Investigating Legal Consciousness through the Technical Work of Elite Lawyers: A Case Study on Tax Avoidance

Since the 1990s, legal consciousness has been amply used by sociolegal scholars to better understand the everyday lives of ordinary people, with a strong focus on vulnerable or impoverished people. This article argues that legal consciousness, with some methodological adjustments, could lend itself...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inLaw & society review Vol. 53; no. 2; pp. 323 - 352
Main Author St-Pierre, Pascale Cornut
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken, USA Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.06.2019
John Wiley & Sons, Inc
Cambridge University Press
Subjects
Ambiguity
Attorneys
Case studies
Consciousness
Empiricism
Income Tax Act-Canada
Innovations
Intellectuals
Law firms
Legal norms
Morality
Sarat, Austin
Scandals
Tax avoidance
Tax courts
Tax planning
Tax shelters
Taxation
Transnationalism
Vulnerability
Canada
United States > US
Chicago Illinois
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Summary:Since the 1990s, legal consciousness has been amply used by sociolegal scholars to better understand the everyday lives of ordinary people, with a strong focus on vulnerable or impoverished people. This article argues that legal consciousness, with some methodological adjustments, could lend itself to the study of the rich and powerful by investigating both the technical work of their lawyers and how that work shapes our broader legal culture. To illustrate this point, this article takes tax avoidance as a case study. Drawing on materials revealed by a recent tax scandal, it suggests that current difficulty in tackling the problem of tax avoidance rests on uneven access to the cultural repertoires related to legal technique and legal innovation, which fosters the tax-avoidance narrative's ambiguity.
ISSN:0023-9216
1540-5893
DOI:10.1111/lasr.12397