Consciousness and Ideology

In this volume of essays by leading socio-legal scholars, the dual concepts of consciousness and ideology are examined and used to expose law’s presence and power in social life. Rejecting the association between ideology and concealment, each essay explores the ways in which ideology and consciousness artfully produce truth, creating both power and the grounds of its resistance. The rich empirical studies included in this volume are crucial to our understanding of law, consciousness and ideology.

Contents: Series preface; Introduction; Part I Consciousness and Ideology in Socio-Legal Studies: The ideology of law: advances and problems in recent applications of the concept of ideology to the analysis of law, Alan Hunt. Part II Conceptual Practices of Ideology and Consciousness: Everyday metaphors of power, Timothy Mitchell; The ideological effects of actuarial practices, Jonathan Simon; Suspended in space: Bedouins under the law of Israel, Ronen Shamir. Part III Discursive Practices of Ideology and Consciousness: The dialogics of legal meaning: spectacular trials, The unwritten law, and narratives of criminal responsibility, Martha Merrill Umphrey; Kissing hands and knees: hegemony and hierarchy in Shari'a discourse, Brinkley Messink; Legal discourse and political intolerance: the ideology of clear and present danger, Mark Kessler; Practice and paradox: deconstructing neutrality in mediation, Sara Cobb and Janet Rifkin; The discourses of mediation and the power of naming, Sally Engel Merry. Part IV Legal Consciousness, Resistance and the Everyday: Situating legal consciousness: experiences and attitudes of ordinary citizens about law and street harassment, Laura Beth Nielsen; Remote justice: tuning in to small claims, race, and the reinvigoration of civic judgement, Valerie Karno;...The law is all over': power resistance and the legal consciousness of the welfare poor, Austin Sarat; Narratives of the death sentence: toward a theory of legal narrativity, Benjamin Fleury-Steiner; Narrating social structure: stories of resistance to legal authority, Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey; Blue jeans, rape, and the 'de-constitutive' power of law, Kitty Calavita; Name Index.

Patricia Ewick is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Clark University, USA. Her current research addresses legal consciousness, social control and construction of legal space.