3.1 The ‘legal’ in legal consciousness

Most of the reviewed publications examined migrants’ legal consciousness in relation to state law. The legal order studied was often that of the state in which the migrant was currently residing (Abrego, Reference Abrego2008; Reference Abrego2011; Gleeson, Reference Gleeson2010; Schwenken, Reference Schwenken2013; Flores et al., Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019), with some exceptions (Gehring, Reference Gehring2013; Kulk and de Hart, Reference Kulk and de Hart2013; Chakraborty et al., Reference Chakraborty2015; Namukasa, Reference Namukasa2017). Gehring (Reference Gehring2013) analysed the legal consciousness of Dutch persons who migrated to Spain after their retirement, investigating how these migrants perceived and dealt with access to care provisions in both Netherlands and Spain. Kulk and de Hart (Reference Kulk and de Hart2013) also studied legal consciousness from a transnational perspective, conducting interviews with Dutch women who were married to Egyptian men and lived in Egypt. The authors demonstrated that legal consciousness is largely developed within a specific social context, to which they referred as ‘transnational social space’, namely a small community that is closely connected (Kulk and de Hart, Reference Kulk and de Hart2013, p. 1062). Chakraborty et al. (Reference Chakraborty2015) analysed legal consciousness of refugees in Germany in relation to EU law (i.e. the Dublin III Regulation and the EURODAC Regulation) rather than national law. The authors demonstrated that the Dublin system is mainly perceived negatively because of its power and complexity. Finally, Namukasa (Reference Namukasa2017) examined how East African health workers in the UK perceived and experienced various roles of law – that is, as both a control mechanism and an empowering tool. To that end, the study went beyond state law perceptions, including migrants’ negotiations in the context of international human rights.

All the reviewed studies that analysed migrants’ legal consciousness in relation to state law focused on a specific field of law, such as education, labour, social security, migration or family law. This is in line with Engel's (Reference Engel, Bryant and Sarat1998, p. 140) observation that ‘[d]ifferent substantive areas of law are associated with different perceptions, understandings and behaviours and must, therefore, be distinguished in research on legal consciousness’ (see also Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2018).

Divergent approaches could be identified based on the specific entry point to the field of law studied, ranging from a particular legal instrument over certain rights to a broader legal concept. Abrego (Reference Abrego2008) analysed the impact of one education law on legal consciousness. California Assembly Bill 540 exempted all long-term residents in California, irrespective of legal status, from non-resident tuition fees for public colleges and universities, making public higher education more accessible for undocumented students.

In the field of labour law, Gleeson (Reference Gleeson2010) studied legal consciousness in relation to specific workplace rights, including minimum wages, overtime provisions, meal breaks and medical attention in cases of emergency. Gehring (Reference Gehring2013) focused on access to health-care rights in Netherlands and Spain for Dutch retirement migrants. Even though Dutch migrants are EU citizens and can thus move and reside freely in the EU, they are confronted with different welfare systems regarding health care.

Other studies started their analysis of legal consciousness from a particular legal concept, such as illegality, citizenship, discrimination or domestic violence. As such, studies on legal consciousness in the area of migration law have analysed how undocumented migrants experience illegality (Abrego, Reference Abrego2011; Flores et al., Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019). In her paper from 2019, Abrego used citizenship as an entry point to investigate the legal consciousness of US citizen young adults of mixed-status families. Citizenship was understood as ‘the juridical category granting the most rights and protections’ (Abrego, Reference Abrego2019, p. 645), being ‘the only status that can protect them from expulsion’ (Abrego, Reference Abrego2019, p. 650). In Hirsh and Lyons (Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010), the central question was whether and when workers attributed harmful experiences in the workplace to racial discrimination. In the field of family law, Graca (Reference Graca2018) examined how Portuguese women in England understood and perceived domestic violence. Finally, Alpes (Reference Alpes, Hillman, Van Naerssen and Spaan2018) examined how deportations of Cameroon migrants (bushfallers) were perceived by their family members in Cameroon. In contrast to her expectation, she found that the family members did not view illegality as the cause of deportation; rather, selfishness and laziness were explanatory factors for the success or failure of migrants.

