ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up Roger Cotterrell's discussion of 'legal alienation' where he left off. Inspired by Cotterrell's early writings, and considering the gap in the present literature, it explores and to develop the concept of 'legal alienation'. The chapter examines the general alienation literature and it discusses those few studies in which the concept of alienation has been applied to the field of law. It argues that most previous approaches to 'legal alienation' are either too wide or too narrow to be of much use to socio-legal studies. The chapter explores the elusive concept of 'legal alienation' will be broken down into several dimensions: 'legal powerlessness', 'legal meaninglessness', 'legal cynicism' and 'legal value isolation'. The empirical study of legal alienation focuses on different types of social protest: 'loyalty', 'voice' and 'exit'. The chapter argues that if the American authorities do not produce an adequate response to the public outcry in the Trayvon Martin case.
