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Through an ethnography of a terrorism trial that followed bomb‐blasts in Delhi in 2008, this article seeks to understand the centrality of files and documentary practices to the production of legal truth. By following key documents regarding the case against one man I call Fahad, I argue that the truth produced in a trial crucially depends a chain of seemingly insignificant certificatory practices‐the signatures, countersignatures, stamps, and seals that appear on documents. What emerges in the account I provide is that juridical truth is less a matter of finding 'what really happened,' and more about the competition between narratives that depend on the certificatory correctness of humble sheets of paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship finds that having an attorney in immigration legal proceedings increases the chances of a favorable outcome. This work, however, often acknowledges that the representation effect is underexplained: selection may explain outcomes, and variation among attorneys is difficult to assess. Through 103 interviews with attorneys who practice immigration law in three organizational environments (nonprofit legal services, private firms, and corporate law firm pro bono programs) in two East Coast areas, this paper argues that attorneys' sorting of clients between different types of legal organizations helps explain the representation effect. Attorneys define what type of case is a "good fit" for their representation, selecting cases they think they can help increase the probability of a favorable outcome. However, what they define as a "good fit" varies by attorneys' practice environments, and centers not only on the facts or characteristics of a client and their case, but also attorneys' organizational constraints. By documenting the central role of practice environment variation and its organizational constraints on attorneys' case selection, this paper helps explain the representation effect and its implications for increasing vulnerable immigrants' access to legal representation in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law and globalization studies have documented how Global South lawyers compete over the adaptation of international norms. Yet, little is known about how this adaptation legitimates worldviews beyond the law. To advance this literature, this paper proposes a discourse‐centered field analysis of the legal globalization of anti‐corruption ideas in Brazil. It examines Brazilian lawyers' disputes over a 2016 anti‐corruption bill. The bill supporters mobilize global anti‐corruption discourses that are exogenous to the legal field to defend harsher criminal law. Their critics counter the reform by mobilizing endogenous legal ideas against criminal law expansion. In so doing, they do not challenge reformers' ideas about corruption. I show how this discursive mismatch leads to a form of globalization by stealth, whereby local dynamics allow global ideas to remain unchallenged in local fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courts have long struggled to bridge the access‐to‐justice gap associated with in‐person hearings, which makes the recent adoption of online legal proceedings potentially beneficial. Online proceedings hold promise for better access: they occur remotely, can proceed asynchronously, and often rely solely on written communication. Yet these very qualities may also undermine some of the well‐established elements of procedural‐justice perceptions, a primary predictor of how people view the legal system's legitimacy. This paper examines the implications of shifting legal proceedings online for both procedural‐justice and access‐to‐justice perceptions. It also investigates the relationship of both types of perceptions with system legitimacy, as well as the relative weight these predictors carry across litigant income levels. Drawing on online traffic court cases, we find that perceptions of procedural justice and access to justice are each separately associated with a litigant's appraisal of system legitimacy, but among lower‐income parties, access to justice is a stronger predictor, while procedural justice dominates among higher‐income parties. These findings highlight the need to incorporate access‐to‐justice perceptions into existing models of legal legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In settler colonial states such as Canada, tax is central to political ideas that circulate about Indigenous nations and people. The stories that are told about Indigenous peoples by 'taxpayers' often involve complaints about budgets, welfare, and 'unfair' tax arrangements. The paper theorizes how informal 'tax imaginaries' and 'taxpayer' subjectivities are forged through state policy and how ostensibly fiscal concerns are imbricated with white political entitlement that erodes Indigenous legal and political sovereignty. By tracing the construction of taxpayer concerns and tax myths as forms of fiscalized racism, the paper demonstrates the importance of tax to settler colonialism and the shape of Indigenous‐settler relations. Taxpayer subjects are not just legal or material positionings in relation to tax and the state, but powerful subjects that refigure political problems as 'fiscal' and construct Indigenous people and nations through racialized repertoires of property and possession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The premise of Russia's 2012 "Foreign Agents" Law, one of the first such laws restricting foreign funding for non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), is that foreign monies equal foreign agendas. Since then, over 50 countries have adopted similar laws using a similar justification. This paper interrogates this claim of foreign donor influence through examining legal mobilization by human rights NGOs at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). We track donor support for litigation by providing an overview of all foundation grant flows relating to strategic litigation for 2013–2014, and then matching the granting activities of two major U.S. foundations over 14 years to human rights NGO participation in cases before the ECtHR. Further, through case studies of Russian NGOs, we assess the causal role that donor support has played in facilitating their increased involvement in ECtHR litigation. The combined analysis indicates broad patterns of private foundation support to litigating NGOs, but uncovers no evidence that foreign donors were "pushing" NGOs toward litigation as a strategy, but instead more evidence suggesting that NGOs convinced donors to support human rights litigation. Despite the inaccuracy of the justification underpinning Russia's foreign agent law, the law threatens the survival of human rights organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and to what extent do defense actors use publicity in trials of protesters in contemporary Russia? Why do they fight over strategic uses of publicity if "everything is decided in advance"? Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article finds, first, that publicity accompanies legal resistance to politicized prosecutions and is inventively used by the defense. Second, mobilization of publicity creates opportunities for the defense to bargain with and keep the prosecution in check. Third, the relationship between publicity and legal resistance in repressive settings is ambiguous. Some human rights lawyers embrace publicity and others avoid it. I argue that this divergence should be interpreted in relation to lawyers' embeddedness in different professional ecologies. At the same time, lawyers' publicity strategies are altered by the interactional dimension of the trial. The latter manifests itself on two levels: at the micro‐level of a courtroom and in the public sphere where different publics engage in debates that interfere with lawyers' defense strategies. This paper has broader implications for the analysis of defensive legal mobilization in dual legal systems beyond the Russian case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways in which grievance procedures are used and perceived by incarcerated people raise important questions about the operation of procedural justice and legal consciousness and mobilization scholarship in settings where rights are especially vulnerable. This paper analyzes perceptions and usage of the grievance procedure for incarcerated people using survey data from people (N = 508) in three prisons in Ireland. We find that incarcerated people's views of the grievance procedures are generally negative, though some use it, especially those serving long sentences and those in segregation, with education level not significant in terms of usage. Additionally, having confidence in staff is associated with satisfaction with the procedure, as is the perception that one's rights are respected, showing important connections between perceptions of complaints and aspects of legal consciousness. We suggest a need for further situated analyses of procedural justice and legal consciousness, as well as practical requirements for complaints systems to elicit confidence among incarcerated people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine consensual and coercive police–citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, popular legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages people to self‐regulate, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. But can consensual and coercive police–citizen relations be so easily disentangled in a city in which many people fear crime, where the ability to use force can often be palpable in even mundane police–citizen interactions, where some people fear police but also tolerate extreme police violence, and where the image of the military police as "just another (violent) gang" has significant cultural currency? Legitimacy has two components—assent (ascribed right to power) and consent (conferred right to govern)—and consistent with prior work from the US, UK, and Australia, we find that procedural justice is key to the legitimation of the police. Yet, the empirical link between legitimacy and legal compliance is complicated by ambivalent authority relations, rooted in part in heightened cultural expectations about police use of force to exercise power. We finish the paper with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand how decision‐making works at the first appearance hearings (Custody Hearings) in Brazil, an initiative that intends to make the Brazilian criminal justice system more accusatorial. We used primary data gathered in the hearings between April and December 2018 in nine Brazilian states. Binary logistic regression models were applied to identify the variables that affect the odds ratios of pretrial detention. Results indicated a high level of homology between the prosecutors' requests and the judges' decisions, even when controlling for the characteristics of offense and offender, which precludes any direct openness to the defense. Decision‐making in the Custody Hearing reinforces the inquisitorial characteristics and the institutional features of the Brazilian Criminal Justice System, suggesting that the reforms carried out over the last years were not able to change how actors operate on a daily basis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How, in a context of growing critiques of financialization, can law contribute to protecting the legitimacy of finance? This paper argues that the assignment of responsibilities between individuals and organizations plays a decisive role, using the recent Libor scandal as an empirical illustration. To do so, the paper offers a Foucauldian framework, the differential management of financial illegalisms, dedicated to the study of illegalities in financial capitalism. The comparison of the legal treatment of two manipulations of Libor, this key benchmark in financial markets, reveals how mid‐level traders have been the object of criminal prosecution, while law undervalued the role of top managers and organizations. To capture how differential management is performed in practice, I analyze precisely how the conflict‐resolution devices (criminal trial vs. settlement) and the social categorizations prevailing in the two manipulations of Libor favor different forms of responsibility, individual or organizational. I conclude by exploring the implications of law's relationship to financial legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perception that a high court's decision is binding and final is a crucial prerequisite for its ability to settle political conflicts. Under what conditions are citizens more likely to accept controversial judicial rulings? Mass acceptance is determined, in part, by how rulings are framed during public debate. This paper takes a broad view of the strategies and actors that influence the discursive environment surrounding judgments, calling attention to hitherto unexamined determinants of mass acceptance. We theorize that third parties can boost acceptance by pledging compliance, and that courts can moderate opposition by compensating losers. We also look at how populist attacks on judiciaries, common in contemporary democracies, affect acceptance. We test these propositions using a survey experiment conducted in the aftermath of the UK Supreme Court's Brexit decision, the most salient judgment handed down