Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight

Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a “second‐order” layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in‐depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawaii reveal how law enforcement practices not only affect cockfighting rituals, but are embedded within them. Police practices and informal rules work in concert to shape fighters' second‐order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of central concepts, including order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second‐order perspective also underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly created and recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's inherently relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs—for example, when an unusual police action directed toward a subgroup of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for them. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers scholars a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law.     

Law's Strange Allure: The Power of Legal Lore beyond the Law-Politics Divide

American political culture is both seduced and repulsed by legal power, and this essay reviews Gordon Silverstein's contribution to understanding the causes and consequences of “law's allure.” Using interbranch analysis, Silverstein argues that law is dangerously alluring as a political shortcut, but ultimately he concludes that law offers no exit from “normal politics” and the hard work of “changing minds.” This essay suggests that Silverstein's framework—his dyadic focus on courts and Congress, constructive and deconstructive patterns, legal formality and normal politics—strips law from its animating context of interests, inequality, and ideology. Without consideration of these larger forces of power, Silverstein's framework misplaces law's ability to “change minds” in perverse and unexpected ways.     

DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE: LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY

In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ultimately developed into the full‐fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholarship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions: “Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law enforcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with community activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on oral histories and archival data permits a neo‐institutional analysis of how each of these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berkeley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and criminal justice policy's disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.     

The Force of International Law: Lawyers' Diplomacy on the International Scene in the 1920s

Where does international law (IL) draw its authority from a still weakly institutionalized international scene deprived of the warrants of a state? To address this classical debate, the article draws from a case study on the social and professional structure of the “international legal community” as it emerged during the 1920s as part of the rise of multilateralism and international organizations. It focuses on the “situation of the international lawyers” of the time, starting with the multiple and often antagonistic roles they play (as legal advisers, scholars, judges, diplomats, politicians, etc.) and the variety of interests and causes they defend (states, international organizations, professional interests, etc.) in international politics. It argues this heteronomy of international lawyers helps understand the autonomization of international law. Far from being opposed to one another it has often been assumed—realism and idealism, national loyalty and international loyalty, political logic and learned logic—actually gain when analyzed as various modes of affirming a single cause—that of an international rule of law. This attention given to the “situation of international lawyers” and to the way they manage their various allegiances also accounts for the particular vision of the “International” and of “Law and Politics” relationships that are encapsulated in this emerging international corpus juris.     

Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche presents a history of metaphysics that can also be read as a history of jurisprudence. Nietzsche shows how—via Platonism, Christendom, Kantianism, and utilitarianism—the “real” or “true” world of ideals gives way to an “apparent” phenomenal world that is itself ultimately brought into question. This article shows how 20th-century legal thought, broadly construed, also moves away from “ideals” of law toward an understanding of law as observable social phenomena. It suggests that the move to the “apparent” world in legal thought raises questions similar to those raised by Nietzsche's work: Does sociological law point to a nihilistic destruction of the legal tradition or to a joyous possibility of overcoming that tradition?     

Mobilizing the Law in China: "Informed Disenchantment" and the Development of Legal Consciousness

This article critically examines the development of legal consciousness among legal aid plaintiffs in Shanghai. It is based on 16 months of research at a large legal aid center and in‐depth interviews with 50 plaintiffs. Chinese legal aid plaintiffs come to the legal process with high expectations about the possibility of protecting their rights; however, they also have only a vague and imprecise knowledge of legal procedure and their actual codified rights. Through this process of legal mobilization, plaintiffs' legal consciousness changes in two separate dimensions: changes in one's feelings of efficacy and competency vis‐à‐vis the law, and changes in one's perception/evaluation of the legal system. Put another way, the first dimension is “How well can I work the law?” and the second is “How well does the law work?” In this study I observe positive changes in feelings of individual efficacy and competency that are combined with more negative evaluations/perceptions of the legal system in terms of its fairness and effectiveness. The positive feelings of efficacy and voice provided by the legal process encourage labor dispute plaintiffs in the post‐dispute period to plan new lawsuits and to help friends and relatives with their legal problems. Disenchantment with the promises of the legal system does not lead to despondency, but to more critical, informed action. This study provides new evidence on the nature of China's developing legal system with a focus on the social response to the state‐led “rule of law” project.     

