法意識研究──不平等權力結構中，法律實踐的局限與能動

Legal Consciousness Studies: Law as a Cultural Practice and Its Constraints and Enablements in Structures of Power and Inequality

法意識研究致力於探索不平等社會中法律與社會的共構，從人們的思維與行動剖析法律在權力結構下的社會角色。本文旨在提供法意識研究的知識地圖，文獻同時包含國際比較視野，以及臺灣在地成果。 法意識研究的「文化轉向」將法律視為文化實踐，研究聚焦於人們在不平等資源與文化圖式（cultural schema）中進行「法律性」（legality）的社會建構，以此構成了法律霸權（legal hegemony）的不平等結構。然而，法律作為文化實踐的分析未能精確描繪法律的象徵權力，也未能包括人們抵抗權力的政治脈絡。 為了解決上述問題，本文建議研究者考察能動主體（agency）在道德與責任感中的行動策略，從而解剖不平等的法律性結構與抵抗行動的「辯證關係」。此種統整權力、法律與日常實踐的法意識分析，開展出在地法文化轉型的重要議題。

This paper aims to provide a literature review of legal consciousness studies, presenting their theoretical perspectives with special reference to Taiwanese empirical research. Legal consciousness studies start from the disputing process that analyzes people’s subjective consciousness of interpreting events and explores the cognitive transformation of actors’ legal consciousness. Researchers next take a “cultural turn” approach, regarding the law as a cultural practice and focusing on the construction of meaning in daily life. The social construction of “legality”, based on unequal resources and cultural schema, reflects the constraints of legal practice that perpetuate legal hegemony. Although legal consciousness studies have flourished since then, it has also had some critics on the ignorance of the law’s symbolic power and the politics of people’s resistance. This paper suggests that legal consciousness studies should focus more on the interweaving of law and other social powers, asking in what sense the actor’s sense of self or identity is the driving force behind their legal consciousness and how this simultaneously constructs the social relations in which they operate. This is to study the inequalities in the construction of the subject through the investigation of its structural aspect. By exploring the strategies of individuals under the cognitive template of cultural schema, the researchers analyze the agency’s compliance and resistance to the law in moral sense, so as to dissect the “dialectical relationship” between the structure and agency. In fact, it is in the interpersonal interactions and disputes that we speculate on issues of choice, the separation of self and others, and moral responsibility, which stimulates the agency to resist the structure of inequality. At this time, “personhood” plays a key role in the law as a cultural practice, and it was also an important issue in the cultural transformation of local law.