Research on procedural justice and legitimacy has expanded greatly across the
social sciences in recent years. The process-based model of regulation, which
links people’s assessments of procedural justice and legitimacy to their compliance
with the law and legal authorities, has become particularly influential
in criminology and sociolegal studies. A review of the previous research on
perceived legitimacy highlights two important features. First, legitimacy has
been conceptualized and measured in many different ways. Second, most of
the research on legitimacy has focused on only a handful of developed nations.
Using survey data from Trinidad and Tobago, this article examines the conceptualization
and measurement of the perceived legitimacy of the law and
legal authorities. The findings indicate that some of the prominent conceptual
and measurement models used in previous research are not empirically valid
in the Trinidadian context. The implications of the results for conceptualization,
theory, and future research are discussed.