Practising on the Moon: Globalization and Legal Consciousness of Foreign Corporate Lawyers in Myanmar

Abstract

This paper argues that there are two contrasting versions of legal consciousness among foreign corporate lawyers in Myanmar. The old hands—expatriates who have practised there prior to the opening-up of the country in 2011—depict an image of a fairly developed legal system and an appreciation of local law and practices. In contrast, the newcomers who came to Myanmar after 2011 tell accounts of the void of law. Contrary to the old hands who see themselves as mere translators of Myanmar’s local law and practices, the newcomers assume a more active role of importers and educators of modern business law and norms to fill the void. The paper uses two theoretical models in legal consciousness studies—the “community of meaning” model and the “power and resistance” model—to explain the difference between the two groups, as well as the implication the newcomers’ legal consciousness has for the globalization of law.

Justice, Emotion, and Belonging: Legal Consciousness in a Taiwanese Family Conflict

“…However, although scholars agree that the focus should be on this middle level, not as much weight is placed on legal hegemony (Chua and Engel ; Liu ). When addressing the issue of law as a form of knowledge that serves as justification for what goes on in social transactions (Silbey and Sarat ), they rather suggest that more attention be put on the mutually constituted effect of law and identity that is connected to an individual's sense of self (Abrego , ; Chua and Engel ; Engel and Munger ; Hartog ; Tungnirun ), or how other norms, customary practices, or social positions influence the way individuals decide to mobilize their rights (Abrego ; Albiston ; Boittin ; Gallagher ; Marshall ).…”

“…Emotions, in simplified terms, are the "bodily sensations or feelings, of greater or lesser intensity" (Gould 2013) that arise in response to a situation, events, or experiences (Damasio 2004). A growing trend in legal consciousness research has begun to view the role of one's emotions in relation to the culturally embedded sense of self, giving them more weight in the development of legal consciousness than previously assumed and presenting an entirely different concept of how and when the law may become active in the thoughts and actions of individuals (Abrego 2011;Engel 2005;Engel 2016aEngel , 2016bEngel and Engel 2010;He et al 2013;Kim 2015;Liu 2018;Tungnirun 2018).…”

Relational legal consciousness in the one-child nation

“…Many of these studies consider relationships as external to the individual's legal consciousness—they demonstrate how relationships, including unequal power relationships, impose external influences on individual thoughts and actions in relation to law (Gallagher, 2006, 2017; Gallagher & Yang, 2017; Li, 2016; Liu & Halliday, 2017). Studies that fall in the middle of the continuum tend to treat other people as co‐creators of legal consciousness, although they still use the individual as the basic unit of analysis (Engel & Munger, 2003; Nadler, 2017; Tungnirun, 2018). These studies, according to Chua and Engel (2019, p. 347), “place a greater emphasis on the porosity of boundaries between individual cognition and relationships with others.”…”

Effect of Peer Attachment on Legal Emotion Among Junior Middle School Students: The Mediation Role of Self-Esteem

“…The author's previous study (Xu, 2020) has been focused on the differences along the valence dimension, i.e., negative, or positive attitudes toward the respondents' assessment of law as a sociocultural phenomenon. A growing trend in legal consciousness research is to give them more weight in the development of legal consciousness than previously assumed and to view the role of one's emotions with the culturally embedded sense of self (Abrego, 2011;Liu, 2017;Tungnirun, 2017). Given the strong relationship between emotion and the sense of self, the emotional aspect of legal consciousness, in comparison with the cognitive or knowledge aspect of legal consciousness, would be a better candidate for the investigation of the interaction of the legal consciousness and other social-cultural factors related to the self-consciousness.…”