The Giving and Withdrawal of New Rights: A Natural Experiment In Legal Consciousness

社会制度与法律意识的发展和动员之间的关系是社会法学研究的中心问题之一。这项研究利用一个独特的自然实验来考察法律意识--包括公民对法律的取向以及对法律和法律权利的援引--受到国家一级法律规范和制度变化的影响的方式。这项研究将依靠对受访者的访谈进行系统的定性数据分析，使用NVivo软件来分离分析主题和推理模式，并对一个主要大都市地区受有关法律变化影响的所有个人的调查数据进行量化分析。这项研究将为公民与法律的互动提供新的和重要的见解，不仅揭示被研究公民对法律的感知作用，而且还揭示他们是否以及有多大可能性制定自己的权利或求助于法律来解决他们的问题。

The relationships between social institutions and the development of legal consciousness and mobilization are among the central concerns of sociolegal scholarship. This study takes advantage of a unique natural experiment to examine the ways in which legal consciousness -- including the orientation of citizens to the law and the invocation of laws and legal rights -- is affected by changes in state-level legal norms and institutions. The study will rely on systematic qualitative data analysis of interviews with respondents, using NVIVO software to isolate analytic themes and patterns of reasoning, as well as on quantitative analysis of survey data from the entire population of individuals affected by the legal changes in question in one major metropolitan area. The research will offer novel and important insights into the engagement of citizens with the law, not only revealing the perceived role of law according to the citizen being studied, but also whether and how likely they are to enact their rights or turn to the law to resolve their problems.