Understanding Law and Legality in Media

When individuals think about legal concepts like marrying, calling the police, or filing a lawsuit, they frequently consider their community’s values in formulating their understandings and judgments. One way that individuals get a sense of their community’s values is through specialized media. This is especially so among members of marginalized groups, who are often excluded from or sidelined in mainstream conversations.

This study examines the long-term changes in the coverage and discussion of law and legal ideas in media serving the LGBTQ+ community over nearly five decades. This provides the opportunity to understand which legal issues are most salient to the LGBTQ+ community, and to appreciate that community’s attitudes towards legal actions and actors. It does this by examining how broader events, such as legislation, judicial rulings, and social movement activism influence changes in the coverage of particular issues and their discussion as matters of law in LGBTQ+ magazines.

In doing so, the project contributes insights into how legal issues rise and fall on the agenda of marginalized groups, how the legal consciousness of marginalized communities develops over time, and how legal decisions influence public awareness and attitudes toward law and legal actors. Further, by employing a diverse team of undergraduate and graduate research assistants, this project will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the research process.

This project represents the first-of-its-kind, large-scale examination of the portrayal of law and legality in LGBTQ+ media over an extended period of time. Theoretically, the researchers root their approach in the well-developed literatures on legal consciousness, issue salience, critical junctures, and judicial impact, while developing new expectations for how and when law and legality matter among affected communities.

Methodologically, the researchers will combine computational text analysis with rigorous human coding to investigate depictions of rights claiming and court decisions in LGBTQ+ media in the United States from 1969-2015. The analysis of the data will, first, identify and examine how the salience of legal issues in the LGBTQ+ community changes over time, and evaluate what influences those changes.

Second, the researchers will examine temporal shifts in the legal consciousness of the LGBTQ+ community, and identify the causes of those shifts. These analyses will shed new light on the ways in which cultural, social, political, and legal factors affect both the prominence of legal concepts in a marginalized community and the character of the legal consciousness of that community, including attitudes toward legal and political actors.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.