Explaining the Absence of the Media in Stories of Law and Legal Consciousness

Abstract

The role of the mass media as a resource for making sense of law has seldom been directly examined. Instead, it is simply assumed that the media have a strong impact on people’s perceptions of the law. However, I argue that the media may be unimportant to groups and individuals whose first-hand legal experiences are predominantly negative and confrontational. This is the most important finding to arise from the small case study I discuss in this article. In the lives of the individuals I interviewed, law tends to be strongly present, resulting in the perception that it is predominantly a burden. As a result, media representations of law are often overshadowed by personal experience, which helps to explain why research participants made very few explicit references to the media.

Tax Deduction Through Zakat: An Empirical Investigation on Muslim in Malaysia

“…In case of the judiciary, one can express legal consciousness, which is 'internal' to the system of law and which stands in contrast to its 'external' measurement, which is presented by ordinary citizens (Friedman, 1989). The legal consciousness of marginalized people is diverse in characteristics (Gies, 2003). They perceive the law as visible, immediate and powerful; on the other hand the law constitutes a burden, nuisance or harassment (P.; Ewick & Silbey, 1998;Merry, 1990;Sarat, 1990).…”

“…They perceive the law as visible, immediate and powerful; on the other hand the law constitutes a burden, nuisance or harassment (P.; Ewick & Silbey, 1998;Merry, 1990;Sarat, 1990). Thus, relations of power and resistance are the indicators of marginalized people's legal consciousness (Gies, 2003;Sarat, 1990).…”

Perceptions of lawyers—a transnational study of student views on the image of law and lawyers

“…9 However the exact nature of this process has rarely been tackled, Salzmann and Dunwoody's work being a notable exception, and carried out at much the same time as our own project, 10 and Lieve Gies' important work on the role of the media as a resource for shaping our understanding of law notwithstanding. 11 On a micro level we were interested in the question of whether popular culture had an impact upon perceptions, and if so, then which films and which TV programmes (Asimow, 1999)? The difficulties in producing rigorous results on such an area without huge funding are considerable.…”

Law as Popular Culture: Cross-disciplinary Encounters

“…Firstly, one could argue that we ought to distinguish carefully between interpretive communities of different social profiles. The 'driving while black' syndrome which affects ethnic minorities and is roughly tantamount to a feeling of being disproportionately targeted in police stops-and-searches, has the unfortunate effect of giving specific social groups some undesirable yet potentially significant first-hand experience of law enforcement (see, for example, Bradley, 1998;Dowler, 2002;Gies, 2003), making them possibly also very sceptical about images of policing in the media. For example, Bradley's (1998) British study of public perceptions of policing suggests that ethnic minorities do not rely just on the media for their information but also very much on informal sources such as word of mouth.…”

“…Research on legal consciousness could therefore offer an alternative for effects-oriented audience research which tends to disregard first-hand legal experience. A focus on legality as a common occurrence in everyday life brings to light a wide range of legal experiences which people may successfully mobilize in their readings of media representations of law (Gies, 2003).…”