This article focuses on the issue of domestic violence in Muslim societies in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The analytical framework is comparative, emphasizing four factors and the interplay among them: shari'a (Islamic law), state power, intrafamily violence, and struggles over women's rights. The comparative approach historicizes the problem of domestic violence and impunity to consider the impact of transnational legal discourses (Islamism and human rights) on “local” struggles over rights and law. The use of shari'a creates some commonalities in gender and family relations in Muslim societies, notably the sanctioning and maintenance of male authority over female relatives. However, the most important issue for understanding domestic violence and impunity is the relationship between religion and state power. This relationship takes three forms: communalization, in which religious law is separate from the national legal regime; nationalization, in which the state incorporates religious law into the national legal regime; and theocratization, in which the national legal regime is based on religious law.

This paper examines the legal consciousness of same-sex couples with respect to marriage. Data from an interview-based study of 71 members of same-sex couples reveal strong consensus on the desirability of having samesex relationships legally recognized, and considerable variation in couples’ attempts to enact marriage culturally through various practices, including the use of marriage-related terminology and public commitment rituals. I argue that some of these efforts to enact marriage culturally should also be read as attempts to enact legality in the absence of official law. The findings from this study challenge the idea that marginalized social actors will tend toward a resistant legal consciousness: Rather than seeking to avoid and evade legality in their everyday lives, most same-sex couples seem to embrace legality for its practical and symbolic resources, even as they stand “against the law” in their opposition to the exclusion of same-sex couples from the institution of legal marriage. Approaching marriage from the perspective of same-sex couples, this research demonstrates that the legal and cultural aspects of marriage are deeply intertwined. Cultural enactments of marriage enact legality even in the absence of official law, and many actors ascribe to law a cultural power that transcends its specific benefits and protections, the power to produce social and cultural equality.

This article investigates the recent rise of criminal background screening in rental housing as a case study of the diffusion of actuarial social control. That case study suggests that actuarial techniques have spread more widely through the crime prevention field than sociolegal scholars have recognized, replacing disciplinary efforts to diagnose and alter the behavior of individuals with actuarial efforts to identify and isolate high-risk groups. This actuarial strategy has proliferated not only because new discourses encouraged it but also because new institutional structures facilitated it. That conclusion illustrates the importance of structural (rather than cultural) factors in shaping society's response to crime—particularly the growing availability of the collective institutional capacity that actuarial social control requires.

To an unprecedented degree American society at the turn of the twentieth century is governed through crime. Nearly three percent of adults are in the custody of the correctional system. Crime and fear of crime enter into a large part of the fundamental decisions in life: where to live, how to raise your family, where to locate your business, where and when to shop, and so on. The crime victim has become the veritable outline of a new form of political subjectivity. This essay explores the complex entanglements of democracy and governing through crime. The effort to build democratic governance after the American Revolution was carried out in part through the problem of crime and punishment. Today, however, the enormous expansion of governing through crime endangers the effort to reinvent democracy for the twenty-first century.

This article argues that Jewish merchants have historically dominated the diamond industry because of their ability to reliably implement diamond credit sales. Success in the industry requires enforcing executory agreements that are beyond the reach of public courts, and Jewish diamond merchants enforce such contracts with a reputation mechanism supported by a distinctive set of industry, family, and community institutions. An industry arbitration system publicizes promises that are not kept. Intergenerational legacies induce merchants to deal honestly through their very last transaction, so that their children may inherit valuable livelihoods. And ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom participation in their communities is paramount, provide important value-added services to the industry without posing the threat of theft and flight.

As a distinct class of criminals, sex offenders stand out as being particularly subject to the new “risk management” penal strategies that, according to a number of scholars, have come to dominate punishment rhetoric and practices in recent years. Nonetheless, the criminal justice policymaking that targets sex offenders appears to have a more emotionally based underside. In this paper, I examine the emotional drive that appears to undergird contemporary sex offender lawmaking, suggesting that a significant force propelling the current panoply of sex offender containment strategies is a constellation of emotional expressions of disgust, fear of contagion, and pollution avoidance, manifested in a legislative concern about boundary vulnerabilities between social spheres of the pure and the dangerous. To do so, I analyze the lawmaking discourse of U. S. legislators as they debated four proposed legislative bills directed at sex offenders during the late 1990s.

