ALSA 2025 meeting

This panel aims to bridge the traditional socio-legal studies of the "living law" and the recent research of legal consciousness from 4 countries papers.
The concept of "living law," by Eugen Ehrlich, expressed the sense of justice among the ordinary people resisting the denial of their customary practice by state law. Relying on this concept, socio-legal surveys were conducted in various countries to defend customary rights, leading to landmark judicial decisions.
Living law's theory presupposed that such law existed prior to state law, was autonomous and robust, and that the law's community adhering to it was homogeneous. However, our empirical research reveals that in order for longstanding daily practices to be formulated as customary rights, they are often framed using legal categories derived from international human rights norms, state law, or regional legal frameworks. It becomes necessary, therefore, to understand living law as a form of translation of exogenous laws.
Moreover, the way in which such exogenous laws are translated and interpreted varies among local peoples and their supporters. Recent studies on legal consciousness, initiated by Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey, emphasize the diversity in people’s understanding of law. They focus on how individuals justify and narrate their practices, thereby seeking to capture the plurality of legal consciousness. Relying on this perspective, this panel analyzes the processes through which exogenous law, customary rights, and daily practices are translated and interpreted.
Our topics include customary forests in Japan and Indonesia, farmland reallocation practices in China, and human rights advocacy in Myanmar.

Japanese sociology of law began with research on the rights of common, achieving success in having courts recognize these rights as customary rights. However, in recent years, with the advancement of compliance-oriented legalization, forestlands with improper registration where rights of common are recognized have become problematic as “lands with unknown owners,” prompting the enactment of laws to regularize these situations.
This paper first explains the differences between previous legalization studies and the current societal trend emphasizing compliance. Then, based on interviews and questionnaire surveys with forestry cooperative staff, it depicts how compliance-oriented legalization is actually progressing.
When forestry cooperatives, which receive logging commissions from communities, emphasize compliance and verify forestland ownership based on official registration, obtaining consent from all numerous owners becomes necessary, causing high transaction costs and triggering a tragedy of the anti-commons. Therefore, in practice, a simplified procedure relying on customary rights and securing consent from community leaders is employed. However, this is not a legal consciousness based on an understanding of the customary rights of common but rather a calculated rationality that simplifying procedures is unlikely to cause problems.
By illustrating how the customary rights of common are actually perceived and used, this paper attempts to bridge traditional socio-legal studies on customary rights and new research on legal consciousness.