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The Loss of Property Rights and the Construction of Legal Consciousness in Early Socialist Romania (1950–1965)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Mihaela Şerban
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Abstract

What happens to legal and rights consciousness when rights previously protected are taken away? In this article, I investigate the process of contesting urban housing nationalization in Romania in the early 1950s in order to understand how the loss of property rights led to new hybrid types of legal consciousness. I find that the construction of socialist legal consciousness was grounded in the interaction between the legally constituted selves of former owners and state bureaucrats who drew from distinct legal and property rights ideologies. This process underscores continuities in legal consciousness even under drastic regime changes, which in turn has implications for the construction of new hegemonic legalities and power regimes. The article is based on extensive document and archival research.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 773 - 805
Copyright
© 2014 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The field research for this project was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation (grant #0752404). I am grateful to Sally Merry, Christine Scott-Hayward, and Francesca Laguardia for their comments and suggestions. I received helpful comments and advice from participants at the conference Complaints: Cultures of Grievance in Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Princeton University, 2013), as well as LSR's editors and anonymous reviewers.

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