Few studies explicitly included non-state normative orders in their conceptualisation of the ‘legal’ in legal consciousness. Nevertheless, Graca (Reference Graca2018, p. 422) asked Portuguese women for their understanding of domestic violence ‘in their own words and without any legal contextualisation of the researcher’, thus leaving reference to particular legal systems or norms to her respondents. Kubal (Reference Kubal2015, p. 70) considered legal consciousness as a form of social remittance with the latter understood as ‘the ideas, the values and practices of legality – at the ideational (normative) and behavioural level – remitted by “return” migrants’. She adopted the broad understanding of legality proposed by Ewick and Silbey (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998, p. 43) as referring to ‘the meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices that are commonly recognized as legal, regardless of who employs them or for what ends’.

The predominance of state law in studies on migrants’ legal consciousness echoes similar observations in the broader field of legal consciousness studies. In their ground-breaking work The Common Place of Law, Ewick and Silbey (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998, p. 40) reported that ‘[w]e did not want to ask people about their legal problems or needs, since it was the respondents’ own understandings and definitions of these concepts … that we wanted to hear about’. The authors aimed to unveil the various ways in which law is present in everyday life. To this end, the authors distinguished ‘legality’ from ‘law’, with the latter used to indicate ‘aspects of legality as it is employed by or attributed by formal institutions and their actors’ (Ewick and Silbey, Reference Ewick and Silbey1998, p. 39). The authors wanted to study how law operates outside of these conventional institutional borders and formal settings. They shifted the focus from the ‘traditional’ places where official law was studied to its manifestations in common places and understandings by ordinary people. In this sense, the authors were inspired by the distinction made by Pound between ‘the law in books’ (the ‘ideal’ law) and ‘the law in action’ (the ‘actual law’), namely the implementation of these rules on the ground.

Nevertheless, other scholars (Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2004; Piana et al., Reference Piana, Schijman and Wagener2018) have argued that even if Ewick and Silbey intended to decouple legality from formal institutional law, their central focus was still on official law. Various authors have therefore suggested conceptualising law in a broader way when studying legal consciousness, given that official law is often not the only normative system that impacts social fields and societies (Sarat and Kearns, Reference Sarat and Kearns1995; Engel, Reference Engel, Bryant and Sarat1998; Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2004; Halliday and Morgan, Reference Halliday and Morgan2013; de Hart et al., Reference de Hart, van Rossum and Sportel2013). According to Hertogh (Reference Hertogh2018), it will be very challenging to assess the true importance of state law if other forms of (non-state) law are ignored.

Notwithstanding these calls from scholars to also take non-state normative orders into account, legal consciousness studies with this departing point have been rare (but see e.g. Engel and Engel, Reference Engel and Engel2010; Graca, Reference Graca2018; Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2018). This seems odd, as the realisation that there are other normative systems beyond state law that influence daily life was one of the key insights and starting points of the field of socio-legal studies as a whole (Engel, Reference Engel, Bryant and Sarat1998; Engel and Engel, Reference Engel and Engel2010; Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2018). As Engel (Reference Engel, Bryant and Sarat1998, p. 139) holds: ‘[Legal consciousness scholars] have failed to reinsert some of the very insights that represent the most distinctive achievements of law and society scholarship.’ Therefore, Hertogh (Reference Hertogh2018, p. 183) urges reconnecting contemporary legal consciousness studies with the ‘classic’ law and society tradition.

Given the importance of the host society's state law to migrants’ everyday lives, it is understandable that much research on migrants’ legal consciousness takes (a specific field of) this state law as the object of analysis. This focus may obscure, however, the relevance of other normative orders. The call in general legal consciousness studies to include non-state normative orders when studying legal consciousness appears equally valid for studies on migrants’ legal consciousness.

3.2 ‘Consciousness’ in legal consciousness

In general legal consciousness studies, the dimension of ‘consciousness’ can refer to people's ideas and perceptions of law (what people think and how they express this) or include people's actions in relation to law (what people do, also defined separately as ‘legal mobilisation’).

