This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article, I offer an overview of these texts across several traditions and a defense of their importance in the study of comparative constitutional law. I then draw on fieldwork from Sri Lanka to provide a firsthand account of what a modern religious constitution looks like and how it works to govern one of the country’s largest communities of Buddhist monks. I conclude by urging scholars to view religion and constitutional law not as opposing legal domains but, rather, as homologous forms of social ordering that draw upon similar concepts and logics to address common human dilemmas.

What labor rights do police workers have? How are they legally delimited? This article addresses these questions through a case study of government responses to attempts by police constables in post/colonial South Asia to express job-related grievances and establish employee unions. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents collected in India over fifteen years, the analysis demonstrates that, for more than a century, class warfare within police organizations has manifested in counter-insurgency “lawfare” between senior officials and subordinate personnel regarding whether and how the latter may collectively organize to transform their living and working conditions. It further shows how in this context law as a social field has worked to subjectify rank-and-file police as an ironically exploitable and expendable class of laborers who are always already suspect of rebelling against the state that they have sworn to serve. Through revelations of a long history of structural servitude compelling subaltern police in South Asia to do questionably legal types of labor, this study raises challenging questions about how police work has been conceived and practiced globally as “security labor” and how, moving forward, we must work to reimagine what police work is, what it can be, and what it ought to be.

Although legitimacy is crucial for courts’ efficacy, the sources identified as legitimizing domestic institutions are weaker or absent altogether for international institutions. We use an original, preregistered, nationally representative survey experiment to show that perceived home-state interest strongly affects the legitimacy afforded by UK citizens to the International Criminal Court. Importantly, this relationship is moderated by nationalism. Our findings have implications for state actors in a position to act vis-á-vis international courts, elites seeking to alter opinions toward courts, and courts themselves weighing possible institutional costs of acting against noncompliant states.

Prior to the modern understanding of sex as fundamentally biological, a person’s sex status—that is, whether they were male or female—was largely a legal issue. How was this legal fact established in cases of doubt? To answer that question, this article tells the story of the regulation of cases of doubtful sex (the cases of people who were then referred to as hermaphrodites) between 1629 and 1787 in England and Colonial America. Trials of doubtful sex from this period show that, rather than being based on a single piece of evidence (such as genital appearance), determining a person’s sex required a rich and context-sensitive evaluation by witnesses and juries. However, toward the end of the eighteenth century, scientific and medical authorities gradually sought to classify hermaphrodites according to their “true sex” and to remove any doubt from that classification. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the early modern common law tradition did not conceptualize sex as purely binary and did not hinge on medical opinions throughout most of the eighteenth century. These findings highlight the continuous engagement of courts in actively shaping the meaning and ontology of sex rather than merely reflecting it in their decisions.

Building upon participant observation in a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, run by activists of an Islamic feminist movement in India, and its networks with similar alternative dispute resolution forums run by male qazis (non-state actors trained in Islamic law and Muslim personal law), this article explores the modalities of interaction between non-state actors who adjudicate Muslim personal law in India. It also delineates how gendered agency is shaped in these interactions. This article identifies three aspects of this interaction between male and female non-state actors: (1) everyday cooperation between male and female qazi despite their doctrinal differences; (2) the gradual assertion of female qazi in and through everyday cooperation with male qazi; and (3) institutional competition interlaced with everyday cooperation. I explore a range of interactions including contestation and collaborative contestation between non-state actors, a domain that has not been explored in existing scholarship on legal pluralism. I also draw attention to how we might think about women’s agency in a legal pluralist context beyond a straightforward challenge to male authority and as it is forged at the intersection of individuals, interactions, and institutions. Through a critical exploration of women’s agency, I show how women both inhabit and transform gender norms at an individual and institutional level in their interactions with non-state actors and institutions, expanding scholarship on legal pluralism and gender beyond reified “women’s interests.”

In this article, I illustrate two ways in which Zionist settlers appropriated water in Mandate Palestine. The first way was through the imposition of a new kind of property regime, one that measured and defined water rights in terms of volume. This differed from customary Palestinian practice, which distributed water in time-based shares. I argue that volume-based measures made water more easily bought and sold and, by extension, more like a commodity. The second method of appropriation I detail is the granting of concessions to generate hydroelectricity to the Palestine Electric Corporation. These concessions gave the company control over three of Palestine’s major rivers, which it then turned into an object of investment for foreign shareholders. As a result, water use cannot be understood separately from electricity during the Mandate. While these two processes might appear unrelated, I argue that they were both legalized methods of exclusion that, when taken together, reveal a larger process of gradual, albeit incomplete, dispossession of water resources. While Zionist settler colonialism legitimated itself by claiming to efficiently use natural resources, such as water, in actuality, it sustained itself by imposing exclusive property rights.

