Law, Cognition, and Identity

Download or read book Law, Cognition, and Identity written by Eric J. Mitnick and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This article argues for a turn toward social and cognitive psychology in one prominent area of sociolegal studies. Over roughly the past two decades, sociolegal scholars have become increasingly interested in the intersection between law and social identity. In a number of different contexts (disability, indigenous cultural groups, colonialism, race, gender, citizenship, and many others), law has been described as constitutive of social life, culture, and identity. Yet there remains within sociolegal scholarship only the most limited sense of how, why, and to what extent legal institutions constitute social and cultural identity.This gulf in the literature is primarily the result of disciplinary boundaries: Where the influence of law on social identity has been almost exclusively the province of sociolegal studies, the social cognitive mechanisms that give rise to social identity have been studied most extensively within the fields of cultural sociology and social and cognitive psychology. A turn toward these areas of research reveals that law and legal institutions are capable of constituting aspects of human social identity when the investitive criteria that serve as the bases for legal categorization reflect socially salient characteristics.This article further explores the sources of social salience, contending that legal investitive criteria become socially salient in virtue of physical differences, power relations, cultural differences, and deep history. Finally, law's role as an agent of socialization is placed in context, locating law within an array of socially constitutive institutions, including educational institutions, the media, and the family.