Ewick and Silbey (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998, p. 46) understood ‘legal consciousness’ as ‘participation in the construction of legality’. The authors argued that consciousness is ‘not merely a state of mind’ but is ‘produced and revealed in what people do as well as what they say’ (Ewick and Silbey, Reference Ewick and Silbey1998, p. 46, emphases in original). Similarly, Silbey (Reference Silbey2005, pp. 337–338) critiqued the fact that ‘surveys often treat consciousness as a disembodied mental state, a set of attitudes and opinions, rather than a broader set of situation practices and repertoires of action’, implying that such practices and actions should be included in studies on legal consciousness. For Chua and Engel (Reference Chua and Engel2019, p. 336), legal consciousness also refers to ‘the ways in which people experience, understand and act in relation to law’, comprising both ‘cognition and behavior’ (see also Cowan, Reference Cowan2004).

Merry's (Reference Merry1990; Reference Merry2012) approach to the inclusion of ‘actions’ in the concept of legal consciousness seems to have evolved. In a publication from 1990, she defined consciousness as referring to ‘the way people conceive of the “natural” and normal way of doing things, their habitual patterns of talk and action, and their common sense understanding of the world’ (Merry, Reference Merry1990, p. 5). ‘Patterns of action’ are included here in the conceptualisation of consciousness. Later, Merry (Reference Merry2012) identified legal consciousness as one of four dimensions of legal culture next to ‘internal legal culture’, ‘external legal culture’ and ‘legal mobilization’, explicitly distinguishing legal consciousness from legal mobilisation. Legal consciousness describes ‘the way individuals experience and understand the law and its relevance to their lives’ (Merry, Reference Merry2012, p. 51). Legal mobilisation then refers to ‘the tendency for various individuals and groups to define their problems as legal ones and take them to some legal regime for help or settlement’ (Merry, Reference Merry2012, p. 49).

Other authors have adopted an even broader approach to legal consciousness, explicitly including attention to compliance with and the impact of law. Nielsen (Reference Nielsen2000, p. 1059) has described legal consciousness studies as being concerned with ‘individuals’ experience with law and legal norms, decisions about legal compliance, and … the subtle ways in which law affects the everyday life of individuals’.

Turning to studies on migrants’ legal consciousness, most reviewed publications included both perceptions and actions in their definitions of legal consciousness, following the most prevalent approach used in general legal consciousness studies (e.g. Abrego, Reference Abrego2008; Reference Abrego2011; Gleeson, Reference Gleeson2010; Gehring, Reference Gehring2013; Kulk and de Hart, Reference Kulk and de Hart2013; Kubal, Reference Kubal2015; Flores et al., Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019; Galli, Reference Galli2020). For instance, in her study on the legal consciousness of undocumented students in California, Abrego (Reference Abrego2008) used ‘legal consciousness’ as an overarching term covering understandings of law as well as the mobilisation of law, even though she dedicated a separate paragraph to legal mobilisation. In her 2011 study on the legal consciousness of undocumented Latinos in US society, consciousness equally covered both understandings of law and actions or claims-making (Abrego, Reference Abrego2011). Likewise, Gleeson (Reference Gleeson2010) included legal mobilisation in her understanding of legal consciousness when studying the relevance of undocumented status for workers’ claims-making. Legal-spatial consciousness as conceived by Flores et al. (Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019) also concerns both understandings and actions: it concerns the impact (cf. Nielsen, Reference Nielsen2000) of state law on people's everyday lives as well as engagement with law.

A few studies on migrants’ legal consciousness understood consciousness as referring only to perceptions. In their study on racial discrimination in the workplace, Hirsh and Lyons (Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010) focused on the ‘naming’ process in the classic ‘naming, blaming and claiming’ model developed by Felstiner et al. (1980–1981). Naming is considered the most crucial stage in the emergence and transformation of disputes, as an experience first has to be identified as injurious before blaming and claiming can take place. Naming is thus about perceptions and ideas. Different from her studies from 2008 and 2011, Abrego referred in her 2019 publication on US young citizens of mixed-status families to legal consciousness as ‘the commonsense understandings of the law’, thus not including actions or legal mobilisation.

In conclusion, both the general literature and studies on migrants’ legal consciousness have interpreted ‘consciousness’ in different ways. A majority of studies include both perceptions and actions in their understanding of consciousness, whereas other publications explicitly distinguish between legal consciousness and legal mobilisation. For the sake of analytical clarity and comparability, it is recommended that authors explicitly indicate how they understand consciousness.

