Abstract
Legitimacy of law is a phenomenon discussed for decades or rather centuries. However, the legal scholars have focused on disputations on various sources of the legitimacy, i.e. the arguments, whereby the law could be justified, rather than the essence and content of the legitimacy itself.
Therefore, this contribution uses a different approach towards legitimacy, asking what exactly means the legitimacy of law within the conditions of democratic society and how could it be measured rather than how can we justify the law. For those purposes the contribution introduces the concept of legal consciousness in its broadest possible meaning, where it becomes the crucial component or even an equivalent of the legitimacy.
The core of the matter is therefore the relationship between the legitimacy of law and the legal consciousness. The contribution also introduces the behavioral legal science approach, which makes it possible to empirically estimate the concept of legal consciousness in the population and thus offers the information about the current level of legitimacy of law in the society.