Ordinary Citizens' Experiences of Law as Process: The Case of Employment Discriminations in Belgium

Through their different encounters with union, court, and government equality agency lawyers, workers report diverse understandings of her personal experience of injustice in the workplace. This paper examines workers’ experiences of discrimination and the role lawyers play in litigating these issues in Belgium. Bringing together the legal and rights consciousness studies and the sociology of mediation and tracking different stages in the construction of discrimination cases, from the moment when a future litigant describes an event as an injustice to the moment when the judge recognizes a discriminatory behavior (or conversely, dismisses a case), we suggest several possible empirical explanations of the way in which lawyers’ interpretation of a case directly affects workers’ rights consciousness. Because we refer to US socio-legal studies, this paper also calls into question how to import these studies to assist in analyzing legal mobilizations and legal consciousness in continental Europe.