by this court to date. The paper moves the literature on courts and public opinion beyond the United States, and presents evidence backing largely untested assumptions at the heart of models of judicial behavior regarding the benefits of crafting rulings with an eye on the preferences of key audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities face a dilemma in determining how to create fair, consistent, and reliable processes that respect the rights of both alleged perpetrators and victims and encourage people to bring complaints forward. Using the literature on non‐law forms of ordering and neo‐institutional theory, this article examines university Ombuds and Title IX Coordinators and their handling of sexual misconduct disputes. Primary data collection included a review of 1200 documents and interviews with 14 Ombuds and 13 Title IX Coordinators from 22 large institutions of higher education between 2011 and 2014. This study concludes that Ombuds and Title IX Coordinators, despite being designed in sharply contrasting ways, converge (but not fully) toward a hybrid of formality and informality. This paper examines Title IX to understand what drives convergence behavior and to analyze how the recent changes in the law may alter the process of convergence. As Title IX law continues to develop, the theory of procedural convergence has important implications for the creation of non‐law dispute mechanisms and the balance between individual rights and the organizational development of legal norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prison laws and policies often do not explicitly state the rights and privileges for the individuals residing there. This space is a unique example of where the law‐on‐the‐books meet the law‐in‐action—a place where "law‐in‐between" operates in the hands of street‐level workers. Using data collected from interviews with restricted housing unit residents and staff in four men's prisons, this paper examines how the law‐in‐between operates in a highly structured and punitive environment. Findings reveal agreement among residents and staff regarding general definitions and perceptions of rights, with some similarities regarding what rights are broadly. However, divergence exists in discussion of how rights are accessed in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major aim of this article is to examine how migrations affect private governance, taking as a case study the Prud'homie de pêche, a private order that has governed the fishery of Marseille for the past six centuries. Scholarship generally argues that social norms guarantee the efficiency of private orders and their ability to resist the arrival of newcomers. My data suggest that the Prud'homie has failed to accommodate social changes prompted by migratory flows, not despite but because of its social norms. This paper suggests that social norms are not only powerful tools of governance for private orders, but also forces of inertia that can prevent these orders from accommodating social changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether—and if so how—a 2002 European Directive on sexual harassment has changed the practice and content of sexual harassment law in France. It finds that the European Directive shaped how French courts address sexual harassment and informed the content of a new sexual harassment law France passed in 2012. Yet, its influence has been mediated by dominant national attitudes about: (1) the nature of sexual harassment, (2) which legal institutions are best suited to address it, and (3) the character of women who claim to have been harassed. This paper further suggests that news reporting on a 2011 arrest of a French politician for sexual assault led to more positive attitudes about sexual harassment victims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1997, Canada's youth custodial facilities held 3825 sentenced youths. Eighteen years later, this number was 527—an 86 percent reduction. Overall youth imprisonment (sentenced + pretrial detention) decreased by approximately 73 percent. This paper uses Canada's successful decarceration of youths to understand what might be learned about decarceration more broadly. By examining the reforms that transpired in Canada's treatment of young offenders since the 1960s and the political/cultural shifts that occurred since the 1990s, we demonstrate that the decline resulted from changes occurring in various parts of the system. Finally, we contrast this decarceration with more than 60 years of relative stability of Canadian adult imprisonment rates as well as Canada's failure to substantially decrease youth pretrial detention in order to identify those factors seemingly necessary to reduce imprisonment more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legislative and policy interventions in response to the organ trade have centered on the introduction of criminal sanctions in an effort to deter organ sales and/or 'trafficking.' Yet, such measures fail to take account of the social and political processes that facilitate the exploitation of individuals in organ markets in different contexts. Informed by empirical data, gathered via a series of in-depth interviews with Sudanese migrants who have sold a kidney, this paper examines the link between increased urbanization, migration patterns, informalization, and the emergence of organ markets in the Egyptian-Sudanese context. The findings illustrate how processes of legal marginalization and social exclusion leave people vulnerable to exploitation in organ markets. The prevailing law enforcement response does not capture or respond to the empirical reality. Accordingly, this paper shifts the emphasis away from criminalization toward an analysis of the legal barriers and policy decisions that shape the poor bargaining position of organ sellers. In doing so, it opens up discussion of the organ trade onto wider critiques that disrupt boundaries between formality and informality in labor markets and trouble dominant modes of criminalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using court decisions, interviews with legal actors, and ethnographic observations, this paper analyzes the development of sexual identity classifications for sexual minorities seeking asylum in the United States and argues that the adjudication of such claims works to consolidate and regulate sexual identities but also creates possibilities for recognizing marginalized queer identities. Asylum seekers must prove their sexual identities, and immigration officials must classify claimants as belonging to a protected group. At the inception of queer asylum law in 1990, protected categories were highly circumscribed, but the