3.3 Types of legal consciousness

Various proposals have been made to specify how people relate to the law, thus distinguishing ‘types’ or ‘categories’ of legal consciousness. One of the most widely known and used typologies is Ewick and Silbey's (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998, pp. 45–49) ‘before, with or against’ the law. Some people conceive of legality in a certain situation as something objective and distant, and removed from everyday life. These people then stand ‘before the law’, which is governed by fixed rules in demarcated spheres. Sometimes legality is depicted as a game in which people strategically use social resources based on a certain, yet variable, set of rules: individuals play ‘with the law’ and legality operates in everyday life. Finally, people may perceive law as produced by power. Legality is seen as ‘arbitrary and capricious’: individuals act ‘against the law’.

Based on their studies of radical activism, a fourth dimension of legal consciousness, ‘under the law’, was proposed by Fritsvold (Reference Fritsvold2009) and developed by Halliday and Morgan (Reference Halliday and Morgan2013). Within this category of legal consciousness, state law is seen as fundamentally illegitimate. Related to this is the emergence of a different conception of law that extends beyond the state and that is more linked to morality, thus integrating a legal pluralist approach (Halliday and Morgan, Reference Halliday and Morgan2013).

The typology of Ewick and Silbey (Reference Ewick and Silbey1998) has been widely used to analyse findings on migrants’ legal consciousness (see e.g. Abrego, Reference Abrego2008; Reference Abrego2011; Gehring, Reference Gehring2013; Kulk and de Hart, Reference Kulk and de Hart2013; Schwenken, Reference Schwenken2013; Chakraborty et al., Reference Chakraborty2015; Kubal, Reference Kubal2015; de Hart and Besselsen, Reference de Hart and Besselsen2020). For instance, Abrego (Reference Abrego2008) drew on this typology to explain the legal consciousness of Californian undocumented students. Earlier studies have indicated that disenfranchised groups will be more likely to be ‘against the law’, as they feel trapped by authorities (Ewick and Silbey, Reference Ewick and Silbey1998, p. 235; Nielsen, Reference Nielsen2000). However, Abrego (Reference Abrego2008) showed that the legal consciousness of undocumented students in her study shifted from being ‘against the law’ to being ‘with the law’ by mobilising the law and claiming new rights to their benefit. Due to the enactment of Assembly Bill 540, the undocumented students felt that their merits were recognised and that the bill provided them with a more legitimate label. This positively influenced their social identity and empowered them to engage in legal mobilisation.

Similarly, de Hart and Besselsen (Reference de Hart and Besselsen2020) used the typology of Ewick and Silbey to analyse how Dutch female citizens with a migrant partner experienced (the impact of) migration law in their everyday lives. The accounts of their interviewees about the law were inconsistent: whereas these Dutch women were critical about family reunification law on the one hand, they supported the increasingly restrictive policies on the other, referring to other categories of people who made this restrictiveness necessary. Nevertheless, the gendered implementation of migration rules made them feel excluded from citizenship and belonging.

Kubal (Reference Kubal2015) found that the legal consciousness of Ukrainian return migrants was most related to the ‘under the law’ category, as they expressed strong criticisms of Ukrainian state law as fundamentally illegitimate. Their narratives of legality revealed the emergence of an alternative view of law rooted in communal principles and a ‘higher ideal of justice’ (Kubal, Reference Kubal2015, p. 83).

In the general legal consciousness literature, Ewick and Silbey's typology has been criticised because ‘the salience of law is presumed rather than problematized’ (Levine and Mellema, Reference Levine and Mellema2001, p. 201). Even if people are ‘against the law’, law is still perceived as dominant or hegemonic, at least by scholars analysing these phenomena. Various authors have argued, however, that law is becoming more ‘alien’ or ‘irrelevant’ in people's daily lives (e.g. Engel and Engel, Reference Engel and Engel2010; Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2018). This empirical finding has triggered a call to study situations in which the dog ‘does not bark’ (Engel and Engel, Reference Engel and Engel2010, p. 161) or ‘law is absent’ (Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2018, p. 74).

