The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 3 - 134

David H. K. Nguyen * Joan Collier * Angela Watts * Camille Cartwright * Amelia King-Kostelac

describe knowledge-i.e. comprehension-of
law and its application to school policies (militello, schimmel & ederwein, 2009; schimmel & militello, 2007). Within the sphere of
education, research has indicated a persistent
lack of legal literacy among many K-12 educators, a deficit that is most frequently linked to
a lack of adequate preparation on educational
law in the curriculum of teacher preparation
and certification programs (schimmel & militello, 2007; pazey & Cole, 2011). no research
has been conducted yet to examine legal literacy among higher education professionals.
the approach of most scholarship focused on
legal literacy is to identify policies likely to lead
to litigation, to straightforwardly assess faculty
and administrator understanding of the law
itself and implications of the law for educational practice, and to provide best practices to
help avoid some of the most common pitfalls
of being ill-informed of important legal considerations that may impact students, faculty, staff
and/or administrators.
legal consciousness, on the other hand,
provides a more overt social justice orientation from which to view, describe and analyze
different individuals' or groups' experiences
of and relationships to law and policy.1 this
concept could include individuals' sense of
enfranchisement and ability to engage in
claims-making (abrego, 2011), experiences of
disenfranchisement or marginalization (hull,
2016), and investigations of phenomenological aspects of how different individuals experi-

134

Legal literacy is most commonly
used to describe knowledge-
i.e. comprehension-of law and its
application to school policies . . .
Legal consciousness, on the other
hand, provides a more overt social
justice orientation from which
to view, describe and analyze
different individuals' or groups'
experiences of and relationships
to law and policy .

ence legal protection in public spaces (nielsen,
2000). the term itself originates in socio-legal
research of the 1980s and 90s, with a specific
goal to "address issues of legal hegemony, particularly how the law sustains its institutional
power despite a persistent gap between the law
on the books and the law in action" (sibley,
2005, p. 323). this avowed focus is echoed
in scholarship utilizing legal consciousness
as a framework, as the concept is specifically
invested in understanding how the practice
and application of law can reflect and fortify
extant features of power and prejudice within
a society (hull, 2016). in essence, legal consciousness was developed to analyze the gap

Legal consciousness has also been utilized, particularly in legal theory prior to the 1990s, to describe "ideas about the nature, function,
and operation of law held by anyone in society at a given time" (Trubeck, 1984, quoted in Lobel, 2006). This is not altogether different
than how we are summarizing the concept here; however, earlier theory was less likely to apply an activist or social justice component
in their research.

T h e J o u r n a l o f C o l l e g e a n d U n i v e r s i t y St u d e n t H o u s i n g

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 3

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