In eleven countries, same-sex sexual intimacy is punishable by death. Applying a legal pluralistic framework, we argue that “state-enabled killing” of same-sex-attracted people occurs in at least twenty-three countries. State-enabled killings range from extrajudicial and quasi-judicial killings, where state actors carry out the killing, through instances where the state retrospectively authorizes, through bias or lawful excuses to homicide, the killing of same-sex-attracted people by private actors, to cases where the state permits or endorses forms of so-called “conversion therapy” that can lead to death. We contend that a narrow focus on the death penalty as the only genuine form of state-enabled killing of same-sex-attracted people is analytically unwarranted and strategically dubious in terms of law reform advocacy. Critical legal pluralism allows us to pursue the practical and normative implications of hypothesizing a functional equivalence between the death penalty and these other forms of state-enabled killing.

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Mood, and Donald Haider-Markel, is an important piece of law and society scholarship that isolates investigatory police stops as an institutional practice with profound consequences for racial inequality. Pulled Over also speaks to scholarship on race and ethnicity by addressing an ongoing tension between a focus on the socially constructed nature of racial categories and their stratifying significance. Pulled Over offers an important model for future studies by incorporating social constructionist insights into how race is measured, empirically documenting institutionally produced racial inequalities, and linking these inequalities to the evolving meaning of race itself.

Police organizations are moral battlefields. Blowing the whistle on misconduct is one domain of moral contestation. Yet whistleblowing by police officers is important to ensure accountability, prevent threats to the rule of law, and avoid police capture by organized crime. In this study, we draw on a survey of 975 police officers in Himachal Pradesh, India, to investigate whistleblowing decisions and to account for these decisions. We found that officers imagined themselves blowing the whistle on the planting of evidence on criminal suspects but less so when colleagues used violence against suspects. Perceptions of organizational justice, the strength of bonds between officers, perceived audience legitimacy, and police effectiveness influenced the whistleblowing decisions of the officers.

This review essay looks at the relationship between Deborah Tuerkheimer’s Credible (2021) and Meera Deo’s Unequal Profession (2019) in order to make a substantive point about inequality in legal institutions and the methods that are employed in dissecting them. At first glance, the connections between these projects might not seem apparent, although each deals with the inequalities in which its actors in focus are embedded. But both projects go deeper by unveiling institutional inequities that are often in plain sight when we investigate the background frameworks implicated in their production, and they reveal the problematic relationship between everyday discrimination and the systemic biases that justify them. Finally, reading these books together allows us to make an intervention about the methods and credibility of narratives within socio-legal scholarship more generally. In theorizing about legitimacy, we ask how the way in which we are told to look at structures of normativity changes the kinds of inequities we are able to see.

The US Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder and subsequent legislative failures to restore the Voting Rights Act (VRA) have alerted scholars to the precarity of federal voting rights and the importance of the Supreme Court to its implementation. I argue, however, that the court has exercised outsized influence on the administration and development of the VRA long before Shelby County, consistently advancing the goals of the Act’s opponents. Using statutory interpretation, the court has shifted both administrative and political burdens from VRA skeptics to its supporters, gradually undermining the efficacy of the law. Administratively, the court has made it harder to implement and enforce the VRA by raising evidentiary standards and narrowing the scope of section 2 and section 5. Making the VRA more burdensome to administer also creates new political burdens for the Act’s supporters, who must navigate a veto-riddled legislative process to reverse unfavorable Court decisions. As a result, the Court has made it more difficult to effectively use sections 2 and 5 to combat racial discrimination in territorial annexations, redistricting, and ballot access. These findings demonstrate yet another instance of the Supreme Court wielding its statutory authority to reshape public policies and illustrate the judicialization of the VRA.

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.