In this sense, Hertogh (Reference Hertogh2018) distinguished the conventional (or ‘critical’ or ‘hegemonic’) approach to legal consciousness from a secular approach. In his view, both approaches start from a shared observation in which (some) people are critical towards law or the justice system. Whereas the conventional approach then analyses why people turn to the law after all (and aims to be ‘critical’ towards the power of law and the state), the secular approach investigates why these people turn away from the law. A secular approach thus aims to study ‘if and how law matters in everyday life’ (Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2018, p. 12), adding the ‘if’ to the ‘how’ question prevalent in the critical research tradition.

To describe this situation of turning away from the law, Hertogh proposed the concept of ‘legal alienation’, which means, in short, ‘the absence of law from everyday lives’. Concretely, he defines legal alienation as a ‘cognitive state of psychological disconnection from official state law and the justice system’ (Hertogh, Reference Hertogh2018, p. 14). In our view, it is remarkable that his definition of legal alienation refers to ‘official state law’ and not to law in a broader sense. This seems to go against the plea, within a secular approach, to adopt a legal pluralist perspective and include non-state normative orders in the study of legal consciousness.

None of the reviewed studies on migrants’ legal consciousness identified instances of the irrelevance or absence of law. An open question is whether and how this more recent frame of ‘legal alienation’ developed by Hertogh will appear to be relevant when researching migrants’ legal consciousness. Migrants who travel from one state legal order to another frequently need to engage with specific provisions of the host society's state law, such as to obtain residence rights and access to education and health care (de Hart and Besselsen, Reference de Hart and Besselsen2020). Therefore, the hypothesis would be that instances of legal alienation will occur less frequently among migrants because of the simple fact that they are often dependent on the state law of the host society.

In his review of Hertogh's book, Halliday (Reference Halliday2019, p. 871) argued that ‘a degree of legal alienation is consistent with the general legitimacy of state law and the general assent of people to the legal regime’. Complete legal alienation would come down to a society being governed by arbitrary oppression, which is not the case in liberal societies such as Netherlands, on which Hertogh focuses. In this sense, the concept of legal alienation could be more usefully considered a theoretical deepening of counter-hegemony evident in the ‘against the law’ narrative provided by Ewick and Silbey, Halliday (Reference Halliday2019) argues. Interpreted as an expression of counter-hegemony, the concept of legal alienation would probably be more relevant (and prevalent) when studying migrants’ legal consciousness.

4.1 Individual characteristics

Various elements impacting migrants’ legal consciousness can be situated at the level of the individual person: legal status, age, legal knowledge, educational level, language skills, gender, financial resources and social identity.

First, legal status was found to be a major driver shaping migrants’ legal consciousness. Access to legal status is regulated by immigration laws, which have a tremendous effect on migrants’ everyday lives and on their experiences with and understandings of the law (Menjivar and Lakhani, Reference Menjivar and Lakhani2016). As Menjivar (Reference Menjivar2006, p. 1000) notes: ‘Immigrants’ legal status shapes who they are, how they relate to others, their participation in local communities, and their continued relationship with their homelands.’ Differently from Miežanskienė (Reference Miežanskienė2020), however, our paper does not apply the lens of migrants’ legal status to examine the main factors affecting migrants’ legal consciousness. Rather, we reflect the variety of factors as they emerge from the empirical findings in our sample.

Various studies have analysed the legal consciousness of migrants with a particular legal status, with much attention paid to irregular migrants (Abrego, Reference Abrego2008; Reference Abrego2011; Reference Abrego2019; Gleeson, Reference Gleeson2010; Schwenken, Reference Schwenken2013; Flores et al., Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019). For instance, Gleeson found undocumented Latino workers in the US to be more reluctant to make claims concerning their workplace than their documented counterparts (see also Schwenken, Reference Schwenken2013). Due to their uncertain legal position, undocumented migrant workers perceived their working life in the US as temporary and felt that it did not pay to complain (Gleeson, Reference Gleeson2010). The ever-present fear of deportation (see also Abrego, Reference Abrego2011), the fear of losing their jobs (see also Schwenken, Reference Schwenken2013) and the threat of workplace raids were identified as other reasons preventing undocumented workers from claiming their rights simply to ‘avoid problems’ (Gleeson, Reference Gleeson2010, p. 31). This does not necessarily mean that these undocumented workers do not know their rights. Gleeson (Reference Gleeson2010, p. 31) argued that ‘not all undocumented workers are uninformed, passive individuals living in perpetual fear, but rather strategic agents who have a calculated plan for their time being in the United States’.

