Sustaining the State: Legal Consciousness and the Construction of Legality in Competing Abortion Activists' Narratives

Abstract

This article investigates how activists involved in both sides of the street politics of abortion simultaneously create, are constrained by, and use law when recounting a period of conflict that resulted in litigation. The activists‐turned‐litigants' construction of legality is explored by identifying and analyzing patterns of inclusion, absence, amendment, and type of law (i.e., state or extrastate) in and across the stories they tell. It is found that even though there are multiple reasons to expect all of these activists to resist or amend the state's conception of law, their narratives ultimately reproduce state law's legitimacy and power. The activists' stories also illustrate that legal consciousness is contextually and experientially based and is therefore subject to change. This finding has implications for legal mobilization as well as for the nature of legal consciousness.

After Hegemony: The Varieties of Legal Consciousness Research

“…LGBT communities (e.g., Harding 2011;Hull 2016). Likewise, in researching counter-hegemonic struggle, the focus has been on social and political activist groups (e.g., Fritzvold, 2009;Wilson 2011;Halliday & Morgan, 2013).…”

“…Likewise, in researching counter-hegemonic struggle, the focus has been on social and political activist groups (e.g. Fritzvold, 2009; Halliday and Morgan, 2013; Wilson, 2011).…”

“…Moreover, researchers are undertaking legal consciousness work in relation to an increasingly eclectic set of issues: from abortion (Wilson, 2011), to begging (Ranasinghe, 2010), to cock fighting (Young, 2014), to conservation (Pieraccini and Cardwell, 2016), to fat acceptance (Kirkland, 2008), to housing occupation (Cowan et al, 2018), to indigeneity (McMillan, 2011), to medicine (Halliday et al, 2014;Picton-Howell, 2018), to migration (Abrego, 2008(Abrego, , 2011Gehring, 2013;Schwenken, 2013), to ombudsmen (Gill and Creutzfeldt, 2017), to sexualities (Harding, 2011;Hull, 2016;Knauer, 2012;Oswald and Kuvalanka, 2008), to sex work (Boittin, 2013), to the sharing economy (Morgan and Kuch, 2016).…”

Shari‘a Consciousness: Law and Lived Religion among California Muslims

“…Some of this research has focused on how experiences of race and racism shape legal consciousness (Nielsen 2000;Lovell 2012). Other research focuses on the highly contingent nature of law in welfare agencies (Sarat 1990), at the workplace (Hoffmann 2003), in emergency shelters (Ranasinghe 2014), and on the streets (Levine and Mellema 2001;Nielsen 2004;Wilson 2011), in addition to comparative studies outside the United States (e.g., Hertogh 2004;Kurkchiyan 2011;McCann 2012;Chua and Engel 2018). Over time, legal consciousness becomes a "naturalized" way of understanding state law, as people's "habitual patterns of talk and action, and their common-sense understanding of the world" become infused with a juridical awareness or vocabulary (Merry 1990, 5).…”

Ambivalent Legal Mobilization: Perceptions of Justice and the Use of the Tutela in Colombia

“…A robust literature on legal consciousness has demonstrated the complicated and sometimes contradictory nature of beliefs about and mobilization of law (Bumiller ; Engel ; Ewick and Silbey ; Feeley ; Sarat ; Sarat and Felstiner ; Yngvesson ). Though initial studies concentrated primarily on legal consciousness in the United States, subsequent studies have expanded this focus both in terms of geography (Boittin ; Engel and Engel ; Gallagher ; McMillan ) and substantive area (Nielsen ; Hoffman ; Hull ; Wilson ; Young 2014). This article further expands the geographic and thematic scope of these studies.…”