Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight

Abstract

Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a "second-order" layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawaii reveal how law enforcement practices not only affect cockfighting rituals, but are embedded within them. Police practices and informal rules work in concert to shape fighters' second-order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of central concepts, including order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second-order perspective also underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly created and recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's inherently relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs-for example, when an unusual police action directed toward a subgroup of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for them. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers scholars a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law.

Portuguese culture and legal consciousness: a discussion of immigrant women's perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence

“…Adopting this speculative approach allowed respondents to speak more freely about possible reactions to domestic violence that occurred in the community, including those that they thought might not be deemed socially acceptable. The same approach was used by Young (2014) when developing the concept of second-order legal consciousness. Implicit to this question is the possibility that the behaviour that other Portuguese women adopt might be different from that which respondents described as the appropriate one, a concept that they generally had no problem engaging with and indeed led women to become noticeably more relaxed and open to volunteer information.…”

The Power of Second-Order Legal Consciousness: Authorities’ Perceptions of “Street Policy” and Welfare Fraud Enforcement

“…As they investigate allegations, accumulate evidence, and interact with clients and colleagues, authorities construct impressions of how clients understand program policies and enforcement practices. These impressions constitute “second‐order legal consciousness”: “people's perceptions about how others understand the law” (Young :499). Young () compellingly reveals how different actors’ readings of one another shape law‐infused social realities, focusing specifically on law enforcement targets’ understandings of enforcement authorities.…”

Selection in Border Areas: Profiling Immigrants or Crimmigrants?

“…Ideas about the law, experiences of the law, how people understand the law, and how people use the law, have all been used in relation to legal consciousness (Silbey ). Despite this, the definition often used is legal consciousness as the ‘outcome of social processes through which meanings and identities are constructed’ (Merry , p.247), or in simpler terms, a ‘commonsense understanding of how the law works’ (Young , p.501). This includes how legal concepts such as racial discrimination are used and viewed in an individual's daily life (Hirsch and Lyons ).…”

“…A criticism on the study of legal consciousness is that the focus is on the understanding itself and not the process of how the understanding comes to be (Silbey ; Young ). Legal consciousness is more than just an individual's belief and, instead, the result of a complex social process.…”

“…On a first glance it would be easy to attribute these observations solely to the beliefs of the individual officers. However, it is important to study the processes behind the beliefs in a broader organisational context (Silbey ; Young ). In the remainder of this section we will do so using the factors as explained by Hirsch and Kornrichs ().…”