支持理论下民事诉讼当事人法律意识的实证研究

传统研究重视“法的供给”视角,致力于创设“良法良制”。通过转向“对法的需求”视角,本研究基于支持理论和法律意识理论,访谈了142名四类常见民事诉讼案件的当事人。本研究发现,当事人对司法的信赖分为“特定支持”和“普遍支持”两个维度。负面的诉讼经历仅会降低当事人对主审法官(法院)的评价(特定支持),尚未削弱他们对法院系统及司法制度的评价(普遍支持)。此外,当事人可以被进一步分为“门外汉”和“入门者”。前者不信赖法院的根本原因在于其法律意识与司法制度间存在巨大的冲突和矛盾;“入门者”的意识则限定于法律体系内,只在意法官的审判质量。随着司法系统的日渐完善,“入门者”对司法的信赖有望逐步提升。但“门外汉”则需要通过“知情(法)受益”这一过程先转化为“入门者”。     

Connecting Critical Race Theory with Second Generation Legal Consciousness Work in Obasogie's Blinded by Sight

Sociologist and legal scholar Osagie Obasogie's study of how blind people “see” race reveals the usually invisible, taken‐for‐granted mechanisms that reproduce racism. In Blinded by Sight, he distinguishes racial consciousness from legal consciousness, though he notes their common emphases on studying how cumulative social practices and interactions produce commonsense understandings. I argue that there is much to be gained from connecting these two fields, one emanating primarily out of critical race theory and the other out of law and society scholarship. Legal consciousness offers an important avenue for bridging macro studies of race making with micro studies such as Obasogie's, which focus on individuals’ experiences and practices of constructing race and learning racism.     

A Separate Peace? The Politics of Localized Law in the Post‐Revolutionary Era

Law is often seen as peripheral to Southern life before the Civil War, and the South as an outlier in the American legal history of that era. In The People and Their Peace (2009), Laura Edwards demonstrates the profoundly legal nature of Southern society and takes an important step toward integrating the legal history of the South with that of the nation. Edwards identifies two dueling legal cultures in North and South Carolina between 1787 and 1840—the law of local courts, which she terms localized law, and the state law of professionalized lawyers and reformers. She argues that white women, slaves, and the poor fared better in localized law—which was based on notions of popular sovereignty and the flexible rubric of restoring “the peace”—than in state courts, which were steeped in a national culture of individual rights that led to more restrictive results. This essay questions Edwards's dichotomy between local law and state law and her depiction of the popular content of localized law, while building on Edwards's innovations to suggest a new direction for Southern legal history.     

Carl Schmitt on the Secularisation of Religious Texts as a Resacralisation of Jurisprudence?

Carl Schmitt, an increasingly influential German law professor, developed a provocative and historically oriented model of “political theology” with specific relevance to legal scholarship and the authorship of constitutional texts. His “political theology” is best understood neither as an expressly theological discourse within constitutional law, nor as a uniquely legal discourse shaped by a hidden theological agenda. Instead, it addresses the possibility of the continual resurfacing of theological ideas and beliefs within legal discourses of, for instance, sovereignty, the force of law and states of emergency (or “exception”) that present themselves as relentlessly secular, even—in the case of Kelsenian jurisprudence—”scientific”. This article illustrates and then critically evaluates Schmitt’s theory in terms of the authorship of constitutional texts in particular. It includes two case studies—genocidal colonial land appropriation and Kelsenian positivism in order to illustrate aspects of his political theology. Whilst Schmitt is defended against reductionist interpretations, I show that there remains considerable unfinished business before a Schmittian approach to legal theory merits full acceptance.     

The Humdrum of Legality and the Ordering of an Ethic of Care

This paper provides an ethnographic analysis of the ways that employees of an emergency shelter create and maintain order. The paper applies the framework of legal consciousness to explicate the practices of the employees that amount to “private ordering.” The employees administer the rules of the shelter in the context of an “ethic of care,” but one that is outside the purview of formal law. This ethic, however, is polysemic, and the employees, therefore, must adopt diverse styles based on their understandings of their professional roles regarding the needs of the clients. The practices of two employees are highlighted in detail, whose strategies in applying and maintaining adherence to shelter rules are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Both make decisions in a somewhat spontaneous and, more importantly, inconsistent, fashion. Despite the complications that arise from applying the rules as such, the employees tolerate, even laud and celebrate, these methods. While this system of private ordering has little resemblance to the ordered, consistent, and rigid application of formal law, it allows the employees to administer diverse strategies of ethics of care and shape practices to fit their professional roles and the complex exigencies of an emergency shelter. The paper locates the extant private ordering not in the law, nor in its shadow—assumed to be preconditions—but outside or beyond them. Given that this ordering is founded against the law—it is not law, nor law‐like and has no desire to so be—the paper suggests that it can be thought of as private ordering proper and lays the framework for theorization that accounts for its instrumental and symbolic dimensions.     

