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Full-Text Articles in Law
Vertical And Horizontal Perspectives On Rights Consciousness, David M. Engel
Vertical And Horizontal Perspectives On Rights Consciousness, David M. Engel
Journal Articles
It has become commonplace to assert that rights consciousness is expanding globally and that individuals worldwide demonstrate an increasing awareness of and insistence upon their legal entitlements. To marshal empirical support for such claims is, however, exceedingly complex. One important line of socio-legal research on rights consciousness adopts what might be called a “vertical” perspective, tracing the flow of legal norms and practices from prestigious international organizations and world centers of cultural production to local settings, where they may be adopted, resisted, or transformed. Vertical perspectives on rights consciousness have contributed new understandings of law in contemporary societies around the …
Uprooted Justice: Transformations Of Law And Everyday Life In Northern Thailand, David M. Engel
Uprooted Justice: Transformations Of Law And Everyday Life In Northern Thailand, David M. Engel
Journal Articles
Studies of law in everyday life tend to view law either as instrumental in shaping specific decisions and practices or as constitutive of the cultural categories through which humans apprehend their world and perceive law as relevant to a greater or lesser extent. This article, however, suggests that circumstances may arise in which law’s role in relation to everyday life is neither instrumental nor constitutive but instead becomes one of radical dissociation. Based on an analysis of injuries in northern Thailand, it examines two transformational episodes in Thai legal and political history. The first occurred at the turn of the …