Situating legal consciousness: Experiences and attitudes of ordinary citizens about law and street harassment

The legal consciousness of ordinary citizens concerning offensive public sp eech is a phenomenon whose legal status has been vigorously debated, but wh ich has received little empirical analysis. Drawing on observations in publ ic spaces in three northern California communities and in-depth interviews with 100 subjects recruited from these public locations, I analyze variatio n across race and gender groups in experiences with offensive public speech and attitudes about how such speech should be dealt with by law. Among the se respondents, white women and people of color are far more likely than wh ite men to report being the targets of offensive public speech. However, wh ite women and people of color are not significantly more likely than white men to favor its legal regulation. Respondents generally oppose the legal r egulation of offensive public speech, but they employ different discourses to explain why. Subjects' own words suggest four relatively distinct paradi gms that emphasize the First Amendment, autonomy, impracticality, and distr ust of authority. Members of different racial and gender groups tend to use different discourses. These differences suggest that the legal consciousne ss of ordinary citizens is not a unitary phenomenon, but must be situated i n relation to particular types of laws, particular social hierarchies, and the experiences of different groups with the law.