Resumen de Studying Legal Consciousness: Building Institutional Theory from Micro Data
Law and Society scholarship signals a commitment to use social scientific methods – rigorous, transparent empirical investigation subject to peer review and critique – to understand how law works as an institution: a set of recognizable, patterned processes and cultural aspirations to confine force with rule bound decision-making. This paper responds to questions and critiques by French colleagues reviewing work by Susan Silbey and co-authors. The paper begins with discussion of jurisprudence and then offers a geneology of studies of legal consciousness. Following a short intellectual biography of how Silbey’s work developed, the paper explains the micro-macro nexus in studies of legal consciousness, explaining how to build theory from empirical research on the roles and experiences of law in everyday life, among citizens rather than legal professionals There is a short section comparing socio-legal studies to science and technology studies.
