Legal Disagreement

Abstract

Individuals within the same jurisdiction often have different perceptions of the legal system, a phenomenon we call legal disagreement. Cross-country analyses of legal institutions generally ignore this kind of within-country variation. This article defines the concept of legal disagreement, identifies its potential causes and consequences, and shows that it can be measured using data from cross-country surveys. We argue that legal disagreement is likely to be caused by differences in individuals’ sources of information about the legal system, how the system treats cases of a given type, or how individuals process legal information, all of which may be related to differences in social position. We also suggest that understanding why individuals disagree about legal systems is valuable for several reasons, particularly when the disagreement reflects systematic differences in beliefs across people in different social positions. We use data from World Justice Project population surveys to create quantitative measures of legal disagreement for 128 countries or jurisdictions. We identify correlations between legal disagreement and measures of its potential causes and consequences, such as perceptions of discrimination and ethnic fractionalization. We also provide evidence that those variations are driven by differences in perceptions that track differences in gender, financial well-being, and class.

Measures of Justice: A Symposium in Honor of Sally Engle Merry (1944–2020)

“…Moving away from concerns with measurement specifically, Kevin E. Davis and Alfredo Guerra Guevara engage the question of commensurability from a legal perspective in “Legal Disagreement,” questioning whether the law is applied uniformly among all individuals. They develop the concept of legal disagreement, which they broadly define as “disagreement about the legal consequences that a legal official will assign to a particular set of facts” (Davis and Guevara 2024). They argue that legal disagreement is caused by differences in individuals’ social positions and is directly influenced by their perspectives, treatment, or biases.…”