What Do People Know about the Law? Does It Really Matter? (WG Knowledge and Opinion about the Law – Legal Consciousness)

Knowledge about the law was a central field of inquiry that significantly contributed to the emergence of the first wave of Knowledge and Opinion about the Law (KOL) studies. Since the early 1960’s, many highly influential case studies or national studies have been published in both Western (eg. Aubert, Kutchinsky) and socialist socio-legal scholarship (eg. Kulcsár, Sajó). However, over the past two decades, the international socio-legal community has largely lost interest in this topic, or, alternatively, the study of legal knowledge has become a subtheme within the broader field of legal consciousness research.

The aim of this panel is to revive discussion of this issue in today’s highly substantially changed scholarly context. This panel invites contributions that examine legal knowledge from a variety perspectives, ranging from classical quantitative legal sociology to critical legal consciousness studies. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: the formation of individual knowledge about the law, the role of media in producing or shaping popular understandings of law, differences in knowledge across various branches of law, the longitudinal changes in legal knowledge within groups or countries, the relevance or possible irrelevance of legal knowledge, the impact of legal knowledge on people’s perceptions and evaluations of the law, and the effect of people’s legal knowledge on their image of the social and cultural world. There are no methodological limitations. The panel welcome all contributions based on theoretically informed empirical research.