Humanitarian visas provide one of few potential pathways to citizenship for foreign nationals victimized within the United States and are an important aspect of immigration law. Yet one form of humanitarian visas—T nonimmigrant status (T visa)—has received scant attention in the socio-legal studies literature. “T visas” were designed to aid survivors of human trafficking and, though the US government estimates that tens of thousands of individuals are trafficked in the United States every year, only 15 percent of the five thousand T visas available annually have been granted since the program’s inception in 2002. Why are T visas such an underutilized form of immigration relief? Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with immigration lawyers, law enforcement personnel, and non-governmental organization service providers routinely involved in T visa applications, we find that the low rate of applications and approvals is driven by a combination of structural barriers and expansive discretion of key actors in the legal process to interpret and apply the law, which results in a narrow and often misinformed construction of victimhood. We add to the literature on the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats to shape the law and determine how it is applied with considerable consequences for survivors of trafficking.

This article shows how Progressive-Era state actors in Chicago employed open-ended, low-level criminal charges directed at regulating the moral health of the community to criminalize interracial relationships—even though interracial marriage had been legal in Illinois since 1870. Capacious legal definitions of offenses like vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication allowed police officers and judges to delineate moral and immoral relationships along racial lines. Using newspaper articles, writing from contemporary social reformers, and court reports, this article reconstructs the treatment of interracial couples in the Chicago legal system to show how discretion in criminal law can reinforce racial hierarchy. I offer three historical arguments: first, that individual arrests and prosecutions of interracial couples labeled lawful, interracial relationships as a form of unlawful “vice,” second, that large-scale raids on spaces for interracial socialization reinforced the criminality of interracial intimacy in a segregated city, and third, that singling out interracial couples allowed the state to exercise control through intrusive forms of punishment like probation and institutionalization.

In 2008 the California Supreme Court forced the state’s parole board to change how it justifies the decision to keep a person in prison. This article combines computational and interpretive analysis of 9,842 hearing transcripts to show how, to achieve compliance with the court, parole board commissioners refurbished an old rehabilitative way of talking about incarceration found in a set of secondary hearing procedures and placed it at the center of decisions. The article considers the consequences of this shift for inequality in incarceration in California. More broadly, it makes the case for focusing on the relationship between administrators and those who can directly intervene in their practices in the name of compliance to understand bureaucratic penal change.

This article explores how not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiments affect the implementation of new cannabis laws in California cities. Despite increasing legality and growing social tolerance, the actual status of cannabis remains controversial. Large segments of the population and local authorities remain uncomfortable with the use of cannabis and resist allowing cannabis facilities in their communities. I employ statistical analysis to understand why some jurisdictions move toward more permissive cannabis policies and others do not. The results show that, on average, socially and economically prosperous cities express higher support for cannabis legalization, but cannabis businesses are more likely to receive permits in cities that are socially and economically distressed. The disparity between demand (white middle-class communities) and supply (poor Hispanic communities) demonstrates that stereotypes generated by the war on drugs have not disappeared after the passage of new cannabis laws and continue to perpetuate the marginalization of disadvantaged individuals and places.

This article examines how social capital affects the resolution of disputes by focusing on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, sometimes described as “Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.” Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the article contends that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially considers the position of each disputant within the community of editors in its decision-making process. In doing so, the Arbitration Committee does not simply decide or arbitrate disputes but seeks to attenuate their impact on Wikipedia’s social fabric. This data allows us to revisit sociological debates on the role of social capital, by revealing the ways in which well-connected individuals employ it strategically in order to obfuscate their noncompliance with norms, thus leading to what I call “dispute cancellation.”

This article examines the role of industry in implementing and interpreting the international legal norm of human rights due diligence. Our study focuses on a multi-industry association called the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), which has assumed a leading role in implementing conflict minerals legislation and interpreting the norm of human rights due diligence in mineral supply chains. Drawing on interviews with RMI staff, corporate representatives, and independent members of the RMI’s governance committees, we analyze the RMI’s risk assessment tools that facilitate corporate compliance with global mineral supply chain regulations. We demonstrate that these technocratic tools mask the underlying corporate interests that control how human rights due diligence is being interpreted and implemented on the ground. We then argue that global supply chains are being “governed at a distance” through these technical practices whereby companies divest themselves of responsibility to their suppliers. Supply chain governance at a distance is therefore transforming the norm of human rights due diligence from an instrument of corporate accountability to a tool of corporate legitimacy.

Since the early 2000s, many of the left groups that spurred the alt-globalization movement have embraced directly democratic organizing and the creation of ethical relationships and subjectivities far more than they have pursued projects to reform legal and political institutions. These practices are often described as prefigurative because people are working to build alternative possible futures in the here-and-now outside of dominant statist and capitalist rationalities. In this essay, we ask if prefiguration can also involve imagining legal forms anew. Drawing on Amelia Thorpe, Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property (2020), we discuss contemporary efforts to use the language, form, and legitimacy of law to imagine it otherwise, efforts that occur through various kinds of direct actions rather than primarily through appeals to courts, legislators, or other state officials. In so doing, we point to an emergent field of critical and sociolegal scholarship that we call prefigurative legality.

