This article addresses the gap between normative expectations of the right to protest in liberal democracies and the continued practice of repressive protest policing. The empirical literature has identified three types of factors explaining repressive policing: macro- or societal-level factors, meso-level factors relating to the police organization, and micro-level factors pertaining to specific events. Yet these factors provide only a fragmented understanding of the phenomenon. In this article, we put forward a novel three-tiered methodology of scaled reading, which is able to examine all these explanations together. We use scaled reading to analyze the protocols of the Or Commission of Inquiry, which investigated lethal clashes between the Israeli police and Israel’s Arab minority in October 2000. Through large-scale algorithmic topic modeling, we found that all types of empirical explanations of repressive policing co-exist within the October events. The mid-scale analysis revealed that no type of explanation exclusively belongs to a specific group of actors. The small-scale reading of the most representative documents for each topic demonstrated that this coexistence of mechanisms is also present within single testimonies. Together, our findings challenge existing empirical categories and illuminate repressive policing as a nonlinear, nonbinary, noncausal, and nonunitary phenomenon. These insights help make sense of the phenomenon’s persistence in deeply divided societies.

Despite the fact that three-fifths of Czech judges are women, it would be a mistake to consider the Czech judiciary “feminized”: it is characterized by vertical gender segregation and a slow “defeminization” in positions of power and influence. The key to understanding both women’s presence overall and absence at the top is the gendered division of labor, especially in the home. The same reason why many women enter the judiciary—better reconciliation of private and professional lives than in other legal professions—is the reason why women do not progress—their “second shift” at home prevents them from ascending the career ladder.

We live in an age of datafication wherein nearly all aspects of our lives can be transformed into data and evaluated. The authors seek to make sense of the heightened datafication-enabled social control under China’s Social Credit System (SCS) by developing the concept of the data state. A “data state” is defined as a governance model enabling the state to comprehensively monitor, evaluate, and control its subjects through datafication, leaving them little room to defend their autonomy. We identify the multiple functions of the SCS in its development up to 2020 and analyze its inherent defects, including the decontextualized evaluation of individuals and the semi-automated imposition of disproportionate punishment. We argue that, if the SCS were to fully integrate its functions and connect to other data-driven governance initiatives, it would eventually allow the data self, carefully groomed by the state, to dominate the bio-self and turn China into a data state. Whereas China’s SCS may be unique and not easily replicated elsewhere, understanding its intricacies helps to enable the citizens of democratic societies to guard against the relentless growth of datafication that may result in an invincible and irreversible ecosystem for the emergence of a data state.

I propose a three-way model of negotiation on judicial mediation: the judge as a negotiator. Primarily drawing on ethnographic observations of a civil judge in a basic-level court in hinterland China, I document Chinese judges’ tactics at the micro level. I find that the Chinese judge not only “expands” and “narrows” claims. In addition, included in her repertoire are “repression,” “conversion,” and “facilitation.” Following this, I explore the inequitable consequences of the judge’s apparent success in disposing cases. In negotiating the claims, the judge convinces or cajoles litigants who are economically vulnerable, inexperienced in the courtroom, legally bewildered, or timid in confronting the judges’ authority, into the settlement. But she often facilitates the claims of litigants who can mount credible political resistance. The interests of those who are vulnerable in one way or another, but not in a position to initiate political threats, are often dispensed. Inequalities are thus generated, reproduced, and reinforced. This three-way negotiation model provides a new perspective to study judicial mediation comparatively.

Contemporary dictators routinely co-opt institutions crucial for democratic governance. Although an extensive literature examines why and how aspiring autocrats bring elections and parties under their control, constitutions—and the judicial or quasi-judicial bodies charged with interpreting constitutions—are often assumed to reflect the existing balance of power. But following regime change, constitutional courts’ power of review makes them integral for establishing political supremacy. We detail how President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan captured the Constitutional Court via its transformation into the Constitutional Council. The uncertainty and upheaval of the post-Soviet collapse created opportunities for formal institutional changes that made the court susceptible to executive capture. Nazarbayev subsequently used the council rulings to lay claim to democratic and constitutional legitimacy in a clear example of authoritarian constitutionalism. To trace the process of capture and legitimation, we examine key court rulings throughout the president’s tenure using a database of Constitutional Council decisions.

Governments are turning to online self-help courts in an effort to cut costs, increase access to the justice system, and, in response to the global pandemic, to reduce physical contact. But to what extent do these courts support pro se or self-represented litigants? This article reports a laboratory experiment which compared how laypeople (pro se) and lawyers explained the same justiciable problem in a mock online court portal. Retired judges also evaluated a subset of blinded claims and provided opinions on their quality. The study found that the overall quality of laypeople’s claiming was lower than lawyers but there were outliers: both high-quality lay-filed claims and low-quality lawyer-filed claims. Laypeople were not as good at reporting legally salient details and showed confusion about corporate responsibility. When laypeople did report legally salient detail, they sometimes did so without a clear purpose or did so unclearly, confusing the reader. The quality of lawyer-filed claims varied and some created overly complex claims that would be uneconomic to litigate. We suggest that designers of online courts can use the evidence from this experiment, and future research like it, to build interfaces that will assist pro se or self-represented to more clearly explain their disputes.

A 2011 New Jersey anti-bullying law required school personnel to make nuanced determinations about student violations, take on multiple new roles, and assume a high administrative burden. We examine how the state’s middle schools responded to the law during a period when standards for implementation among schools were unclear. We observe substantial variation between schools in their implementation approach and we identify two sources of this variation. First, parents, school district administrators and lawyers, state Department of Education staff, and private companies disseminated multiple, sometimes competing interpretations of the law and of bullying, to which school personnel were differentially exposed. Second, school personnel crafted their own implementation approach out of the varied interpretations from these organization field actors. In periods when legal standards are relatively settled, field actors often encourage conformity among organizations; in this case, by contrast, they contributed to variation in implementation. We argue that examining the on-the-ground interpretation of organization field meanings during unsettled periods may be particularly useful for understanding the trajectory of laws, as early variation provides the context in which organizational practices can become legal requirements.

After more than half a century of law and society scholarship, two recent volumes propose to survey and advance the field. Edited by Mariana Valverde, Kamari Clarke, Even Darian-Smith, and Prabha Kotiswaran, The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (2021) draws on an international list of contributors to refocus law and society scholarship on fresh topics and themes. The Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism (2021), edited by Shauhin Talesh, Elizabeth Mertz, and Heinz Klug, presents a comprehensive guide to the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement that emerged from law and society around fifteen years ago. This review essay explores how the volumes’ common call for a more prominent and methodologically diversified social science of law also encourages a renewed attention to the internal logics of legal doctrine.