The construction of legal consciousness in discourse: rule and relational orientations toward the law in a disability support group [An article from: Journal of Pragmatics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Pragmatics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
Following Conley and O'Barr's (Conley, John, O'Barr, William, 1990. Rules versus Relationships: The Ethnography of Legal Discourse. University of Chicago Press, Chicago), this article describes the construction of legal consciousness in the presentational and interactional discourse of a support group for parents who have children with disabilities. In the special education system of US schools. The legal consciousness developed in the discourse of this group incorporates both rule-based and relational orientations toward the law: a relational legal consciousness focused on advocacy is generally and enthusiastically forwarded, but a rule-based orientation emerges at a crucial point to constrain the relational orientation and define the limits of advocacy.