Not only undocumented legal status has an effect on legal consciousness. Gehring (Reference Gehring2013) showed that in the migratory decision-making process of Dutch retired persons who had moved to Spain, their legal status as EU citizens, including the right to free movement, played an important role in shaping their legal consciousness, as this subjected them to different national laws as well as EU law.

Second, age appears to inform legal consciousness. ‘Age’ may relate to either the age at migration or to one's chronological age. Abrego (Reference Abrego2011) examined the legal consciousness of different subgroups of undocumented Latinos in the US, distinguishing between persons who migrated as adults (first generation) and persons who migrated as children (1.5 generation). The author analysed how age at migration and levels of socialisation through school and work affected legal consciousness. The legal consciousness of the 1.5 generation was driven less by fears of deportation than for adult migrants (first generation). The reasons Abrego identified included a mix of individual characteristics and societal contexts (see section 4.4.). First, the youth participated more often in highly visible collective actions, whereas the adults were afraid to participate in such actions. Second, undocumented youth were legally protected by education laws, which were not available for their adult counterparts. Third, there was more pressure from society to stop the deportation of undocumented youth, which was less the case for first-generation migrants. The author concluded that first-generation migrants were constantly aware of their unlawful situation and that because of their fear of deportation, they were less likely to engage in claims-making. By contrast, the 1.5 generation had a strong desire to fight against its weaker position in terms of legal status.

The legal consciousness of retired Dutch migrants in Spain was influenced not only by their legal status, but also by their chronological age (Gehring, Reference Gehring2013). Retirement migrants often moved at an age characterised by possible health declines. Therefore, access to health-care provisions in the country of origin (Netherlands) or country of destination (Spain) was an important element to consider in their migratory decision-making processes.

Hirsh and Lyons (Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010) argued that (chronological) age, legal knowledge and education level interrelate in shaping legal consciousness. The authors assumed that the older migrants are, the higher their levels of education are and the more knowledge of the law they tend to have. This in turn impacts their perceptions of racial discrimination in that they will be more inclined to perceive discrimination as such.

The latter observations bring us to two other elements shaping legal consciousness, namely legal knowledge and language skills. Legal knowledge, understood as one's familiarity with specific legal rules, influenced legal consciousness in various of the publications reviewed (Gleeson, Reference Gleeson2010; Hirsh and Lyons, Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010; Schwenken, Reference Schwenken2013). Gleeson (Reference Gleeson2010) found that all migrant workers had at least a basic understanding of the rights granted to them but that a lack of language skills and culturally appropriate information impeded the acquisition of legal knowledge. As such, Gleeson identified limited language skills as one of the specific reasons explaining the reluctant attitudes of undocumented workers towards claims-making compared to documented low-wage workers. Abrego (Reference Abrego2008; 2011) also mentioned language as an empowering factor influencing legal consciousness. While persons who migrated as children (1.5 generation) were able to learn the language of the new host society, the first generation had fewer opportunities to do so. This was identified as one of the reasons for the differences in legal consciousness found between the two generations.

Schwenken (Reference Schwenken2013), on the other hand, argued that undocumented migrants used transnational knowledge and consciousness to legitimise their legal mobilisation. The transnational dimension provided migrants a possibility to engage with otherwise restrictive laws in a more ‘game-minded’ way, corresponding to the ‘with the law’ view of Ewick and Silbey's framework. In other words, despite being excluded from formal rights in their host society, undocumented migrants found ways to informally ‘enact’ access to social services, in Schwenken's words, through the inspiration of experiences of undocumented migrants in other countries. Similarly, Kulk and de Hart (Reference Kulk and de Hart2013) found that Dutch women gained much information about Egyptian law from other Dutch women in Egypt and Dutch resources, such as the embassy website and a Dutch online forum.

Whereas various studies exclusively focused on women (Kulk and de Hart, Reference Kulk and de Hart2013; Graca, Reference Graca2018; de Hart and Besselsen, Reference de Hart and Besselsen2020), only one of the other reviewed studies explicitly mentioned gender as informing legal consciousness. Hirsh and Lyons (Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010) found that women – especially those with children – were more likely to perceive racial discrimination as such.

