RUI: Collaborative Research on Varieties of Legal Consciousness

法律意识的研究试图解决关于法律在普通公民生活中的地位和意义的问题。直到最近，两种相互竞争的理论观点主导了关于法律意识的学术研究。一个学派认为意识是个人的思想和态度；从这个角度来看，人们赋予法律的意义及其在他们生活中所扮演的角色代表了个人创造或塑造他们周围世界的方式。第二种思想流派认为，法律意识是定义人们生活的社会制度和结构的副产品。从这个角度来看，法律意识是人们所处世界的产物，而不是根源。近年来，越来越多的实证研究拒绝了法律意识的个人和结构概念化。相反，该学派认为法律意识是一种文化实践，它调解了个人与社会结构之间的关系。意识是在一个期望的框架内发展的，关于什么是正常和道德的行为方式，什么样的错误需要采取行动，什么样的补救措施是可以接受的，适当的，可能的，有效的。从这个角度来看，法律意识随着当地情况、规范和习惯的行事方式而变化。西尔贝将从理论上推进这种文化视角，引入法律意识的类型学，并探索人们是否以及如何以与这些类型学中的一个或多个相一致的方式表达他们对法律的看法。此外，该项目还引入了一个独特的数据集。她对新泽西州四个县的300人进行了深入的面对面访谈。这些问题使她能够收集丰富的麻烦和小干扰的故事，以及与法律代理的正式经验。通过将这种方法与概率抽样相结合，她将能够追踪到迄今为止美国公民在法律意识方面的更大差异，包括非洲裔美国人、西班牙裔美国人和白人之间的差异。最后，她介绍了一个独特的两阶段分析方案。具体来说，一个阶段侧重于对离散词的分析，而第二个阶段则研究采访叙述的主题内容。总的来说，这项研究将对日益增多的关于法律意识的工作作出重大贡献，从人口学、方法和理论上加以扩展。

Studies of legal consciousness attempt to address questions about the place and meaning of law in the lives of ordinary citizens. Until recently, two competing theoretical perspectives have dominated the scholarship on legal consciousness. One school of thought treats consciousness as the ideas and attitudes of individuals; from this perspective the meaning that people give to law and the role that it plays in their lives is representative of the ways that individuals create or shape the world around them. A second school of thought holds that legal consciousness is a by- product of the social institutions and structures that define peoples lives. From this perspective, legal consciousness is the product rather than the source of the world people find themselves living in. In recent years, a growing body of empirical studies reject both the individual and structural conceptualizations of legal consciousness. Instead, this school of thought views legal consciousness as cultural practice that mediates between the individual and the social structure. Consciousness evolves within a framework of expectations about what is the normal and moral way to act, what kinds of wrongs warrant action, and what kinds of remedies are acceptable and appropriate as well as probable and effective. With this view, legal consciousness varies and changes with local situations, norms and customary ways of doing things. Silbey will advance this cultural perspective theoretically, introducing a typology of legal consciousness, and exploring whether and how people express their ideas about law in ways that are consonant with one or more of these typifications. Also, the project introduces a unique data set. She uses indepth, face to face, interviews with 300 persons in four New Jersey counties. The questions enable her to collect rich stories of troubles and minor disruptions, as well as formal experiences with legal agents. By combining this methodology with probability sampling, she will be able to trace greater variation in legal consciousness among American citizens than has been achieved to date, including variations among African-American and Hispanic, as well as white populations. Finally, she introduces a unique, two stage plan of analysis. Specifically, one phase focuses on the analysis of discrete words while the second examines the thematic content of the interview narratives. Overall, the study will make substantial contributions to the growing body of work on legal consciousness by extending it demographically, methodologically, and theoretically.