ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how legal rights interact with other social institutions to shape legal consciousness in workplace negotiations over employment rights. It examines how actors come to understand and think about their rights in the context of a particular civil rights statute, the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The chapter introduces the concept of legal consciousness and connects this concept to broader sociological theory. It analyzes the competing discourses created by law and by institutionalized understandings of work, gender, and disability, all of which play out in workplace negotiations over family and medical leave. The chapter reviews report data from interviews with workers who negotiated leaves in the workplace. It suggests how alternative discourses about work and law interact in ways that both undermine and reinforce existing relations of inequality. Sociolegal scholars have moved beyond understanding legal consciousness as mere attitudes about law or as "false consciousness" that is an epiphenomenon of capitalist production.