Other individual characteristics identified as having an impact on legal consciousness include wealth in the case of Dutch retired persons migrating to Spain (Gehring, Reference Gehring2013). Retirement migrants with sufficient financial resources were less dependent on state care provisions. Hence, these retirees were able to live a transnational life without constraints, implying that their legal consciousness differed from others who had to rely on state care provisions.

As discussed above (see section 3.3), Abrego (Reference Abrego2008) found that Californian law exempting all long-term residents from non-resident tuition fees had a positive influence on the social identity of undocumented students, and this enhanced social identity empowered the students to engage more actively in legal mobilisation. Abrego is the only author to discuss social identity as such.

4.2 Relational factors

In a sense, legal consciousness studies are always relational, as humans are social beings. Nevertheless, there are clear differences in general legal consciousness studies as to their emphasis on individualistic vs. relational perspectives (Chua and Engel, Reference Chua and Engel2019). Studies adopting a relational approach, namely focusing on the significance of narratives and experiences of loved ones (Chua and Engel, Reference Chua and Engel2019), emphasise the impact of the community on legal consciousness. The idea here is that an individual's legal consciousness is formed on the basis of experiences with one's social group.

A number of the reviewed studies on migrants’ legal consciousness explicitly mentioned the importance of relational aspects in shaping legal consciousness (see e.g. Hirsh and Lyons, Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010; Kulk and de Hart, Reference Kulk and de Hart2013; Abrego, Reference Abrego2019; Flores et al., Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019). For instance, Hirsh and Lyons (Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010) found that social context is crucial in naming harmful experiences on the job and that an individual's understanding of discrimination is influenced by larger social environments, such as intergroup contacts and relations. This finding is in consonance with Nielsen's argument that ‘the social location of subjects, and the experiences that arise from that location’ shape one's legal consciousness (Nielsen, Reference Nielsen2000, as cited in Hirsh and Lyons, Reference Hirsh and Lyons2010, p. 273).

In the Special Issue entitled ‘Law in the everyday lives of transnational families’ published in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series, de Hart, van Rossum and Sportel (Reference de Hart, van Rossum and Sportel2013) wrote an introductory paper on the power of law, the legal consciousness of transnational family members and the role of family and networks. The authors showed that transnational family members may be inclined to navigate between multiple (state) legal systems. The authors emphasised, however, that limitations to or opportunities for using legal systems do not apply in the same way to the different members of transnational families. As such, Kulk and de Hart (Reference Kulk and de Hart2013) analysed legal consciousness on the basis of the experiences of Dutch-Egyptian families with family law in Egypt. The authors adopted a relational approach by focusing on narratives of kin ties affecting one's legal consciousness. The authors argued that looking at specific social contexts such as families and networks contributes to a stronger understanding of the concept of legal consciousness and of shared understandings of law.

Kubal (Reference Kubal2015) examined how and to what extent return migrants’ values and attitudes regarding legality influenced their practices after returning to their country of origin, Ukraine. Return migrants were related to different law and bureaucracy systems in their host countries (Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the UK). The assumption was that this ‘great number of relationships’ (Kubal, Reference Kubal2015, p. 72) abroad influenced their legal consciousness. Kubal found that experiences concerning legal consciousness as remitted by return migrants to Ukraine were quite often ambiguous and that legal consciousness was shaped by experiences not only prior to migration, but also when migrants returned to Ukraine.

Chakraborty et al. (Reference Chakraborty2015) found the existence of a ‘chain reaction’ among refugees with regard to the Dublin system. Even though the refugees did not have sufficient knowledge about Dublin, they were informed through informal interactions with fellow refugees. These interactions often increased their knowledge about the Dublin system, but also fuelled anxiety.

Finally, Abrego (Reference Abrego2019) showed that undocumented status impacts not only the legal consciousness of the undocumented persons themselves, but also that of their family members, even if the latter have citizenship. Because their loved ones were excluded from citizenship and lived with an ever-present fear related to the consequences of being undocumented, US citizen young adults of mixed-status families were extremely aware of this fear of police and of unequal access to social institutions, such as education. These experiences reflected on and sharpened their legal consciousness.