indeterminacy of the law allowed advocates and asylum seekers to challenge existing categories and stake out new claims based on their sexualities. Against the backdrop of extant criticisms of the asylum process for queers, this paper suggests that the way asylum law has been elaborated, adapted, and interpreted, particularly in approximately the past decade, offers possibilities for making unique identity claims that are not recognized in existing scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manner in which political institutions convey their policy outcomes can have important implications for how the public views institutions' policy decisions. This paper explores whether the way in which the U.S. Supreme Court communicates its policy decrees affects how favorably members of the public assess its decisions. Specifically, we investigate whether attributing a decision to the nation's High Court or to an individual justice influences the public's agreement with the Court's rulings. Using an experimental design, we find that when a Supreme Court outcome is ascribed to the institution as a whole, rather than to a particular justice, people are more apt to agree with the policy decision. We also find that identifying the gender of the opinion author affects public agreement under certain conditions. Our findings have important implications for how public support for institutional policymaking operates, as well as the dynamics of how the Supreme Court manages to accumulate and maintain public goodwill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do courts award noneconomic damages? Does it matter if the state is the defendant? This article addresses these questions in the context of medical malpractice appeals to the Spanish Supreme Court. Moreover, this study provides the first empirical analysis of the quantification of noneconomic damages in medical malpractice cases in administrative courts, where the state is the defendant, and in civil courts. This separation of jurisdictions is a common feature in civil law tradition countries. Yet, critics of this separation in general, and specialized courts in particular, argue that parties might be subject to different treatments and that similar cases might reach different outcomes, namely in terms of the quantification of damages. A consistent result of this paper is that no significant differences between noneconomic damages in civil and administrative appeals were found. The separation of jurisdictions does not necessarily imply that courts reach different outcomes, even when the state is the defendant. Citizens should not refrain from bringing their claims forward against the state, a more powerful party. In the current era of increasing juridification and judicialization of modern life (Ginsburg 2009; Hirschl 2006; Hirschl 2011), it is crucial for society that citizens and other parties litigating with the state are not disadvantageously treated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010, like many African countries since the 1990s, Kenya passed a new constitution. This constitution aimed to get rid of many past issues including the definition of citizenship. Globally, two general principles govern the acquisition of citizenship, descent from a citizen (jus sanguinis), and the fact of birth within a state territory (jus soli). In contrast to the prior Constitution that required both descent from Kenyan parents and birth in Kenya, the 2010 Constitution adopted a rule of citizenship by descent alone (jus sanguinis) from either parent. However, today Kenya is faced with a conundrum first articulated by Aristotle: how do you understand and operationalize citizenship by descent in a new state, or in the case of Kenya, one that has only just turned fifty? The crux of this conundrum is determining the basis of the citizenship of parents who precede the polity and therefore what they can transfer to their children. Understanding that articulations of citizenship are also systems of exclusion, this paper asks who can and cannot be a Kenyan citizen and why? What are the unintended consequences of efforts to escape Aristotle's conundrum? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural land registration has frequently been recommended as a step forward for developing countries. Registration is conceived not only as a means of clarifying property rights and promoting land markets, but also as a way to protect the rights of women and other vulnerable groups and prevent environmental degradation. This package of advantages was once associated with the land rights of individuals. However, more recently, customary interests have been recognized as important for social peace and as serving local conceptions of justice. In recognition of these objectives, Ethiopia and some other countries of sub‐Saharan Africa have formally recognized what are often called "customary land rights." Ethiopia is cited as a model of this approach in a multicultural setting. This paper shows, however, that serious problems associated with rural land registration have not disappeared. Fieldwork evidence from parts of Ethiopia suggests that customary property interests often go unrecognized. It also shows that the bargaining power of smallholder farmers who rent land to commercial farmers is being reduced. Simultaneously, there is an evident shift in decision‐making power from households and communities to the state and officials. The complexity of these matters in practice raises questions about the interpretation of Ethiopian land policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an ethnographic analysis of the ways that employees of an emergency shelter create and maintain order. The paper applies the framework of legal consciousness to explicate the practices of the employees that amount to 'private ordering.' The employees administer the rules of the shelter in the context of an 'ethic of care,' but one that is outside the purview of formal law. This ethic, however, is polysemic, and the employees, therefore, must adopt diverse styles based on their understandings of their professional roles regarding the needs of the clients. The practices of two employees are highlighted in detail, whose strategies in applying and maintaining adherence to shelter rules are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. Both make decisions in a somewhat spontaneous and, more importantly, inconsistent, fashion. Despite the complications that arise from applying the rules as such, the employees tolerate, even laud and celebrate, these methods. While this system of private ordering has little resemblance to the ordered, consistent, and rigid application of formal law, it allows the employees to administer