Lawyers for conservative and libertarian causes are active in organizing and mobilizing interest groups within the conservative coalition, and networks of relationships among those lawyers help to maintain and shape the coalition. Using data gathered in interviews with seventy-two such lawyers, this article analyzes characteristics of the lawyers and the structure of their networks. The findings suggest that the networks are divided into segments or blocks that are identified with particular constituencies, but that a distinct set of actors with extensive relationships serves to bridge the constituencies. Measures of centrality and brokerage confirm the structural importance of these actors in the network, and a search of references in news media confirms their prominence or prestige. This “core” set of actors occupies the “structural hole” in the network that separates the business constituency from religious conservatives. Libertarians, located near the core of the network, also occupy an intermediate position. Regression analysis of ties within the network suggests that the Federalist Society plays an important role in bringing the lawyers together.

Before the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, scholars consistently pointed to the presence of divided government as an underlying reason for conflict in the confirmation process for U.S. Supreme Court nominees. However, the importance of party unity and coalition-building appointments—each of which highlights the role of the president in the process—should not be underestimated in these confirmation battles. Moreover, an examination of the sixty twentieth-century nominations reveals that a presidency-focused political regimes model provides significant explanatory force for understanding when and what types of nominees are likely to face the most resistance in the Senate. It does so by incorporating Stephen Skowronek's analytical framework for understanding presidential authority to explain how and why different periods of political time affect presidential attempts to shape the U.S. Supreme Court through appointments. In turn, the model places recent conflict in the confirmation process in historical context.

In this article, we analyze how pluralistic, competitive, and conflictual interest group amicus curiae participation is in the U.S. Supreme Court. Examining participating organizations and briefs during the 1995 term, we address three inquiries. First, we scrutinize the types of organized interests who participate as amici curiae. We find that the Court is open to a wide array of interests and that particular types of groups do not dominate amicus activity. Second, we analyze the frequency with which amici file briefs on opposing sides of dispute. We reveal few strict patterns of competition, suggesting that Supreme Court cases are salient to a diverse spectrum of interest groups, many of which are not usually thought of as being in competition with one another. Third, we investigate how often and which amici directly cite one another for purposes of invalidating each other's argumentation. While amici have a great deal of opportunity for this form of direct conflict, it is surprisingly rare. Nonetheless, when amici engage in this express form of discord, they play a clear role in shaping the flow of information at the Court.

While affirmative action in universities is the subject of extensive empirical scholarship, little research has been conducted on the role of university officials in crafting, defending, and transforming race-based affirmative admissions. Through forty-five in-depth interviews with thirty-nine admissions officials and top administrators at three selective public universities between 1999 and 2004, this study uncovers how a near-consensus in favor of race-based affirmative action has emerged among these players. Whereas scholars, citizens, and activists debate the morality and legality of race-based affirmative action as an equal opportunity policy, admissions decision makers have come to view race-based affirmative action in addition as a central, diversity management technique. This article claims that interest group capture theory and judicial implementation theory are insufficient to explain the diversity consensus. I suggest that neoinstitutional organizational theory has great potential to describe and situate the thought processes leading these key actors to forge this policy transformation.

This article considers two recent books in the history of childhood, youth, and the law: Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent and Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children. It argues that these works mark the emergence of age as a category of analysis in sociolegal studies. It calls for further investigations in the legal history of childhood and youth, outlines several areas of interest, and suggests that attention to age will alter how scholars look at the law by complicating key concepts such as innocence, authority, and citizenship. Studies of age and the law could benefit from cross-cultural and transnational approaches.

The history of the legal profession has been dominated by Richard Abel's monopolization thesis, and by Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik's political model of lawyers as maintainers of liberal polities. By contrast, Assaf Likhovski's legal history of mandate Palestine treats lawyers and judges as cultural intermediaries who shaped the legal identity of Jewish and Arab communities. This article situates Likhovski's book within a growing body of scholarship on non-European lawyering in the British Empire. It links Likhovski's case studies to legal figures from colonial India, West Africa, and Malaya, all of whom acted as cultural translators and ethnographic intermediaries in the formation of colonial identities.

This article analyzes a number of yearly reports from the World Bank's Doing Business project, an ambitious international effort to measure various aspects of law and development, analyze their interrelationship, develop benchmarks for assessment of legal systems, and suggest legal reforms. After describing the methodology used, we analyze the strengths and limitations of the project, both as a scholarly enterprise and as a set of proposals for legal reform. Our analysis highlights the challenges associated with measuring legal variables in the face of legal complexity and uncertainty, measuring development when the concept of development is contested, tracing causal connections between law and development, and using scholarly research as a basis for legal reform.