Between Law and Trust. An Insight from Legal Consciousness and Ideology
Between Law and Trust. An Insight from Legal Consciousness and Ideology

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the idea that ”there is a kind of reciprocity between government and the citizen with respect to the observance of rules”, this article explores the ways in which we shape law by our interactions and, at the same time, law and the manner in which it is experienced shapes our cognitions and our relations. There is nowadays thorough empirical research that points to the idea that people implicitly associate law with self-interest, and that activating law can undermine interpersonal trust and cooperation. Even more intriguing is the fact that the remedy for reduced cooperation and trust insinuated by the exposure to law may be the desire for more law. Ideologies are self-fulfilling, therein lies their capacity to serve power, Patricia Ewick accurately notes. This could be one explanation for the erosion of trust prevailing in our contemporary society. Governments can and will legally1 impose their conception of the common good in more or less overt manners. At the present moment, we are all aware that law and the rule of law are directly dependent on citizens’ regaining their trust and sense of moral values. The limits of the traditional mechanisms of social regulation have unprecedently been called into question by the "side" effects of science and development, “imposing” self-regulated standards. Legal rules do not improve people's behaviour due to the accompanying sanctions ... Sociolegal scholarship shows that”self-regulatory motivations” can be activated, if people believe that they have an obligation to conform to the law. Paradoxically, this is the chance to recover individual choice and, at the same time, rejoin the collective life of the society. In the end, like Ewick concludes in her paper on Consciousness and Ideology, interaction between ideology, consciousness, and social structure is “ultimately a result of particular social historical transactions and can only be known and understood empirically”. In this alternation, eventually, “consciousness, construed as an active process of meaning making, produces, reproduces, or challenges ideology”.

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