diverse strategies of ethics of care and shape practices to fit their professional roles and the complex exigencies of an emergency shelter. The paper locates the extant private ordering not in the law, nor in its shadow-assumed to be preconditions-but outside or beyond them. Given that this ordering is founded against the law-it is not law, nor law-like and has no desire to so be-the paper suggests that it can be thought of as private ordering proper and lays the framework for theorization that accounts for its instrumental and symbolic dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a qualitative empirical examination of the noncompliance of Israeli female welfare recipients with welfare laws and authorities. The paper demonstrates that their behavior, defined as 'welfare fraud' by the law, is a limited form of collective resistance to the Israeli welfare state. Although the acts of welfare fraud that the women in my study engaged in entail a political claim against the state, the relationship between these acts and notions of collectivity is very constricted in form. The women's collectivity is shown to be constrained by the welfare authorities' invasive and pervasive investigation practices and methods. Due to fear of disclosure to the authorities, the women emerged as deliberately isolating themselves from their immediate environment and potential members of their like-situated collective. This weakens the connection between the women's acts of resistance and their collectivity, and prevents their acts of resistance from driving social change, trapping them in their harsh conditions and existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the hypothesis that litigants' perceived procedural justice is positively associated with their trust in judges. We argue that although this association might seem quite robust, it can vary across contexts. In particular, we suggest that the nature and magnitude of the association between procedural justice and trust in judges depends on outcome concerns, and other sociolegal moderators such as outcome importance and prior court experience. We tested our predictions in three different types of law cases among 483 litigants at court hearings of the district court of the Mid‐Netherlands. As predicted, our results indicate that perceived procedural justice was positively associated with trust in judges when outcomes were relatively favorable, and that this association was even stronger when outcomes were relatively unfavorable. The courtroom context studied here enabled us to explore how other sociolegal variables moderated these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the sociology of international commercial arbitration on the basis of unexploited archives and data. This material casts new light on the competition between 'grand old men' and 'young technocrats' in the 1980s and 1990s, a theme that has structured the analysis of international commercial arbitration since the pioneering work of Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth ( Dealing in Virtue). In contrast, the data show that the crucial transformative period actually took place between the 1950s and 1970s, when a relatively well-defined group of individuals emerged as the leading arbitrators at the International Chamber of Commerce. These individuals- the 'secant marginals'-succeeded in constructing a cooperative interface (rather than competition) between otherwise separate legal systems and professions. In doing so, they created the conditions necessary for the emergence of a new transnational legal profession. At a more general level, the article proposes an alternative narrative of globalization, wherein actors operating at the intersection of various systems, create new arenas of governance on the basis of inter-system cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continued relevance of customary law for the regulation of the daily lives of Africa's citizens poses serious governance challenges to sovereign states, such as how best to regulate customary dispute settlement. While confronted with largely similar problems, the South African government proposed to enhance and regulate the position of its traditional courts, whereas Malawi has opted for the creation of hybrid local courts that combine characteristics of regular state courts and customary fora to be the main avenue of customary law cases. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and displays how the two countries' historical and political contexts enable and constrain their regulatory choices in the field of customary dispute settlement, as well as influence the risk and benefits of the various options. In this respect, the political power of the traditional leaders is a significant determinant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on in-depth, qualitative interviews that examine individual experiences in two different legal contexts: deportation regimes and supermax prisons. Through putting these contexts and experiences into dialogue, we identify common legal processes of punishment experiences across both contexts. Specifically, the U.S. legal system re-labels immigrants (as deportable noncitizens) and supermax prisoners (as dangerous gang offenders). This re-labeling begins a process of othering, which ends in categorical exclusions for both immigrants and supermax prisoners. As individuals experience this categorical exclusion, they cross multiple borders and boundaries-often against their will-moving from prison to detention center to other countries beyond the U.S. border, and from isolation to prison to 'free' society. In both cases, the state action that subjects experience as punishment is civil and, therefore, nominally not punitive. Ultimately, excluded individuals find themselves in a space of legal nonexistence. By examining these common processes and experiences, we argue that a new kind of subject is revealed: a disintegrating subject (as opposed to a juridical or disciplinary subject) whose exclusion reinforces the power of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to calls to 'decenter' American penality beyond the carceral apparatus, this article ethnographically examines administrative process and dissects how it interlocks with criminal justice. To do so, it draws on an admittedly unusual, but theoretically generative, case: administrative gun boards, charged with issuing, denying, revoking, and suspending licenses to conceal carry a firearm. While scholars have examined gun ownership and gun carrying as a social practice, less attention has been paid to gun licensing as a state practice. Drawing on observations of over 900 cases from gun board meetings in two counties in Michigan, this