Chua and Engel (Reference Chua and Engel2019) argued to expand relational perspectives used in legal consciousness studies to continuously develop and refine the field of legal consciousness. In this regard, some studies on migrants’ legal consciousness serve as inspiration for legal consciousness studies in other fields on ways to adopt such a relational perspective.

4.3 Cultural dynamics

Two of the studies reviewed highlighted the role of culture in informing legal consciousness. The literature review by Kubal (Reference Kubal2013) on the relationship between migrants and the legal system of their host countries covered various theoretical approaches, such as legal assimilation, legal transnationalism, legal pluralism, legal culture and legal consciousness. The ‘cultural lens’ used in her study referred to the legal culture of the country of origin, which she defined as migrants’ ‘values, attitudes to law and accustomed patterns of legal behaviour’ (Kubal, Reference Kubal2013, p. 67). The author concluded that cultural characteristics related to the country of origin may influence the perception of new experiences and understandings in the host country, even though this does not necessarily mean that these perceptions would involve an exact reproduction of meanings and understandings from the country of origin (cf. Kubal, Reference Kubal2015). Therefore,

Graca (Reference Graca2018) studied the influence of Portuguese culture on perceptions of and reactions to domestic violence against women of Portuguese origin living in England. The author used the concept of ‘culture’, as defined by Silbey (2010, as cited in Graca, Reference Graca2018) as ‘beliefs and practices associated with a specific group’, here in reference to the traditional aspects of Portuguese culture in terms of family structures and gender roles within a family. Different aspects related to the culture of the country of origin seemed to play a role in shaping these women's legal consciousness and legal mobilisation in regard to domestic violence. These aspects were identified as ‘familism’ (women who value family interests above their own), ‘shame and community pressure’ and ‘acculturation’.

4.4 Public policies and discourse

Local policy contexts appear to influence migrants’ perceptions and ideas of law. This is highlighted by the term ‘legal-spatial consciousness’ developed by Flores et al. (Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019), which refers to interpretations of individuals’ personal experiences of how law and space are intertwined. Legal-spatial consciousness assumes that law, space and migrant identity are co-constituted and that this affects how individuals experience legal regimes. Flores et al. (Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019) found that undocumented American youth in different places understood and experienced migrant illegality differently. The experience of migrant illegality is thus place-dependent: local laws and policies matter. For instance, in Nashville, undocumented migrants were labelled more as ‘illegal’ than in other places, since obtaining a driving licence was made more difficult; in Georgia, undocumented migrants were also often considered ‘more illegal’ through educational agreements that limited their access. As Flores et al. (Reference Flores, Escudero and Burciaga2019, p. 29) stated, ‘certain locations and people within a place can become more or less illegal than others, with laws becoming more and less legally binding in certain spaces than in others’. Thus, living in an area with predominantly anti-immigrant discourse will likely have an impact on undocumented migrants’ legal consciousness. This recently proposed approach to legal-spatial consciousness may inspire future studies.

Access to social institutions also seems to have an effect on migrants’ legal consciousness. For instance, considerations regarding access to health-care systems were found to be crucial in the migratory decision-making processes of retired Dutch migrants and their perceptions of different (i.e. national vs. European) legal frameworks (Gehring, Reference Gehring2013). The same applies to access to the workplace (Gleeson, Reference Gleeson2010; Schwenken, Reference Schwenken2013) and access to education (Abrego, Reference Abrego2008; Reference Abrego2011). As described above (see section 3.1.), the fact that undocumented youth in the US with access to education are protected by education laws has played a role in shaping their legal consciousness (Abrego, Reference Abrego2011).

Abrego (Reference Abrego2011) also clearly pointed to the power of public discourse and media, and their effects on legal consciousness. The public discourse regarding undocumented youth was found to be much more positive than that regarding first-generation undocumented migrants, resulting in more pressure from society to end deportations of undocumented youth. Furthermore, the media were found to play a crucial role in framing undocumented migrants. While images of adult undocumented migrants were mostly negative, the media portrayed students relatively positively.

Finally, Galli (Reference Galli2020) demonstrated that the ambivalent context of unaccompanied minors’ interactions in various spaces with different state agencies in the US shaped their perceptions of law: whereas minors were protected by children's rights on the one hand, they were stigmatised as undocumented migrants on the other.