Examining the Importance of Teachers in Attitudes Towards the Law

Legal socialization examines how people acquire their views about the law. A key tenet within this field is that fair interactions with nonlegal authorities, such as teachers, influence people’s legal values (i.e., the ubiquity hypothesis) which subsequently influences how people judge legal authority later in life. This study uses data from the New Hampshire Youth Survey to test the ubiquity hypothesis. Participants completed measures of how procedurally just their teachers were in general, as well as the procedural justice of their least and favorite teachers. Approximately 45 days later, they participated in an experiment where they read a vignette describing an interaction between a police officer and a young adult. Participants read vignettes where the officer either did or did not give a voice to the young adult and did or did not behave in a neutral manner. After reading the vignette, participants were asked to judge the procedural justice and legitimacy of the officer. The results indicated students’ judgments of the officer’s procedural justice were not influenced by prior experiences with teacher procedural justice. Judgments of officer legitimacy, on the other hand, were associated with teacher procedural justice, specifically participant’s least favorite teacher. These results indicate a more nuanced view of the ubiquity hypothesis than has been portrayed by legal socialization scholars whereby prior experiences with nonlegal authority affect some legal judgments but not others.