paper examines how administrative process mimics, supplements, and facilitates criminal justice through three mechanisms: procedural pains, in which administrative process resembles criminal justice; parallel punishment, in which administrative process supplements criminal justice through withholding of benefits, entitlements or licenses; and valve-turning, in which administrative process funnels, or threatens to funnel, claimants into the criminal justice system. Revealing how administrative process and criminal justice become mutually reinforcing, the findings extend and integrate scholarship that shows the material, symbolic, and psychic implications of criminal justice contact, on the one hand, with the increased tendency of administrative contexts to resemble criminal justice institutions, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What were the consequences of penal transportation to the New World for eighteenth-century British criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and the Parliamentary Papers, this study examines sentencing and execution trends in eighteenth-century London. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the passage of the 1718 Transportation Act that made transportation available as a penal sentence, thus enabling one to assess the 'effect' of transportation on penal trends. This study finds that the primary consequence of the adoption of transportation was to make the criminal justice net more dense by subjecting people to a more intense punishment. While it was also associated with a small decline in capital sentences for some types of offenders, the adoption of transportation was also associated with an increase in the rate at which condemned inmates were executed. The study closes with a discussion of the conditions that may lead to law's unintended consequences, including the mesh-thinning consequences observed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes toward legal authorities based on theories of procedural justice have been explored extensively in the criminal and civil justice systems. This has provided considerable empirical evidence concerning the importance of trust and legitimacy in generating cooperation, compliance, and decision acceptance. However, not enough attention has been paid to attitudes towards institutions of informal dispute resolution. This paper asks whether the theory of procedural justice applies to the alternative dispute resolution context, focusing on ombuds services. What are the predictors of perceptions of procedural justice during the process of dealing with an ombuds, and what factors shape outcome acceptance? These questions are analyzed using a sample of recent ombuds users. The results indicate that outcome favorability is highly correlated with perceived procedural justice, and both predict decision acceptance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks what crime prevention looks like for residents in informal settlements in Khayelitsha, a black township on the outskirts of Cape Town. It engages with the idea of vigilantism and hybrid policing formations, analyzing the overlaps and intersections between legal community-based crime prevention initiatives, and local 'punitive practices'. The focus is not on the intensely violent spectacle of 'mob justice', where suspects are killed, but on the more ubiquitous, hybrid formations that also fall on the vigilantism continuum. These include coercive practices such as banishment, corporal punishment, retrieval of stolen goods by local policing formations and, trials conducted by street committees. The core argument I make is that, at times, particularly in poor areas where the state is absent and encourages citizens to take responsibility for their own crime prevention, the boundary between legality and coercive illegality collapses in on itself. Thus, the notion of voluntarism, that is so important to official discourse on crime, is particularly problematic when applied in poor communities with high rates of unemployment and high crime rates. As such, the state's encouraging of citizens to take responsibility for their own safety, alongside a punitive state discourse on crime and criminality, creates the space for illegal vigilante style actions to emerge in the shadow of legal crime prevention initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top-down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on a paper "Do the "Haves" Still Come Out Ahead." The paper was conceived in an age of hopefulness that saw the triumph of civil rights movements, the proliferation of public interest law, and many experiments in access to justice. Although establishment lawyers found the ferment worrisome, it was a heady time for those who ardently wished to transform law from an instrument of oppression into a tool of liberation. The "Haves" paper was a challenge to the judicial triumphalism that was the received wisdom of the progressive wing of the U.S. legal academy. In effect, it attempted to show that, examined from the bottom up, the U.S. displayed in a subtle form many of the contradictions that rendered grand programs of reform largely symbolic in their results. The recoil by society's managers and authorities against the enlargement of accountability and of remedy for "have not's" is an important component of the movements for deregulation and tort reform. The enlargement of rights and the heightened expectation of protection and remedy that is under attack is one of the master trends of law in the twentieth century.

The article focuses on a research paper entitled "Why the "Haves" Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change," by sociologist Marc Galanter, in which he analyzed the limits of a legal system, such as that of the U.S., to achieve redistributive outcomes. Galanter described a complex structure of social action in which repeat players engage in the litigation game very differently from one-shot players, or those who have only occasional recourse to the courts. Although Galanter pointed out that the repeat players are not necessarily the "haves" of the world, there is considerable overlap among these statuses. Galanter used a vernacular phrase in the title to his paper suggests that he recognized that the perception that "haves' come out ahead" was common knowledge. Assuming that this perception is common, here one considers the significance of this knowing for believing. Although the idea of ideology as false consciousness has largely been abandoned by social scientists because such uses seemed to denigrate the lived experience of citizen subjects while valorizing expert or professional accounts, the concept often retains an element of concealment.

As the papers and discussion on the first day of the conference suggested, the tension between civil and religious loyalties is central theme of citizenship in Southeast Asian nation-sates. The separate law, courts, and customs of Muslim citizens and the complexity of dealing with marriages and divorces involving a Muslim and a non-Muslim were recurring themes in a number of the essays. Sociologist Mehrun Siraj's paper focused as well on the issue of how a law that is seen as God-given, such as the Quran, can be made more accessible, so that the fundamental gender equalities dictated by the Quran can be found. Finally, there was discussion of what divorce or polygamy or marriage meant where religious differences, rural-urban differences, or gender differences marked radically different practices. The discussion of polygamy also took up rural/urban differences, as well as class differences, but there was more focus on its economic and symbolic significance, for both men and women, across national and ethnic boundaries. The discussions of divorce and of polygamy are closely connected in that both raise the question of rights for different women who are or have been married to the same man. In addition, both divorce and polygamy raise questions of interpretation and questions about official versus unofficial practices.

In this paper we seek to contribute to a greater understanding of legal citizenship by exploring the gendered experiences of Latin- American-origin immigrants in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area as they go through the legalization process. To explore this gendered angle we rely on in-depth interviews conducted from 1998 through 2008 with women and men from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico. The data reveal that although immigration policies and procedures are presumably gender neutral, they are in fact inflected with gendered meanings and enacted in gendered social structures. Gender ideologies permeate the processes to differentially affect the legalization, permanent legal residence, and citizenship processes of immigrant women and men. This article points to key gender inequalities in immigration law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the voter registration, turnout, and party registration in the 2008 general election for men with felony convictions in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, and North Carolina. The findings indicate that turnout among felons is much lower than previous research has shown. Ex-felon turnout in 2008 varied by state, averaging 22.2 percent. People captured and convicted for their first offense after the election voted at similarly low rates. Also contrary to the expectations of previous literature, the ex-felon population does not seem overwhelmingly Democratic. In North Carolina and Florida, two states for which the data are available, party registration varies by race. Among registered black male ex-felons, 71.7 percent in North Carolina and 84.2 percent in Florida are registered Democrats. Among whites, however, only 35.3 percent and 36.4 percent of ex-felons are registered Democrats in North Carolina and Florida, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of legal claims by government officials and citizens in everyday political encounters involving civil rights. Data come from 580 letters sent to the federal government between 1939 and 1941, and from the replies sent by the newly formed Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department. In almost every case, the department refused to intervene and explained its refusal by making legal claims about federal jurisdiction. These legal claims masked the department's discretionary choices and thus helped depoliticize the encounters. Surprisingly, however, a substantial number of letter writers challenged the government's legal claims by deploying their own legal and moral arguments. The willingness of these citizens to challenge official legal pronouncements cautions against making broad generalizations about the capacity of ordinary people to respond effectively when government officials deploy legal rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and to what extent does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? How important is it compared to other incentives and mechanisms of social control, and how does it interact with those mechanisms? How might we explain variation in corporate responses to law and other external pressures? This article addresses these questions through an study of environmental performance in 14 pulp and paper manufacturing mills in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Georgia in the United States. Over the last three decades, we find tightening regulatory requirements and intensifying political pressures have brought about large improvements and considerable convergence in environmental performance by pulp manufacturers, most of which have gone “beyond compliance” in several ways. But regulation does not account for remaining differences in environmental performance across facilities. Rather, “social license” pressures (particularly from local communities and environmental activists) and corporate environmental management style prod some firms toward better performance compliance than others. At the same time, economic pressures impose limits on “beyond performance” investments. In producing large gains in environmental performance, however, regulation still matters greatly, but less as a system of hierarchically imposed, uniformly enforced rules than as a coordinative mechanism, routinely interacting with market pressures, local and national environmental activists, and the culture of corporate management in generating environmental improvement while narrowing the spread between corporate leaders and laggards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of the audience in the process that transformed executions from public spectacles to hidden rituals, and makes visible the ambiguities and uncertainties that accompanied the transportation of capital punishment from its monarchical origins to a modern democratic setting. From this vantage point, the evolving responses to concerns associated with the execution audience share many characteristics with efforts to control other problematic audiences. And yet, the particular forms that audience manipulation in the context of executions took cannot be fully understood without considering the occasion that brought the audience into being. Viewed as a mirror held up to the execution, the audience, whether conceptualized as a rowdy crowd or a solemn group of witnesses, emerges as a constitutive element of the execution and, in this sense, carries the potential to grant, or deny, legitimacy to the event and, by extension, capital punishment itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the author focuses on the research paper by Marco Verweij, which offers a promising approach for studying the effectiveness of rules for achieving environmental goals. He argues that the adversarial culture of the U.S. compared to the cooperative culture in civil law nations meant that firms in Europe were more proactive in cleaning up their emissions than was the case in the U.S. Verweij claims that all the nations on his study are industrial democracies and that the only relevant difference lies in their legal cultures. Verweij assumes that chemicals found in sample of water from the Great Lakes or at the outlet of the river Rhine reflect the success or failure of reduction of toxic substance released by industries. The use of similar waterways would help to clarify the merits and weaknesses of his larger argument about rules. For example, a comparison of cleanup in the connecting rivers between the Great Lakes versus the Rhine would have come somewhat closer to the biophysical mark.

The article focuses on a paper "Why the "Haves" Come Out Ahead" by sociologist Marc Galanter, which has been exceptionally influential, and for good reason. Its analytic elegance and power particularly in its famous distinction, between repeat players and one-shotters, have illuminated many aspects of the legal process. The "Haves" article also, provided a coherent theoretical account of how the fates of "have not" parties in the legal system may be improved: by upgrading their capacities for longer-term strategic action, principally through increasing the funding of legal services, improving access to legal knowledge and skills, and organizing diffuse "have not" classes as repeat players. The "Haves" article balanced critical realism with a basis for hopeful aspiration for something better. Its realism did not descend into fatalism, but its hope did not rise to naiveté. The relative success of repeat players has been borne out in a large body of empirical research, and is reaffirmed in several articles in this symposium. Much of the research has justifiably used individuals and organizations as proxies for one shotters and repeat players.

A discussion of the differences between local understandings of property and Western influenced government land policies led to an exchange over cultural differences between the "East" and the "West." Some economists emphasized differences, contrasting Western notions of private property with Eastern concern for the uses of land and Western stress on individual rights with Eastern concern for social duty and obligation. Others are gued against simple East-West contrasts, suggesting that Westerners recognize both rights and obligations but invoke them in different contexts. Given the bleak picture of evicted farmers and devastated forests that emerged from the papers and discussions, economist Joel Handler asked if anyone knew of successful development projects. His question set off a lively discussion, reflected in the excerpts below. Economists asked, "development for whom?" which led into suggestions on how to spread the costs of development more evenly to avoid enriching the already rich and further impoverishing the already poor.

The article presents a comment by the author on the presidential address given by researcher Joel Handler in 1992 at the annual meeting of Law and Society Association. Spike Lee's motion picture "Do the Right Thing." It is an auteurial tour-de-force by way of a postmodern fable for the ages that is self-consciously perplexing and inconclusive. While focusing on the competing imperatives of the pacificism of U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King's assimilationist politics, Lee poses the more general and debilitating dilemma that faces those committed to decisive action in an opaque world. Lee seems to go further and contend that there is no way of knowing whether the attempt to "do the right thing," might turn out to be another way to "do the wrong thing." In his presidential address, Joel Handler stated that he was unimpressed by this cinematic portrayal of the political activist's existential predicament. In this research paper, the author tries to suggest the error of Handler's perspective by defending postmodernism as an effective and viable theoretical resource in a radical project of transformative politics.

This article focuses on the emergence of sociolegal studies over the past twenty-five years through an analysis of the development of the Law and Society Association. The paper takes the view that this scholarly field is best understood from a broad-based, multidisciplinary perspective that includes, but does not privilege, legal scholarship. Also, the article argues that sociolegal studies has been pluralistic, self-reflective, and dynamic since its Inception and that current critiques must be examined in light of this past. Three areas of contemporary concern--the centrality of law; the impact of policy, politics, and reform motives; and the nature of science--are assessed In terms of sociolegal studies specifically and social science inquiry more generally. Opportunities for growth and change are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The section discusses several issues affecting the publication and readership of Law & Society Review journal. This journal is vital to the interdisciplinary enterprise of law and society. The editor have adopted the practice of using his editorial board as a resource to assist authors in finding ways to broaden the potential appeal of their articles. The editor plan to turn to the associate editors for advice, both on reviewers and on manuscripts, when he find myself uncertain on how to proceed. The Law and Society Association membership list, and the areas of interests members indicate on their membership application and renewal forms, are particularly useful. The major change in process is that the journal have moved from the traditional system of paper submissions to a system in which all submissions, requests for reviews and communications with authors are handled electronically. During the first few months of the operation, the electronic submission was handled through simple e-mail attachments plus a Web-based reviewer's evaluation form. It will make it easier for authors located outside North America to submit to the Review and easier, cheaper and quicker for the editor to include reviewers who reside outside North America.

In this article the author commonest on the research paper related to environmental degradation by Marco Verweij. According to the author Verweij has suggested a very interesting approach to the comparative study of regulation. The fundamental basis of comparison of water quality, between lakes and rivers is nonsense as currently constructed. But this just highlights the crucial problem before us as we attempt to link changes in policy, which are supposed to influence human systems, with non-human systems. In her comments the author suggests other ways to set up the biophysical system so that the systematic comparison of regulatory systems and their electiveness could be made. It may not be possible to match scales between human and non-human systems exceptionally well at first, but at least we could get closer to the mark by comparing comparable biophysical evidences.