Legal Culture, Consciousness, and Conflict in Asia

by Associate Professor Lynette Chua

Law and society research on Asia has just begun to emerge as a significant academic field, but its development has been hindered by differences in scholarly traditions and practices in different Asian countries and regions. In some countries, such as Japan and Korea, law and society is a well-established discipline with strong institutional roots. But elsewhere in Asia, including most of Southeast Asia, law and society is poorly recognized and has shallow roots, if any. The potential contributions of law and society research to academic theory and public policy have been amply demonstrated in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and other world regions. It is crucially important that the law and society field in Asia should develop into a vibrant and cohesive discipline that links researchers across the entire region.

Analysis of recent conferences on Asian law and society suggest that two key concepts have the potential to facilitate this kind of scholarly interaction and development: legal consciousness and legal culture. Law and society scholars have an array of definitions for the two concepts and take a variety of approaches toward their study. Although they overlap substantially, referring to individuals' orientations toward law and the cultural context, law and society scholars invoke and emphasize their meanings differently, depending on their foci and levels of analyses, such as individual, social group, or community. While some scholars treat them as post-structuralist concepts, others regard them as epiphenomenal reflections of social structure and culture, or treat them as rational, individualistic preferences or aggregations of such preferences.

The pluralism and cultural diversity of Asia makes it well suited for studying and advancing these concepts. For example, people deal with grievances and conflicts in Asian societies in a variety of ways - they might turn to state legal institutions to address their problems, but they might also turn to other forms of resolution, such as collective political action or communities organized around religion, ethnicity, kinship ties, or other shared norms and identities. At recent conferences of the Law & Society Association (LSA) and the East Asian Law & Society network (now succeeded by the Asian Law & Society Association or ALSA), as well as two conferences by the PI (below), scholars conducting research on diverse issues and sites in Asia have drawn attention to legal consciousness and culture. Their work highlighted the concepts' continuing significance to the discipline but also their lack of cohesion in the Asian field.

Building on these observations and ongoing discussions with other scholars, the project will feature contemporary empirical work on Asian societies. The aims are to showcase research that theorizes legal consciousness and legal culture for law and society scholarship at large and to help shape a canon for this area of scholarship in Asia.

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