Procedural justice research has shown how people’s experiences with courtroom actors, such as judges, defense attorneys, and prosecutors, shape their views of the justice system and its legitimacy. However, less is known about how people’s experiences outside the courtroom that relate to their cases shape their views of this system. Based on forty-one interviews with twenty-one youths and twenty parents in Dane County, Wisconsin about their legal financial obligations (also known as monetary sanctions), this study broadens the focus of procedural justice to include another key aspect to people’s experiences with the law beyond the courtroom: their experiences navigating bureaucratic aspects to their youths’ cases and their interactions with non-court staff (e.g., clerks, Human Services, and community agencies), otherwise known as “auxiliary personnel” (Feeley 1979) or “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010/1980). We focus on legal financial obligations as a case study to show this multi-agency view of procedural justice as it reveals the families’ often disjointed experiences with justice staff both inside and outside of the courtroom.

Parole officers are central actors in the penal system as their decisions can affect the timing of a person’s release from prison and also restrict or enable their freedoms in the community upon release. Existing research on parole examines how parole officers think about and govern ex-prisoners via techniques of surveillance, regulation, and support. Few studies, however, provide qualitative insight into how parole officers experience their occupational authorities and associated power over (ex)prisoners’ future, or the emotions generated by frontline supervision work. Using data from interviews with 150 parole officers in Canada, we explore the emotions associated with parole officers’ occupational responsibilities and authorities vis-à-vis the parolee, the public, and the parole officer’s employer. Participants experienced their duty to make decisions that impact their clients’ legal and social futures, and potentially public safety, as a source of emotional stress and concern, as they worried about how their decisions could negatively affect their client, the community, and their own professional status. In illuminating parole officers’ feelings and experiences, we show how parole—the “transition” between incarceration and freedom—produces an emotionally charged experience not just for (ex)prisoners, but also for those engaged in frontline supervision work.

During the twentieth century, privacy evolved from an ambiguous legal idea into a defined state-centric right, while privacy claims against non-state entities became more marginalized. Whereas prior studies treat this as the direct outcome of cultural shifts or landmark interventions by legal elites, I document legal institutionalization as a three-stage process of domain formation and meaning making. Using a combination of citation network analysis and qualitative research, I show that the concept of privacy first entered the legal field when journalists raised concerns about the unauthorized use and commodification of personal data; that US jurisprudence produced two competing schools of legal thought as judges and legal scholars struggled to give substance to an abstract concept and structure to an evolving domain of judicial practice; and that privacy was consecrated as a constitutional right when state courts and the US Supreme Court selectively mobilized the language of privacy to confront the expanding reach of the American state. These findings demonstrate the processual nature of legal institutionalization, draw attention to intra-legal contestation and the implicit pluralism of American jurisprudence, and highlight an emerging distinction between the legal regimes governing bureaucratic rule and market exchanges in the early twentieth century.

For most of legal anthropology’s existence as a distinct subfield, ethnographers have studied the function of law rather than its form. With the proliferation of neoliberal technologies of governance, however, anthropologists are increasingly turning to law’s form. This article surveys the anthropology of legal form and its contribution to the study of transnational law and governance. In taking legal form as the object of ethnographic inquiry, legal anthropologists examine the material, sensory, and symbolic dimensions through which law is recognized. Such an approach analyzes how power operates not through law’s substantive meanings but, rather, through its aesthetic dimensions. Current anthropological scholarship has illuminated the diverse ways in which the technical and formal aesthetics of law operate to foreclose political contestation. I argue, however, that the aesthetics of legal form may also be mobilized to render power relations visible and open to challenge amidst proliferating forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within one arena of global governance—the UN Committee on World Food Security—I illustrate how activists draw on the aesthetics of rights to illuminate inequalities and politicize governance processes. In doing so, I suggest that greater engagement with Jacques Rancière’s political theory of aesthetics can deepen anthropological insights into the power of legal form in the context of transnational law and governance.

