Legal Consciousness


Legal Consciousness


the sum of views and ideas expressing the attitude of people toward law, legality, and justice and their concept of what is lawful and unlawful. Legal consciousness is a form of social consciousness. Legal ideology, the system of legal views based on certain social and scientific viewpoints, is a concentrated expression of legal consciousness. The customs and feelings of people in relation to legal phenomena constitute the psychological aspect of legal consciousness; among these are a sense of justice and a loathing of crimes and illegal actions.

Legal consciousness is closely related to other forms of social consciousness, above all to political consciousness. The legal views of a class express and concretize its political goals and demands, to which it tries to give “universal force in the form of laws” (F. Engels, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 21, p. 515). Similarly, the nature of the legal consciousness of individuals is determined above all by social position and political orientation. Although legal consciousness is linked to morality, there are a number of differences between morality and legal consciousness in both the range of relations evaluated and the nature of evaluation categories.

With the victory of the proletarian revolution, socialist legal consciousness acquires an important role in the formation of the socialist state structure. The building of socialism and elimination of the exploiting classes create all necessary conditions for a consolidation of a unified socialist legal consciousness, which expresses the sociopolitical and ideological unity of the working class, kolkhoz peasantry, and intelligentsia. The fundamental ideas of socialist legal consciousness are legality and justice, respect for social property and labor, people’s power and consistent democratism, internationalism, true equality of rights, and development of rights and freedoms in their inseparable bond with duties to society. The CPSU works steadily toward establishing socialist legal consciousness in the consciousness of all Soviet citizens.

References in periodicals archive ?
One of them, however #MeToo in the Law Firm has had such an impact on the national legal consciousness that it will inevitably change how good law firms are managed going forward.
(4) We took his exhortations about the mutual constitutiveness of law and culture, as well as his insights about law's indeterminacy and especially about legal consciousness, and used them to explore the ways subaltern people contested and shaped legal and constitutional regimes from below.
Most people's understanding of laws is drawn from what Leonen called 'legal consciousness.' For instance, he said people automatically drive on the right lane and stop when the traffic light turns red because of a commonsensical understanding of rules and norms.
It discusses the theoretical framework underlying discrimination on the grounds of sex and sexual orientation, the idea of substantive equality within the context of gender discrimination, and the possibility of fostering substantive equality within the scope of EU non-discrimination law; elements of German and Dutch cultural, legal, and historical backgrounds influencing national employment non-discrimination law and the national legal consciousness; and case law related to direct and indirect discrimination from the year 2000, when the Framework Directive was adopted, up to 2015.
form of legal consciousness. According to the first tradition, which can
Richard Wortman, our commentator for this forum, contemplated this problem in his important and innovative work The Development of a Russian Legal Consciousness. For Russian emperors and empresses, law was integral to the regulation of state and society as an extension of their authority.
One was increased awareness among the patients of their rights besides their legal consciousness while the other was poor quality of medical services.
Thus, the first cycle-globalization, classical legal thought (1850-1914), is a way of thinking about law "as a system of spheres of autonomy for private and public actors, with the boundaries of spheres defined by legal reasoning understood as a scientific practice." (23) The second cycle-globalization, that of the social (1900-1968), is a way of thinking about law "as a purposive activity, as a regulatory mechanism that could and should facilitate the evolution of social life in accordance with ever greater perceived social interdependence at every level, from the family to the world of nations." (24) The third, problematic cycle (1945-2000) has no discernible single "way of thinking." It is simply the sum of the distinct expressions of legal consciousness that prevail in the present.
(367) This concept is consistent with the utilitarian theory of punishment, which holds that "the purpose of punishment is to deter others from committing crimes." (368) The utilitarian theory rests on the assumption that a negative correlation exists between legal consciousness and criminal behavior.
Our project takes a wider view of law, building on the observations of 'legal consciousness' research, which asserts the production of legality in all its forms in everyday interactions.