The earliest research on Asian legal consciousness attempted to define traits that were thought to be shared at the national level. Subsequently, these portraits of national legal consciousness attracted criticism and no longer carry much weight among scholars.

Nevertheless, the role of the state in organizing legal regimes and administering legal institutions remains very much a part of contemporary legal consciousness research, and state-level legality is typically viewed in relation to localized legal practices that researchers identify in Asian villages, urban neighborhoods, corporate life, and even within the legal profession itself.

Nowadays, researchers have exhibited an increasing awareness that legal consciousness is also shaped by transnational actors and institutions. Thus, many researchers attempt to account for the global dimension of legal con­sciousness, even when they conduct their research at the level of the individ­ual or in face-to-face communities. In short, contemporary legal consciousness research has become quite complex, exploring the interaction of phenomena at multiple levels simultaneously and attempting to explain how changes in legal consciousness - even within the day-to-day experience of individual actors - can take place as a result of shifts or transformations in one or more of these levels.

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