Legal Socialization

Legal socialization is the process of developing attitudes toward rules, laws, and the legal system. Legal socialization research studies this process and also examines why individuals choose to obey or disobey the law. In fact, the first approaches to studies of attitudes toward the law appear in the legal socialization literature. Factors that affect how these attitudes develop include cognitive developmental variables, such as legal reasoning, and social learning variables, such as salient features of the environment. Other factors that need to be considered are resiliency, psychosocial maturity, individual difference variables (e.g., belief in a just world, authoritarianism), culture, and attitudes. Contemporary work on legal socialization has focused on the effect of legal socialization on rule-violating behavior and compliance with the rules.

Socialization itself connects ...

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