Among law and society fields, legal anthropology has experienced markedly high highs and low lows. Its parent disciplines, law and anthropology, have fluctuated from intense and productive engagement with one another to mutual disregard for each other’s ways of knowing. Most commentary on the trajectory of this interdisciplinary relationship has bemoaned anthropology’s (ir)relevance to legal scholarship, but this introduction and the symposium essays that follow invert the usual narrative by asking how—and why—formal law might matter to anthropology. The symposium is part of a dual special issue that grows out of a multi-year conversation between legal anthropologists representing varied institutional and intellectual backgrounds. Drawing on that conversation and on the essays it has produced, this introduction argues that anthropologists would do well to abandon their prepositional attitude to formal law and, instead, to build on the strengths of anthropological analysis by “cultivating attentiveness” to things legal.

For a legal anthropologist interested in how different agents and forms of governance shape projects of sexual humanitarianism, the strategies that US-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use in their attempts to reframe an Indian anti-prostitution law as an anti-trafficking instrument generate broader conceptual questions. How do Indian NGOs articulate donor-driven concerns with the postcolonial socio-legal framework within which they work? What impact do they seek to have on the law, legal system, and legal actors? What, in turn, happens to formal law, which is already shaped by a complex history of legal concerns, moral panics, and NGO intervention (itself authorized by law) in this context? How do law and NGOs shape each other across anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking projects in the overlapping contexts of postcoloniality, globalization, neoliberalism, and sexual humanitarianism in India? How might one explore these intersections and relationships methodologically? I show how ethnography at the intersection of anti-prostitution law and anti-trafficking NGOs illuminates: (1) law’s imbrication in a broader, long-standing, and ever-expanding field of governmental action on prostitution; (2) how NGOs and legal actors act, in tension and in collaboration, upon the perceived “problem” of prostitution; and (3) how anti-trafficking NGOs and anti-prostitution law co-constitute each other as they shape contested meanings around prostitution.

Every other day, books and articles are published that examine the withering of democracy across multiple national contexts, perhaps best summarized by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zibblat’s How Democracies Die. The law has not been ignored in this burgeoning literature. Telling examples are the studies on autocratic legalism by Javier Corrales and Kim Lane Scheppele; Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq’s book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy; a recent review essay by Michael McCann and Filiz Kahraman on the “interdependence of liberal and illiberal legal orders … in the United States”; and two forthcoming works from the Project on Autocratic Legalism: a special issue in the Verfassung und Recht in Übersee/World Comparative Law journal and a book on Brazil edited by Oscar Vilhena Vieira and colleagues. In this review essay, I focus on three critical issues arising from these and other sources. First, they show that a backlash against liberal democracies is happening in both the global South and the global North. Second, they show that law is no longer thought of as an intrinsic bulwark against assaults on liberal democracy—on the contrary, rising autocrats, many of whom are trained lawyers, often use the law as a tool to consolidate power, sideline minorities and political adversaries, and rule unconstrained. Finally, while earlier analyses of this phenomenon have tended to emphasize legislative change that reconfigured governance at its highest levels (the Presidency or Prime Minister’s Office, Congress, and High Courts), new studies are revealing––and are helping constitute––an empirically broader field of inquiry.

International criminal law (ICL) is premised upon the principle of individual criminal responsibility—the idea that individual persons, rather than states or other entities, bear criminal responsibility for mass atrocities. This principle has been operationalized in practice through the development of various legal theories, technically known as “modes of liability,” that delineate individual contributions to collective forms of violence. However, the modes of liability have been interpreted and applied differently across international courts and tribunals. Crucially, the International Criminal Court has construed those modes in a significantly more restrained manner than previous international tribunals, essentially limiting the set of situations in which a person could be found guilty of an international crime. This article contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on international criminal justice by exploring the social construction of different conceptualizations of the modes of liability in ICL and their transformations over time. Specifically, the framework focuses on the promotion and contestation of ideas among various actors participating in the international criminal justice field and the power dynamics that govern the field. This is a key issue for ICL and global justice because it demarcates the legal boundaries of “guilt” and “accountability” for international crimes.