In this article, we examine how courts make decisions in religious exemption cases that implicate LGBT rights in a wide range of contexts including education, employment, and medical care. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis of 50 federal cases decided between 1990 and 2020, we demonstrate a shift in how anti-LGBT sentiment is expressed by parties bringing religion-based claims—from a broad condemnation of LGBT identity to a narrow condemnation of same-sex marriage—and find that courts are more likely to rule in favor of the latter. We show how courts construct competing understandings of harm and religious freedom depending on the context of the case and whether the setting is deemed public or private. Our analyses shed light on the shifting and competing meanings about religion, sexuality, and public life in the United States.

The Philippine Supreme Court is considered one of Asia’s most activist courts. During the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte (2016–22), however, concerns grew about its independence. This article investigates determinants of the Court’s behavior since the country’s return to democracy in 1987, with particular attention to “loyalty effects”—the likelihood that justices will vote for the government more often when the president who appointed them is in office. Drawing on a data set of seventy major political cases and sociobiographic profiles of the eighty-six justices who voted in them, we test for variables, including freshman effects and strategic defection toward the end of a presidential term. We find that early years on the bench are closely associated with a vote for the appointer’s administration, and the end of a presidential term is weakly associated with a vote against. Under the Duterte administration, voting preferences have been more aligned with the appointer, and factional alliances of justices appointed by different presidential administrations mirror political alignments. These results have practical implications for the fragile constitutional democracy in the Philippines and contribute to understanding of loyalty dynamics in less institutionalized judicial settings.

As a form of land ownership, condominium enables subdivision and produces local government. Designed to facilitate the production of apartments as distinct parcels of land, ownership within condominium now dominates many urban housing markets. In some jurisdictions, including British Columbia, condominium (labelled strata property) may also be deployed to subdivide land for single-house lots within a structure of private local government. The principal effect of extending condominium to unbuilt land is not to enable subdivision, which is something that was already possible and common, but, rather, to endow groups of single-house lot owners with fiscal capacity and governing authority to assume important aspects of local government. Through an analysis of bare land strata property in British Columbia, we reveal how the condominium form, which brought an architecture of ownership and government from the homeowners association of the American suburbs to the North American city, has spread back from the city into the suburban, exurban, and rural, producing a sprawl of ownership within private local government.

This article draws on a case study of how Massachusetts treatment courts responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to address two intersecting theoretical and policy questions: (1) How do actors who work within criminal legal organizations use the law to solve complex social and political problems? (2) How do organizations working within multiple, fragmented organizational fields respond to an exogenous shock? The findings draw on interviews with eighty-four treatment court judges and practitioners and build from neo-institutional approaches to the study of courts to show that legal actors and organizations pursue pragmatic approaches, strategically adapting to their external environments through buffering, which is protective, and innovation, which is transformative. Each strategy reflects the courts’ autonomy or dependence on other organizations in the criminal legal and social service fields. The findings also provide insight into the social process of legitimation as personnel aligned beliefs with adaptation strategies, shifting understandings of surveillance practices and the utility of sanctions to meet overall court goals.

Despite prior negative experiences with the law and licensure barriers, individuals with conviction histories are increasingly seeking entry into the legal profession. To understand their unique educational journeys from a joint stigma and legal consciousness perspective, we conducted in-depth interviews with prospective, current, and former law students with criminal convictions. Findings reveal that early disadvantage and subsequent system involvement provided them with valuable insights into their place in the carceral system. This realization prompted empathy for similarly situated others, a desire to pursue social justice reform, and the deliberate choice to access the power of law to that end. Thus, rather than averting people from the profession, a conviction history can serve as a driving force for pursuing a career in law.

This study empirically examines whether and how the introduction of disability rights impacted the portrayal of disability in personal injury court decisions in Israel and offers a method for doing such research in other legal realms and contexts. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of Israeli district court judicial rulings over twenty years to measure whether a discursive shift occurred from a medical-individual view of disability to a social constructionist and a rights-based understanding of disability. Our coding system included descriptive and conceptual indicators, forming two indexes: a conventional index and a progressive index. Our findings reveal a steady dominance of the conventional discourse and a gradual yet limited rise in progressive discourse. Moreover, individual court decisions often manifest both types of discourse but are still dominated by a conventional view of disability and rarely apply direct disability rights terminology. These findings provide pioneering empirical evidence that substantiates the disability critique of tort law, demonstrating that judicial decision making is slow to adopt a disability rights perspective. More broadly, our findings show that the infusion of a disability rights orientation does not necessarily replace the older medical-individual view of disability but adds to it, resulting in a mixed discourse that includes both conventional and progressive elements.