LSJ/CLASS Events Calendar

Please join us on Friday June 5 for our final workshare, open to both both faculty and graduate students. George Lovell will discuss his paper "Assessing the Allure of Rights" from 12:00 PM - 1:20 in Smith 40A. A copy of the paper is here.

Abstract: A key goal for scholarly work on legal consciousness and legal ideology has been to explain why people retain faith in law despite law’s failure to live up to the aspirations that are law’s claim to legitimacy. This paper questions the underlying assumption people have faith in law. The empirical case for believing that such faith exists is not airtight. Scholars have devoted tremendous attention to the production of legal ideology in judicial opinions and mass media, but relatively little attention to the actual reception of legal ideology among ordinary people. The difficulty of measuring popular faith in law accurately using any single method or source of data is undoubtedly the reason.

The paper looks at a series of everyday political encounters in which individual citizens deployed legal rhetoric in interactions with government officials. It shows how isolated people without technical knowledge of law draw on law’s rhetorical tools without buying into law’s pretensions to legitimacy. The people who invoked legal rules understood that outcomes were based on discretionary choices by government officials, not the content of those abstract rules. The study suggests that it is a mistake to think people “acquiesce” because law is hegemonic, and a mistake to assume that ordinary people outside legal institutions are the primary targets of law’s ideological messages. The more pressing problems for most people are structural problems that make democratic institutions unresponsive to popular demands.

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