In this article, we: (1) advance a theory for how courts should respond to highly political disputes about jurisdictional authority, and (2) assess whether courts can achieve this ideal. Our theory draws from normative realism to argue that courts should push conflict back into the political realm whenever possible—facilitating free and fair dialogue by outlining rules and principles to guide negotiations, while also rejecting zero-sum outcomes when enforcing jurisdictional powers and related rights. We favor this approach because it can generate legitimacy for the legal and political systems by recognizing the judiciary’s limited democratic standing in structural disputes. To ground this argument in actual practice, we assess how the Supreme Court of Canada has managed two streams of highly political jurisprudence related to jurisdictional authority—federalism and Aboriginal rights cases. We show that the Court has increasingly relied on this approach of facilitating dialogue in both areas. While we argue that this approach is particularly well suited to federalism cases, our analysis uncovers negative outcomes in Indigenous case law. The Court’s approach often fails to strongly enforce the constitutional rights of Indigenous peoples, demonstrating that its facilitator role does not adequality account for the power imbalances between the state and Indigenous peoples.

This study examines legal opportunity in China after the recent “law-based governance” reforms, including those that have professionalized the judiciary, established NGOs’ public interest standing, and expanded legal aid coverage. Based on in-depth interviews, it finds that despite the generally tightening political control over the social sector, the reforms have helped some law-related NGOs expand their litigation practice, social and legislative influence, and domestic funding sources. At the same time, these changes have had considerable cooptation effects by aligning these NGOs’ interests with the state’s and channeling their activities into state-sanctioned institutional processes. The findings suggest that states can effectively utilize a dualist strategy that combines restrictive and supportive approaches to public participation in the legal process. It thus sheds light on the progression of legality within various political and institutional contexts.

Scholars studying wrongful convictions have long examined their causes and the ways in which to prevent them and are increasingly interested in exonerees’ post-prison reentry processes. However, research on the experience of incarceration as a result of wrongful conviction is scarce. This article draws on in-depth interviews with eleven exonerees across three states (Illinois, Texas, and New York) to theorize how multiple facets of innocence (personal, relational, and institutional) shape the ways in which former prisoners have navigated their wrongful incarceration: learning to prove their innocence. For many wrongfully convicted inmates, acquiring legal knowledge and mobilizing post-conviction law—specifically, actual innocence jurisprudence—plays a central role in their daily lives given the onerous legal work it takes to prove their factual innocence. I advance what Kathryne M. Young has termed second-order legal consciousness, which prioritizes the social processes that create legal consciousness, as a framework to illuminate how wrongfully convicted inmates constructed legality when pursuing legal exoneration in prison. This article offers new insights into the relational nature of law to show how marginalized groups like prisoners mobilize law when pursuing their rights and allows us to theorize innocence in contexts where the state and society writ large have ascribed a person’s legal guilt.

Contracts are the underpinning of functional business, governmental, organizational, and inter-personal relations across the developed world. It is a methodological advance for contractual research scholars to transform qualitative contractual information into quantitative data to analyze if, how, and why the law is reflected and reproduced in contracts—potentially explaining the continuation or amelioration of social injustices—and/or if contractual content informs human behavior or vice versa. However, efforts to “quantitize” contracts and statistically study them are scattered across subfields without much methodological guidance. The linguistic complexity of many legal contacts, paired with few repositories, makes their comparative quantitative analysis challenging. Prior attempts to quantitatively analyze contracts often lack shared systematic methods for measuring specified textual content, transforming this information into a quantitative format, or statistically analyzing the produced data set. This article presents the power and promise of transforming legal contracts and other similar documents into quantitative data for analysis, reviews the research to date that does so in different ways, and then provides concrete guiding steps and an illustrative example of how to transform contractual content into quantitative data that are valid, reliable, and reproducible, increasing the quality of the data produced and supporting the important socio-legal conclusions that can be derived from their analysis.

Myanmar’s citizenship law is stratified by ethnic membership, but, on the books, it is gender neutral. Much attention has therefore focused on ethnic discrimination codified in the law. But individuals whose ethnic identities should provide them with a legitimate claim to citizenship continue to face barriers. