This article investigates how land users perceive laws restricting deforestation and forest degradation, notably Brazil’s National Forest Code, and how legal meaning emerges as place specific to influence their legal compliance. Interviews were held with land users in Acre state, a municipality with high rates of deforestation located in the forest frontier of the Brazilian Amazon. Critical legal geography was applied as a theoretical framework to investigate the ways in which legal meaning emerges in and through that social context. This research finds that non-compliance is associated with pervasive conditions of social stress combined with lived experiences of contradictory legal processes, including shifting legal discourses and inconsistent local law enforcement. In such social contexts, local legal meaning associates forest conservation laws with socio-economic and legal inequality and the reinforcement of structures of social exclusion.