue has been addressed by two bodies of literature that each focus on one side of the equation but do not speak to each other. Legal consciousness studies analyse how people understand the law but focus less on their compliance with the law. Conversely, most legitimacy studies focus on people's compliance with the law but do not analyse their perceptions of the law. This article draws on the findings from an online survey among Dutch welfare clients to empirically bridge both literatures. I look not only at clients’ own (first‐order) legal consciousness, but also at their second‐order legal consciousness: clients’ assessment of welfare officials’ beliefs about the law. I argue that the connection between legal consciousness and legal compliance is not a unitary phenomenon, but must be situated in relation to particular laws and social hierarchies.

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

    This 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.

  • Relational rights and legal consciousness research: theoretical and methodological innovations
  • When less is less: the complexities of growth and the degrowth company

    In this article, I take issue with settled claims that the organizational features of the corporation make it the most effective enabler of growth under capitalism – an assumption that has focused various growth‐critical narratives on mechanisms to regulate corporate growth. I argue that such narratives are flawed because, far from always blindly amplifying growth, the corporate form often operationalizes degrowth to protect capital. This argument is theoretically grounded in Marx's analysis of the particularities of growth under capitalism, and a law‐in‐context analysis of how companies operationalize degrowth to protect capital/shareholder interests, utilizing the examples of takeovers and share repurchases. The article shows that narratives seeking to both protect the environment and deliver human flourishing need to be contextualized within an understanding of the specifics of growth under capitalism and the function of corporate law architecture.

  • Regulating for trustworthy autonomous systems: exploring stakeholder perspectives on answerability

    The proliferation of autonomous and semi‐autonomous systems (AS) poses important and pressing regulatory challenges. Underpinning these is the recognition that many different stakeholders will need to trust systems to ensure their effective adoption and implementation. However, research on stakeholder perspectives is lacking, and assessing trustworthiness is difficult due to ‘responsibility gaps’ where it is unclear where responsibility for harms arising from AS ought to lie. Bridging these gaps is important because holding one another responsible is how social trust is maintained, and trust is vital to unlocking the promise that AS hold. This article considers how the concept of answerability could provide a useful framework for boosting the trustworthiness of AS. We present findings from a series of stakeholder interviews identifying what answers different stakeholders need to trust AS in health, finance, and government applications, and consider the implications of our research for current proposals for regulating AS in the United Kingdom and the European Union.

  • Wikilegality and legal consciousness1

    This article begins by commenting on recent work on legal consciousness, concentrating especially on the pioneering work of Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey and later commentary, including research by Ayelet Oz that attempts to extend their ideas to cases of non‐state private ordering such as Wikipedia. It goes on to outline some of the distinctive features of Wikipedia's legal system and its ambivalence about (state) law and discusses the objections to what is called ‘wikilawyering’. To illustrate ‘wikilegality’, it offers a brief examination of how a dispute develops and is processed. The article concludes with some brief comments about what this case study can tell us about Ewick and Silbey's claims about hegemonic legality.

  • Jurisprudence and Socio‐Legal Studies: Intersecting Fields By Roger Cotterrell, London: Routledge, 2024, 252 pp., £37.99
  • Issue Information

Featured documents

Add as a preferred source on Google