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Investigating Legal Consciousness through the Technical Work of Elite Lawyers: A Case Study on Tax Avoidance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Pascale Cornut St-Pierre Open the ORCID record for Pascale Cornut St-Pierre [Opens in a new window]
Pascale Cornut St-Pierre*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Law of University of Ottawa (Civil Law Section).
*
Please direct all correspondence to Pascale Cornut St-Pierre, Faculty of Law (Civil Law Section), University of Ottawa, 57 Louis-Pasteur (307), Ottawa (ON), K1N 6N5, Canada; e-mail: pascale.cornutst-pierre@uottawa.ca
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Abstract

Since the 1990s, legal consciousness has been amply used by sociolegal scholars to better understand the everyday lives of ordinary people, with a strong focus on vulnerable or impoverished people. This article argues that legal consciousness, with some methodological adjustments, could lend itself to the study of the rich and powerful by investigating both the technical work of their lawyers and how that work shapes our broader legal culture. To illustrate this point, this article takes tax avoidance as a case study. Drawing on materials revealed by a recent tax scandal, it suggests that current difficulty in tackling the problem of tax avoidance rests on uneven access to the cultural repertoires related to legal technique and legal innovation, which fosters the tax-avoidance narrative's ambiguity.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 323 - 352
Copyright
© 2019 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

I thank the three anonymous reviewers of the Law & Society Review, as well as Jérôme Pélisse, Pascal McDougall, Thomas Burelli, Marina Kurkchiyan, and the participants to the “Extending the Reach of Empirical Studies of Legal Consciousness” panel held at the 2017 Law & Society conference in Mexico for their useful comments on earlier versions of this article.

References

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