Conceptualizing legal culture and legal awareness: meaning and structural components

Abstract

The paper discusses the meaning and structural components of such concepts as legal culture and legal awareness. The authors review main approaches to defining these two concepts, outline their characteristics and distinctive features. It is emphasized that the phenomena have specific features in transit societies, in which the sense of justice is of particular importance since it, in many respects, ensures the legal order and evolutionary character of social transformations. In addition, the paper focuses on the interrelation of legal culture and legal awareness.