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Everyone Knows the Game: Legal Consciousness in the Hawaiian Cockfight

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Kathryne M. Young
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Abstract

Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a “second-order” layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawaii reveal how law enforcement practices not only affect cockfighting rituals, but are embedded within them. Police practices and informal rules work in concert to shape fighters' second-order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of central concepts, including order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second-order perspective also underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly created and recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's inherently relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs—for example, when an unusual police action directed toward a subgroup of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for them. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers scholars a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 499 - 530
Copyright
© 2014 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Rebecca Sandefur, who fundamentally shaped my understanding of how law works, and Monica McDermott, who taught me how to be an ethnographer. Both of them not only encouraged this project from its inception, but thoughtfully critiqued multiple drafts. I am indebted as well to Shelley Correll, Robert Weisberg, and a generous anonymous reviewer for insight and direction, and to Elizabeth Gaudet for keen editorial advice. Conversations with Valerie Jenness, Pamela Karlan, Linda Hamilton Krieger, and Mona Lynch sharpened my thinking about legal consciousness. I am also grateful to Karen Cook, George Fisher, Barbara Fried, Amalia Kessler, Bernadette Meyler, Marc Tafolla, and the editors of Law & Society Review.

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