Workshop on ‘Why does Legal Consciousness Matter?’, 13 January 2025 [closed-door]
E. H. Gombrich once observed that when we look at a painting in a museum, we often forget to notice the frame that surrounds it. He argued that the frame is crucial, as it shapes how we perceive the painting. In Indian legal history, research has been similarly shaped by certain frames—most notably, the concepts of “rule of law” and “law in society.” The latter often serves as a critique of the former. Legal consciousness offers a way to rethink how these debates can be framed productively, allowing us to explore the definition, purpose, and function of law, as well as its relationship with society.
The ongoing debate between the primacy of written law versus law in action tends to resolve the tension through the binaries of intent and implementation of the laws. Corruption and gaps in legal systems are often explained by turning to the “true” intent of written law. Legal consciousness, while recognizing the importance of written law, addresses a wider range of human responses to it, not merely as aberrations or deviations. It provides a vocabulary for understanding people’s actions and articulates the broader role and purpose of law. By not relegating society to a secondary position, legal consciousness integrates people’s actions as central to the functioning of law. Individuals and communities shape and reconfigure law through compliance, resistance, and aspirations, individually and collectively.

Legal consciousness differs from mere legal awareness in that it delves deeper into the implications of legal phenomena. Awareness may involve a basic understanding of legal rules and procedures, while legal consciousness engages with underlying principles of justice, fairness, and power dynamics within the legal system. This more complex understanding encourages critical engagement with legal sources, expanding the field of investigation into various influences shaping legal outcomes. Through this lens, awareness is transformed into a meaningful framework for navigating and contesting legal issues in everyday life.
Individuals encounter law in their everyday experiences and aspirations through an interplay of personal values, community norms, historical legacies, and institutional structures. When individuals or communities engage in deliberations on legal consciousness, they not only seek to protect existing rights, but also articulate new claims as rights within society. This opens up possibilities for connecting local experiences with global contexts, fostering transnational networks of legal consciousness. Legal consciousness, unbound by specific geographic or national borders, can be observed in diverse settings where state and non-state actors navigate complex webs of legal rules, norms, and institutions, allowing for global comparisons.
The complexity of legal consciousness becomes visible through the convergence of multiple legal networks. Legal pluralism, while offering multiple perspectives, has often directed research toward central legal institutions and their interactions with plural legal systems. How do these networks contribute to rethinking sources of law and their relationship with legal consciousness? The state’s authority is not absolute; rather, it is negotiated and contested within broader social contexts. Legal Pluralism implicit in the legal networks open channels for interlegality destabilising the state centrism in the legal studies. Interlegality, the recognition of multiple legal orders coexisting within a society allows for new ways of understanding the law’s role. These disruptions highlight the interaction of diverse legal norms and practices, shaping how individuals and groups mobilise for legal recognition, redress, and empowerment.
This relational consciousness, referring to the interconnectedness of legal mediums, reveals legal consciousness. Individuals recognize and interpret law through their everyday experiences and aspirations, shaped by personal values, community norms, and institutional structures.
Studying legal consciousness brings challenges, particularly in finding adequate sources. We attempt to capture their fleeting voices, silenced through the discourse of power and production of knowledge in the archives. We intend to tease the sources to recover a democratic scholarship that celebrates diversity of actors, who are sceptical of authority, and create meaning through their engagement with law. Can existing archives provide insights into how people subvert, uphold, or modify the law? Can we approach the archive as an anthropological field that captures the fleeting voices of past actors, often silenced by power structures involved in the production of the archive? Our volume emphasises the methodological possibilities of understanding how individuals choose to rely on—or resist—the law. How do they negotiate new bodies of evidence and procedures? How do they ensure accountability within the legal system or redefine access to it? In doing so, how is the role of law and its relationship to society reimagined?
Group consciousness plays a crucial role in bridging individual biases about the law. How do groups motivate individuals to take action within legal systems, and how do these actions shape their understanding of the law’s efficacy? This is important considering that legal consciousness is often fragmented along identity, profession, caste, class, and gender. How do these multiple dimensions of identity shape a person’s legal consciousness?Will the nature of legal consciousness produced as such be heterogeneous or homogeneous? Does it split the law’s hegemony into multiple sites? What happens when the state decides to forego laws that had been set up in conversation with such interlegal spaces? Would the legal consciousness stemming from these interlegal spaces become illegitimate? Is law an ongoing process-evolving, revising, and responding to interpretations?
In our volume on legal consciousness in 19th- and 20th-century India, we reflect on the complex negotiations and meaning-making processes that have shaped the interaction between law and society. The contributions to our volume broadly respond to the following themes:
- Legal and quasi-legal actors and structures: It refers to individuals, institutions, and systems interpreting, enforcing, or shaping laws, operating within formal legal channels or in more informal, semi-legal settings.
- Trials and court spaces: Proceedings serve as a dynamic space where social identities intersect with legal categories, shaping nuanced understandings of justice, equality, and fairness. This interaction highlights the role of the legal system in not only adjudicating disputes but also in reflecting and influencing societal values and relationships.
- Legal Obligation, Coercion, and Circulation in Markets: How does legal consciousness play out in creating the efficacy of categories of obligations, coercion, and circulation of capital and their different conceptual registers in the market?
- Formation of Legal Political Communities-“Law in action” discourses have been instrumental in understanding the implications of formal legal systems. They reveal important insights about the individuals who actively engage with these systems, highlighting the methods they use and the mechanisms that emerge. Do these mechanisms become channels for shaping long-term or short-term identities? Do they play a role in solidifying and creating new meanings for social identities?
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
mwfdelhi (December 4, 2024). Workshop on ‘Why does Legal Consciousness Matter?’, 13 January 2025 [closed-door]. Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi). Retrieved March 27, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12toi