The procedural justice thesis that quality of treatment matters more than outcomes in people’s perception of institutional legitimacy is supported by a large body of research. But studies also suggest that distributive justice and the effectiveness of authorities are more important in certain legal settings (civil courts) and national contexts (posttransition societies). This study tests these ideas through a survey of 192 civil litigants in Poland, a postcommunist country where the national judiciary has recently been subject to intense political scrutiny. Our findings support the generalizability of procedural justice, and especially voice, but also demonstrate the significance of outcomes and legal cynicism. We also discuss prior court contact, role (plaintiff versus defendants), and representation (presence of counsel) as potential moderators on litigants’ perceptions of court legitimacy.

Scholars have shown how legal bystanders experience punishment at the hands of the state in their homes and neighborhoods, as well as jails and prisons. Other scholars have shown how bureaucratic processes, such as attending court, are punitive toward people charged with crimes. There is less information about how legal bystanders also experience punishment in courtrooms. In this article, we bridge the literatures between secondary prisonization and procedural punishment to illustrate how legal bystanders, such as family and friends of bond court defendants, experience punishment when attending bond court. We utilize courtroom ethnography of Central Bond Court in Chicago’s Cook County and interviews with family and friends of people charged with a crime to illustrate this form of punishment in three themes: extraction, destabilization, and degradation. With these findings, we argue that secondary prisonization begins not at the point of incarceration, but at the moment a loved one’s contact with the criminal legal system begins.

Prior research has shown that while women have entered the legal profession in increasing numbers, the profession continues to privilege the norms, beliefs, and cultural practices of men. However, one aspect of the legal profession that has largely been overlooked, especially in Australia, is legal academia. This oversight is significant as legal academia provides the gateway into the legal profession. Women now make up approximately half of universities’ academic staff, are increasingly completing doctorate qualifications, and are moving into senior positions within academia. On the surface, these changes may suggest that women are now fully integrated into academia and that the academic gender gap has now resolved. We argue, however, that numerical inclusion does not necessarily challenge the male normative structures that underlie legal academia. This article draws on analysis of the biographies of seven hundred legal academics in Australian law schools and investigates differences between male and female legal academics in terms of level of appointment, academic qualifications and professional experience, research productivity, research interests, and mobility. It shows that while the gender gap has closed in some areas, the feminization of legal academia is a myth and female academics continue to face gendered barriers.

Law firm pro bono work provides access to justice to low-income people and other vulnerable populations. The professionals that manage pro bono programs are at the forefront of that process. The limited available research on these professionals do not often distinguish lawyers from other managers or theorize about their status vis-à-vis other law firm lawyers. Yet the status of lawyers who are also managers of pro bono programs influences both their identities and the management and provision of legal services and advocacy. Drawing on original demographic and interview data, this article shows how law firm pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles and negotiate their status as lawyers and managers. I find that pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles by striving to be perceived as “real” lawyers, reframe their roles as business generators, conform to the billing culture, and establish a common identity. They also negotiate their titles and office spaces to raise their profiles. Gender inequality influences the negotiation of office spaces and the approval of pro bono matters. These findings have implications for lawyers who manage pro bono programs and the legitimacy of pro bono work.

This article addresses the positionality of anthropologists and the impact of anthropological theories in cultural expertise with the help of three case studies that highlight the engagement of anthropologists with law and governance during colonialism and in the wake of it: a well-known case of witchcraft in Kenya, Volkekunde theories in Africa, and the Rwandan genocide. The article starts with a short genesis of the concept of cultural expertise and its cognate concepts of culturally motivated crimes and cultural defense, to introduce the main question of this article: What can we learn from the use of cultural expertise in the colonial past? Today, as much as in the colonial past, anthropologists have been torn between action and abstention. The article’s three case studies show that neither action nor abstention is free from ethical responsibility. This article argues that the concept of procedural neutrality and its reformulation in the form of critical affirmation help anthropologists to carve out an independent role for themselves in the legal process. Procedural neutrality and its reformulation as critical affirmation make it possible to comply with the ethics and deontologies of the disciplines across which anthropologists operate when providing cultural expertise.

The war on sex offenders was an American campaign against sex crime that began in the 1930s and is still ongoing. In this review essay, I argue that the architects and opponents of that war engaged in political struggles that—especially during the pivotal era of the long 1970s—produced, criminalized, and hierarchized multiple new categories of “good” and “bad” LGBTQ legal subjects. In making this argument, my aim is to bring the field of LGBTQ political and legal history—especially the work of George Chauncey ([1994] 2019) and Margot Canaday (2009)—into closer conversation with scholarship by queer theorists who are not historians—especially Gayle Rubin ([1984] 2011a) and Michael Warner (1999)—about the stigmatization of non-normative gender and sexual practices. While historians have examined the policing of multiple queer behaviors in the early twentieth century, their examinations of the post-1945 period have been concerned primarily with the consolidation of a starker social and legal binary between homo- and heterosexuality. As their narratives get closer to the present, the most stigmatized “bad” queers become more and more tangential. At least in part, this has been because historians have been under the same pressure as LGBTQ activists to distance LGBTQ identity from the stigma of sexual “deviance”—especially sex that violated age-of-consent statutes—in order to promote the political project of LGBTQ rights. Placing bad queers at the center of LGBTQ political and legal history diversifies who counts as a subject of this history and reveals an even bigger carceral state that governed them.