In an age of widespread background checks, we ask how managers in different organizational contexts navigate legal ambiguity in assessing applicants' criminal history information, based on interview data obtained in a recent field experiment. The study builds on institutional analyses of the social sources of workplace legality to describe how employers consider applicants with criminal histories. We find that some organizations set explicit standards to guide hiring decisions, providing concrete policies on how to treat applicants with records. Where such procedural mandates are lacking, however, hiring managers turn to a micro‐rational decision process to evaluate potential risk and liability. These individualized approaches create inconsistencies in how the law is interpreted and applied across organizations, as evidenced by actual hiring behavior in the field experiment.

Drawing upon an analysis of the political vectors behind constitutional reform in Israel (1992), Canada (1982) New Zealand (1990), and South Africa (1993), the article suggests that the trend toward constitutionalization in culturally divided polities has not been adequately delineated by extant theories of constitutional transformation. An examination of the political origins of these four constitutional revolutions suggests that judicial empowerment is in many cases the consequence of a conscious strategy undertaken by threatened political and economic elites seeking to preserve their hegemony vis-a-vis the growing influence of “peripheral” groups in crucial majoritarian policymaking arenas. In response to perceived threats by peripheral groups, elites who possess disproportionate access to and influence upon the legal arena often initiate a constitutional entrenchment of rights in order to insulate policymaking from popular political pressure. Power is transferred from majoritarian decision-making arenas to national high courts, where they assume their policy preferences will find greater support. This process of conscious judicial empowerment is likely to occur (a) when the judiciary's public reputation for political impartiality and rectitude is relatively high and (b) when the courts are likely to rule, by and large, in accordance with the cultural propensities and policy preferences of the traditionally hegemonic elites.

This article examines how workers perceive the laws and rules that regulate their workplaces and how these perceptions differ depending on whether one works in an organization with a high level of worker-manager cooperation versus one with a more conventional hierarchy. Using two cab companies as examples, this article explores how these divergent organizational structures generate different grievance cultures that in turn encourage alternate understanding of available choices and appropriate means for resolving such disputes.

This work expands the current sociolegal literature on legal consciousness by focusing on formal and informal workplace grievance resolution and perceptions of workplace conflict. In exploring the critical decision making regarding grievance resolution, this article begins an important discussion about workplace empowerment and legal consciousness. This study uses qualitative methods to examine 33 open-ended interviews. The use of qualitative methods permits a vibrant dialog that illustrates the legal consciousness of the subjects, The subjects' own words reveal their comprehension of rules, regulations, and procedures as well as their individual relationships with the grievance-resolution options in their workplaces.

Previous experimental research has found that self-Serving biases are a major cause of negotiation impasses. In this study we show that a simple intervention can mitigate such biases and promote efficient settlement of disputes.

This essay argues that there is an important sense in which Foucault gets law wrong—that the pursuit of Foucault's own objectives had the unintended consequence of inhibiting a fruitful interrogation of the place of law in modernity. His immediate concern was with the emergence of distinctive manifestations of modern power that constitute a new configuration, the disciplinary society. The most distinctive feature of his account of the historical emergence of modernity was his expulsion of law from modernity. This “expulsion of law” is found in his metahistorical thesis that law constituted the primary form of power in the premodern era, and that although law lingers on in the doctrine of sovereignty, it is supplanted by discipline and government as the key embodiments of modernity.

The essay proposes an exercise in retrieval, a “retrieval of law,” to recuperate much in Foucault's thought that is suggestive for our understanding of law's role in the constitution of modern society. It rejects Foucault's opposition of law and discipline and makes use of his treatment of government and governmentality toward that end. It argues that a more adequate grasp of the place of law in modernity can be developed by establishing that law and discipline are complementary and characteristically combine in the ubiquitous presence of regulation as the mark of the modem condition.

This study seeks to explain the paradoxical expansion of constitutional power in Egypt over the past two decades, despite that country's authoritarian political system. I find that the Egyptian regime established an independent constitutional court, capable of providing institutional guarantees on the security of property rights, in order to attract desperately needed private investment after the failure of its socialist-oriented development strategy. The court continued to expand its authority, fundamentally transforming the mode of interaction between state and society by supporting regime efforts to liberalize the economy while simultaneously providing new avenues for opposition activists and human rights groups to challenge the state. The Egyptian case challenges some of our basic assumptions about the conditions under which we are likely to see a judicialization of politics, and it invites scholars to explore the dynamics of judicial politics in other authoritarian political systems.

