Studies of legal consciousness in non-Asian settings have typically adopted a linear model influenced by the “naming-blaming-claiming” framework set forth in Felstiner et al. (1980-81).

In this model, individuals initially experi­ence an inchoate sense of injury that may lead to the perception that someone else's wrongful action is responsible - and, in a few cases, the assertion of a claim against the perceived wrongdoer.

Legal consciousness research in Asia has raised important challenges both to the linear qualities of this model and to its emphasis on individual decision­making. Scholars of Asian law and society have found that the ultimate goals being pursued may have little to do with rights claims but rather the strengthening or repair of important social relationships. Arguably, every study of legal consciousness incorporates some relational features. Therefore, Lynette Chua and David Engel (2019:346-7) have suggested that the rela­tional aspects of legal consciousness research can be placed on a continuum. At one end of the continuum are “studies that view the self as essentially autonomous and independent, not entirely divorced from social relationships yet functioning primarily on its own” in terms of problem perception and decision-making. In the middle region of the continuum “we find legal consciousness studies that retain the individual as the appropriate object of study but treat other individuals as co-creators of consciousness rather than mere external variables.” And, at the far end of the continuum, “is a concept of relationalism that rejects the individual as the unit of analysis and views legal consciousness as a fully collaborative phenomenon.”

Research on legal consciousness in Asia, including the following article by Hsiao-Tan Wang, has explored the fully relational aspects of legal conscious­ness and has challenged the more individualistic bias inherent in much of the earlier legal consciousness literature.

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