“Critical Legal Histories Revisited”: A Response

The author responds to comments reappraising “Critical Legal Histories” (CLH) (1984). CLH critiqued “evolutionary functionalism,” the idea that law is a functional response to a typical modernizing process. CLH argued that “society” was partly constituted of legal elements and that law was too indeterminate to have reliably regular functional effects. CLH has been misinterpreted as calling for a return to internal histories of “mandarin” doctrine: all it said was that some doctrinal histories were valuable, without privileging them. This response clarifies that the relations of law to society and social change, and of high‐level official law to everyday local law are distinct issues. CLH is mostly moot today, since social‐legal historians have incorporated its insight that legal concepts are embedded in everyday social practice. But other fields have revived deterministic Whiggish accounts of progressive development and of law functional to it—to which CLH's critique still seems relevant.     

The Juristic Study of Law's Formal Character

Abstract. The author summarizes the essential elements of a general theory he is developing which he calls “The Formal Character of Law.” He explains that law's formal character is a potentially major branch of legal theory that is still relatively unexplored. In his view, it is possible to identify formal attributes in (1) legal rules, (2) other basic legal constructs such as interpretive method, the principles of stare decisis, legal reasons, and legislative and adjudicative processes, and (3) a legal system viewed as a whole. For example, a legal rule has, in varying degrees, such formal attributes as generality, definiteness, and simplicity. (Other constructs have other formal attributes.) Such attributes are formal in the sense that they apply to or accommodate highly variable content and do not prescribe or proscribe content. Of course, legal phenomena have other characteristics besides their formality. The author's main technique for developing his theory is to address a common set of questions to the varied formal attributes of (l), (2), and (3) above. Among other things, the answers to these questions further explicate how law is formal, demonstrate that law is not merely a means of serving problem-specific policy but also serves formal values (which may sometimes trump or limit policy), treats the relations between form and content—specially how good form begets good content and bad form bad content, explores the design and implementation of appropriate formality—its “anatomy and physiology,” and analyses the “pathology” of legal form including not only the “formalistic” (the overformal), but also the “sub-stantivistic,” and shows how the overall theory is important both jurisprudentially and in practical ways.     

Who is Afraid of Radical Pluralism? Legal Order and Political Stability in the Postnational Space*

Constitutional pluralism has become a principal model for understanding the legal and political structure of the European Union. Yet its variants are highly diverse, ranging from moderate “institutional” forms, closer to constitutionalist thinking, to “radical” ones which renounce a common framework to connect the different layers of law at play. Neil MacCormick, whose work was key for the rise of constitutional pluralism, shifted his approach from radical to institutional pluralism over time. This paper reconstructs the reasons for this shift—mainly concerns about political stability that also underlie many others' skepticism vis‐à‐vis radical pluralist ideas. It then seeks to show why such concerns are likely overdrawn. In the fluid, contested space of postnational politics, a common, overarching frame is problematic as it might inflame, rather than tame, tensions. Leaving fundamental issues open along radical pluralist lines may help to work around points of highly charged contestation and provide opportunities for resistance from less powerful actors.     

Hijacking Law

This essay considers the legal strategies of comparative communities in South Asian, Middle Eastern, and US history. What does it mean for a particular group to “hijack” a body of law, taking everyone on board to an unwanted destination? The piece compares the legal strategies of the Parsi community in colonial and postcolonial India to those of the German Jewish yekke population in mandate Palestine and early independent Israel, the women's movement in India in recent decades, and Protestants in contemporary America before the 2015 Obergefell decision legalizing same‐sex marriage. There are multiple ways of trying to take control of a body of law, and for multiple reasons. A group may capture a body of personal law to perpetuate its own values within the group. It may try to control a territorial legal system to impose its values on the entire population. It may work across bodies of personal law to obtain as uniform a result as possible—as if the system were a unified field, not a segmented one. Or its group members may make available their legal expertise to shore up a newly independent state's legal system. The essay suggests that taking control of a body of law does not necessarily mean hijacking it.     

