Legal Consciousness
This study uses the concept of legal consciousness to reveal people’s perspectives on the
implementation of law concerning CFM. Because legal consciousness illustrates what people
think about law and how they interact with law in real life, it is a useful research tool to discover
what informs people’s ideas about law enforcement, namely: religious beliefs, adaptive
behaviours, and mobilization of the legal system that shapes CFM in Thailand. Legal
consciousness unfolds reasons for people’s behaviour, including that of villagers who practise
CFM, government officers who enforce the state forestry laws, and of legal professionals who
conduct cases concerning CFM.
Legal consciousness is one of the forms of empirical study that goes beyond
“materialization” of the law.2 Once the law is written down, it becomes static, and becomes alienated from living law, because law in society is usually dynamic. Although society
constitutes the law and its legal doctrines in bodies of texts, what is more important is how the
law is enforced. Accordingly, the study of legal consciousness presents the law as being alive
and shows the influence of law in real life by focusing on how individuals see themselves as
being embedded in the law and as being entitled to its protection. When people take a problem
to the legal system, they act in response to their legal consciousness; this consciousness may be
positive, or negative, or may even drive them away from the law. I will apply the legal
consciousness concept in Chapters 4 and 5 when I analyze my field research interviews with
villagers, government officers, and legal professionals about their attitudes toward laws
concerning CFM, such as the Constitution, forestry law, and community CFM regulations.
The meanings of legal consciousness are various and its scope is broad. Legal
consciousness is classified as a sub-branch of legal culture studies. Legal consciousness focuses
on individual attitudes toward the law at the micro level, investigating what people think, say,and do about the law, while legal culture focuses at the macro level on the behaviour of the
legal system.3 However, legal consciousness is not focused on individual perspectives and
actions alone, but looks at people’s attitudes and how they form social structures and reflect
social practices.4 After observing and collecting information on legal consciousness,
researchers want to find out about people’s thoughts and beliefs about, reactions to and
experiences of the law. According to legal consciousness researchers, people’s perceptions of
law have to be considered in the context of legal systems, because legal consciousness depends
on other circumstances such as collective action in society.5
As this study will reveal, the villagers I interviewed live in and rely on the forest and have
traditions and laws relating to its spiritual nature and therefore to forest conservation.
Meanwhile, the impact of globalization has forced villagers to expand their consideration of forest conservation, and they have reacted to this pressure in their own ways by still living in the
forest and retaining their beliefs but creating new CFM regulations and practices.
The study of legal consciousness has two branches. First, studies about legal
consciousness sometimes focus on public attitudes toward the law, such as people’s
perceptions of fairness, or citizens’ commitment to and alienation from law and legal values.6
Second, after finding public attitudes towards law and its implementation, studies of legal
consciousness also look at people’s perceptions of law as an epiphenomenon of social
structure.7 The legal consciousness of villagers from selected communities, and of government
officers and legal professionals will thus be analyzed as epiphenomena of social structures such
as forestry laws and government policies on highlanders and forest areas. The legal
consciousness of these interviewees is a result of everything that has happened to them and
has shaped their consciousness; their legal consciousness then causes them to create their own
understandings of CFM.
The second concept of legal consciousness focuses on constructions and exercises of the
law that often nurture class interests and inequities. This second type of legal consciousness
reflects structuralist and Marxist theories; an example of this is research on working class
people’s perceptions of their true interests.8 This example also illustrates that researchers have
to be cautious about “false consciousness”, which is what happens when subjects do not realize
their true interests in the legal structure.9 This is a challenge for the study of legal
consciousness of which I will be mindful when I analyze people’s perceptions in my interviews.
For instance, I found during my research with the villagers that they were dealing with
false consciousness in connection with the next step of their movement, or their legal
mobilization, after their struggles with Thai legal culture. To date, the Constitution has not
been directly applied to protect their community rights and more time is required before the
legal culture can be changed. Lately, the villagers have moved toward communal land title,
which was a government policy adopted following the landless farmers’ movement. The
Indigenous Peoples’ Assembly joined this movement as they believed it would help secure their land rights in forest areas. Indeed, the forest people10 wanted to secure their rights to live and
maintain their livelihoods according to their traditional methods, only adding greater concern
for forest and ecosystem conservation to their practices. However, this objective required more
attention to cooperation with government agencies such as the RFD and DNWP. If the
government agencies and the forest people do not deal with this issue, the movement of the
forest people might lead in the opposite direction from forest conservation. This would imply
false consciousness.
Legal consciousness research has developed from its beginnings in the 1980s and, in its
current stage, it exhibits three characteristics.11 First, researchers have begun to research
ordinary people in society rather than to research only the law or legal professionals. Second,
research methods are broader than in the past, when they were attached to measurable
behaviour only. Also, while law used to be only a tool in society, it is now seen as fulfilling
various roles such as communication, construction, and interpretation of social relations.12 The
last and most important development of the legal consciousness concept is that it uses more