The author examines the sources and premises of the idea that free expression has value in part because of the function it performs in checking the abuse of official power (the “checking value”) and explores how this checking value difyers from those values that have dominated First Amendment analysis since 1919. In addition, the author traces in some detail the uneven influence the checking value has had recently in three areas of First Amendment adjudication: civil actions f o r defamution; disputes arising from efforts by journalists to protect or establish relationships with news sources; and claims b y nonjournalists to a constitutional or statutory right to communicate directly to the public over major print or broadcast outlets. The author argues that the checking value must receive open, systematic consideration if it is to play a consistent part in adjudication and speculates on how such consideration of the checking value might help one think about a wide range of additional First Amendment questions.

This article addresses the question of women's seeming rejection of sexual harassment law by refusing to apply the label “sexual harassment” in the face of incidents that would easily qualify as such. Building on the work of Bumiller (1988) and the tradition of sociolegal studies focusing on understanding the power of the law in its everyday context (e.g., Merry 1979; Engel 1987; Sarat and Kearns 1993), this analysis explores the “tactical milieu” in which both hostile work environment sexual harassment and tactics for its resistance are produced. Using in-depth interviews with both women and men, the author explores the ways a particular form of hostile work environment harassment–dubbed “chain yanking”–poaches on the realm of ambiguous humor to effect male group solidarity and women's disempowerment. A common countertactic–”not taking it personal”– is analyzed for its simultaneous power as resistance and unwitting collaboration. The contradictory effects of this tactic-countertactic pairing on the naming and claiming of the harm of sexual harassment are examined, as well as the implications this has for combating sexual harassment in the workplace.

The history of the genesis and institutionalization of the European Convention on Human Rights offers a striking account of the innovation of a new legal subject and practice—European human rights—that went along with, but also beyond, the political and legal genesis of Europe following World War II. The rise of the European human rights institutions shows not only how law and lawyers played key roles in the early politics of European integration but also how the subtle combination of law and politics—as both national and international strategies—continued to play a decisive part in the institutionalization of European human rights. The article generally argues that the interplay between law and diplomacy had a fundamental impact on the innovation of European law and that lawyers capable of playing an intermediary role between the two were particularly central to this development.

Is it important to conceptualize transnational law and “map” it as a new legal field? This article suggests that to do so might help both juristic practice and sociolegal scholarship in organizing, linking, and comparing disparate but increasingly significant types of regulation. To explore the idea of transnational law is to raise basic questions about the nature of both “law” and “society” (taken as the realm law regulates). This involves radically rethinking relationships between the public and the private, between law and state, and between different sources of law and legal authority. Taking as its focus Von Daniels's The Concept of Law from a Transnational Perspective and Calliess and Zumbansen's Rough Consensus and Running Code (both 2010), the article considers what approaches may be most productive, and what key issues need to be addressed, to make sense of broad trends in law's extension beyond the boundaries of nation-states.

This article draws on interview data from California's Silicon Valley to explore the role of local business attorneys in shaping the market for high-technology start-up financing. Far from exerting a disruptive or disputatious influence on business relations, Silicon Valley lawyers actively facilitate the functioning of the region's venture capital sector. In particular, attorneys intervene in the start-up process to absorb, suppress, and avert crucial uncertainties that might otherwise elevate transaction costs, imperil economic activity, and foster interorganizational discord. Local law firms moderate the hazards of new-company financing in at least three distinct ways: (1) by directly absorbing economic uncertainties in individual transactions; (2) by constructing, preserving, and reproducing normative and cognitive understandings within the community as a whole; and (3) by incorporating these local practices into the external legal regime.

While data theft and cyber risk are major threats facing organizations, existing research suggests that most organizations do not have sufficient protection to prevent data breaches, deal with notification responsibilities, and comply with privacy laws. This article explores how insurance companies play a critical, yet unrecognized, role in assisting organizations in complying with privacy laws and dealing with cyber theft. My analysis draws from and contributes to two literatures on organizational compliance: new institutional organizational sociology studies of how organizations respond to legal regulation and sociolegal insurance scholars' research on how institutions govern through risk. Through participant observation at conferences, interviews, and content analysis of insurer manuals and risk management services, my study highlights how insurers act as compliance managers for organizations dealing with cyber security threats. Well beyond pooling and transferring risk, insurance companies offer cyber insurance and unique risk management services that influence the ways organizations comply with privacy laws.