From worker to self‐entrepreneur: The transformation of homo economicus and the freedom of movement in the European Union

This paper seeks to make a contribution to the study of personhood in EU free movement law by linking a historical and doctrinal analysis with the internal transformation of the homo economicus in economic liberalism. It is argued that a shift can be observed in the government of mobility from “freeing up” the ability of the worker as a relatively passive subject tied to external economic mechanisms to the targeting of the individual him/herself as a responsible, active bearer of economic capability or “human capital”, whereby past socio‐economic conduct and prospective economic activity serve as the thresholds for the entitlement to rights. The essence of the “new” homo economicus of EU free movement law is situated at the intersection of the social and economic, serving as a rational frame for the government of the European mover on the basis of a mutual responsibility between the Union citizen and his/her host Member State towards social and economic activity, self‐sufficiency and integration.     

The Role of the Jurist: Reflections around Radbruch

Many different kinds of professionals work with law, but often they seek to use law for particular governmental or private purposes, they focus on some specific areas or aspects of its creation, interpretation or application, or they study it for its interest judged by criteria that are given by fields of scholarly practice outside it. Is there a special significance for a role exclusively concerned with analysing, protecting and enhancing the general well‐being or worth of law as a practical idea? This article argues that such a role is important. Building on Gustav Radbruch's juristic thought, it asks how that role could be elaborated and how a professional responsibility for discharging it might be envisaged. Many professionals concerned with law adopt such a role incidentally or intermittently, but it needs more prominence and clear demarcation. The article suggests that it might be seen as the specialised role of the jurist, treated as a particular kind of legal professional. The term “jurist” would then have not just an honorific connotation. It would indicate a Weberian “pure” type that may approximate some current understandings of “juristic” practice; but it would also identify a normative ideal—something intrinsically valuable. Seen in this way, the jurist is one who assumes a certain unique responsibility for law.     

Relational legal consciousness in the punitive welfare state: How Dutch welfare officials shape clients' perceptions of law

With a growing number of strict obligations and harsh sanctions for welfare recipients, the Netherlands has increasingly become a punitive welfare state. This article looks at what this means for welfare clients and their commonsense understandings of the law. To analyze how welfare officials shape clients' legal consciousness, I draw on an online survey among Dutch welfare clients (N = 1305) and a correlation analysis. The findings show that there is a clear relationship between welfare clients' own legal consciousness and their assessment of welfare officials' beliefs about the law. However, not all elements of their legal consciousness are relationally influenced by the same factors. Also, clients' self-reported compliance behavior is less relationally influenced than other elements of their legal consciousness. This study adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that constitute the production of relational and second-order legal consciousness and it contributes to the development of new research methods to study people's perceptions of law.     

道与中国法律传统

“道”是先秦道家提出的且在历史上运用十分频繁的一个哲学概念 ,讲求“天人合一” ,强调自律、内控 ,约束人欲的膨胀 ,以维护人与人、人与自然之间的和谐秩序 ,自由思想、权利意识无所由生。法律制度在“道”的指导下 ,形成“道法”传统 ,沿着三个路径变化、发展 :从政治属性上 ,法作为政治的附属 ,走上专制法统的路子 ;从传统法制的内容上 ,走上轻权利重义务的义务本位的路子 ;从法律体系的构织上 ,走上法网宽疏的路子。“道”成为中国古代法的精神。     

Just-in-Time Justice: Globalization and the Changing Character of Law,Order, and Power

This article examines how economic globalization has dialectically interacted with the nation-state and legal order to facilitate the production of “just-in-time justice”—the increasingly flexible character of law, order, and power. Utilizing Chambliss’s analytic strategy, particularly his dialectical approach to lawmaking, I first examine the relationship between the global social order, economic globalization, and the changing architecture of nation-states. I then explore ways that the legal order has been flexibilized, including the creation of “states of exception,” the privatization of social control functions of the state, the development of transnational spaces for governance, and the widespread use of surveillance. My analysis of these transformations suggests that the greatest danger in the contemporary moment may be what we do not know, what is hidden from public accountability, beyond the public gaze. Importantly, this analysis also highlights that law continues to matter—or else there would not be such a press to ensure its disappearance.