Local Government Legal Consciousness in the Shadow of Juridification

For almost two decades, British local government has been subject to intensive legal restructuring. Statutes have reallocated municipal powers and duties, judicial decisions declared council practice ultra vires; new subjects have gained grievance rights and scrutinizing powers. Law, commentators argue, has colonized local government, re-forming its practices, procedures, culture, and agendas.2 But what impact have these changes had on legal consciousness? This raises two further questions. First, how do local government actors understand and experience law; second, to what extent is this a product of structural legal change, that is, of juridification? Exploring the relationship between legal consciousness and juridification poses difficulties. If juridification identifies structural shifts, to what extent can these be meaningfully explored through individual perceptions and responses? If legal understandings are varied and contradictory, does this negate the existence of a central determining condition, such as juridification? In this paper, my aim is not to use legal consciousness as a way of proving or disproving juridification. Nor do I aim to establish juridification as the conclusive determinate of current municipal legal understandings. Both ventures, I would suggest, are fraught with methodological and epistemological problems. My objective, in contrast, is more modest: to explore the character of legal consciousness within local government in the 1980s and early 1990s, and, in doing so, to consider its relationship to juridification.