On The Formation Of Citizen's Legal Consciousness

Certain legal consciousness is indispensable to realization of rule of law. This article concentrates on formulating primary ways of the formation of legal consciousness. It is also discussed below the methods and ways to popularizing law.Being different from former studies on the same subject, the analysis of legal consciousness here is based on two different aspects of law itself. They are the normative aspect and the coercive aspect of law. According to these two aspects, people have two different attitudes toward law. Thus the formal concept of legal consciousness can be differentiated into the internal and the external types.The substantial concept of legal consciousness means that modern legal culture of rule of law requires people to have some certain particular legal consciousness. It is taken in this article that the requirements placed upon the official agents, such as legislators, judgers, and executives, by modern rule of law are different from those placed on the common people. It allows for part of and even most of the citizens to have external attitudes to law, while it demands that, at least, there are some persons, primarily the group of legislators, administrators of justice and executives, must have intensively internal attitude to law.Based on the difference between the internal and external attitude to law, we can identify several components of law: legal knowledge which includes knowing what the positive law prescribes, how they are performed in practice, and value judgments about law. Then the article goes on to investigate the laws of formation of legal consciousness. It reveals two basic types of them: formatting from out-side, and formatting form in-side. These two types have their social-historical conditions respectively. But it should be emphasized that these two different types may interact to each other.Finally, those theoretical equipments discussed above make it possible to demonstrate that popularizing law is a way of formatting legal consciousness from out-side, but it becomes to have the potential of formatting from in-side gradually. On the other hand, popularizing law means initially to popularize legal knowledge, but it turns to the component of value judgment about law in legal consciousness. The article thus concludes that legal propaganda and legal education should turn its emphasis from specific legal knowledge to propagandizing those facts that laws are performed well in real life, and those values and ideas required by modern culture of rule of law. Concerning the method of propagandizing, we shall advance our citizen's legal consciousness through guiding them to participating public discourse about vitiate legal events.