5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Legal alienation has a great impact on people’s everyday legal consciousness in the Western legal cultures. The modern law, besides organizing social life in modern societies rather efficiently, has a strong potential to alienate ordinary people through its technical rationality and impersonal procedures. That is, modern legal consciousness and legal alienation cannot be separated when studying people’s relationship to the law. Socio-legal studies has already tried to conceptualize legal alienation from various perspectives. For example Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey argue that ordinary legal experience can be animated by various narratives and one of them is the so-called “against the law” narrative which is characterised by the individual resistance to law as a representation of state power. Marc Hertogh pointed out that legal alienation is a multifaceted social phenomenon and it makes sense to differentiate among its various dimensions (in Hertogh’s interpretation: legal meaninglessness, legal powerlessness, legal cynicism, and legal value-isolation).

This panel invites contributions aimed at studying any aspects of everyday legal alienation. Since the study of legal alienation needs a complex methodological approach both qualitative and quantitative approaches are welcome and the presentations can also have a national level or a case study focus, too.

For further information please contact Balázs Fekete, organizer of RCSL Knowledge and Opinion about the Law – Legal Consciousness Working Group, at: fekete.balazs@ajk.elte.hu

(Session organized by RCSL Working Group Knowledge and Opinion about the Law – Legal Consciousness)