ABSTRACT
Everyday life has been the object of considerable theoretical interest in cultural studies (see e.g. Gardiner 2000; Chaney 2002; Highmore 2002). Similarly, in the socio-legal field it is at the heart of research which aims to document how our everyday experiences of law shape what is called our ‘legal consciousness’. Everyday life therefore offers an interdisciplinary vantage point from which to analyse the question that concerns me most in this chapter: how important are the media in explaining people’s familiarity with the law? The claim that media culture accounts for people’s main source of legal experience will be subjected to some closer scrutiny: I will argue that such a perspective is problematic in that it appears to suggest that law, predominantly being the object of vicarious experience, rarely manifests itself in daily life in a direct way. The task in hand is therefore to identify law’s presence in everyday life and examine the extent to which this presence is attributable to audiences’ consumption of media culture. In the first instance, this calls for a clarification of where we want to locate law. If law is seen as only encompassing formal legal institutions, this obviously restricts the incidence of law in everyday life, unless we mean to include only the everyday lives of judges, lawyers, prosecutors, academics and other relevant professions. However, this would overlook law’s ability to be at the frontline of everyone’s daily life where it acts as an interpretive prism through which we view the world. We experience law vicariously through the media but law also affects us in more direct and personal ways. A parking ticket or a speed camera may be sufficient to unsettle our routines and bring home law’s inescapable grip on our lives.
