Socialization, Legal

European Research on Adults' Legal Consciousness

Studies about legal socialization emerged in France during the 1980s as an extension of research in legal sociology, which had focused on adults' knowledge, representations, and attitudes regarding law and justice, specifically in civil and family law. Sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, this research was undertaken as part of reforms of the Civil Code under the leadership of Jean Carbonnier (1908–2003), a legal sociologist and expert in civil law, who referred to legal socialization as a “juridicization” process undergone by children and adolescents.

Jurists and legal sociologists from countries in central and eastern Europe were carrying out similar research under the heading legal consciousness. Created in Hungary by the legal theoretician Imre Szabo, this phrase referred to both social and individual legal consciousness. Studies of this sort thrived during the 1960s and 1970s in Hungary as well as in other European Communist countries, in particular, Poland, with its fertile tradition of legal sociology. In western Europe, Berl Kutchinsky in Denmark launched a comparative research project on knowledge and opinion about law (see Adam Podgorecki's 1973 work). During the 1980s, the Ministry of Justice in Canada sponsored research on legal consciousness and knowledge of the law, as reported by Radi Vassilev Radev and François Ribordy.

American Research on Legal Socialization

The first research on socialization occurred in the United States. The studies, conducted by two psychologists, Lawrence Kohlberg (1927–1987) on moral development and Joseph Adelson on political socialization during childhood and adolescence, are especially relevant to legal socialization. In the 1960s and 1970s, the psychologist and criminologist June Tapp refined [Page 1402]this concept. To distinguish legal socialization from other forms of socialization, she centered her definition on legal attitudes and behaviors—internalizing legal norms, learning compliant and deviant modes, and abiding by law and rules.

In this formulation, centered on attitudes toward legal norms and rules, the first word in the phrase legal socialization has a double meaning. A neutral meaning indicates the field of socialization: socialization in the field of law. However, a second meaning implies that this socialization refers to behavior and attitudes that are (or are not) in conformity with the law. Tapp leans toward this second meaning. By underscoring compliance with or obedience to the law, this formulation postulated that the law is essentially an imperative norm (orders and prohibitions), which, if transgressed, will be sanctioned. Furthermore, abiding by the law or refusing to do so seems synonymous with social conformity or social deviance because this second definition presents legal norms as being in legal continuity with social norms. All this apparently leaves little room for alternative patterns of behavior in relation to the law. This approach tends to consider legal socialization to be successful or not as a function of its results for society.

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