This paper argues that lay people’s legal consciousness, defined as how they experience and interpret the law and legal meanings, can be studied by observing natural conversation. It proposes a framework that analyzes the contexts when law is invoked to account for social behavior, which enables examination of individuals’ perceptions of law through their utilization of and reactions to it. This framework is applied to recordings of a jury deliberation, an ideal setting due to its institutionally-controlled conditions. The analysis demonstrates that jurors wield law as a conversational resource to create distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate conduct based upon their endogenous understandings of these boundaries. The invocation of law is an important element of the deliberation because it permits jurors to enforce these distinctions and understand their completed duties as aligning with the legal system’s ideals. This paper also discusses the ability of this framework to study the law’s influence in other social institutions, as well as those institutions’ own “consciousness.”

中文翻译：

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行动中的法律意识：陪审团里的非专业人士和问责制

本文认为，外行人的法律意识，定义为他们如何体验和解释法律和法律含义，可以通过观察自然对话来研究。它提出了一个框架，可以分析援引法律来解释社会行为时的背景，从而可以通过个人对法律的利用和反应来检查个人对法律的看法。该框架适用于陪审团审议的录音，由于其制度控制的条件，这是一种理想的环境。分析表明，陪审员将法律作为一种对话资源，根据他们对这些界限的内在理解来区分合法和非法行为。援引法律是审议的一个重要因素，因为它允许陪审员执行这些区别，并将他们完成的职责理解为与法律制度的理想保持一致。本文还讨论了该框架研究法律对其他社会制度的影响以及这些制度自身“意识”的能力。