ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a legal consciousness approach constitutes a useful method for conducting jurisdictional analysis of legal embodiment. Legal consciousness provides the necessary tools to interrogate the position of law in society, enabling researchers to uncover and probe how law and regulation affects interviewees’ everyday lives. Though existing examples of jurisdictional analysis, and studies of legal embodiment, have yet to integrate legal consciousness approaches, this chapter argues that these different strands of scholarship are for the most part compatible with one another. While proponents of the different literatures may at times appear to be at cross-purposes, this chapter suggests that they are ultimately reconcilable. It does this while foreshadowing how they will be brought together in novel and productive ways in the subsequent chapters of the book. For the most part, this has been framed in relation to the book’s specific aim of ascertaining the embodied effects of the implementation of self-declaration of legal gender status in Denmark in 2014. But the benefit of using legal consciousness approaches to illuminate the embodied effects of jurisdictional arrangements should be apparent for other researchers engaged in trans legal studies, feminist legal scholarship, as well as socio-legal studies more widely.
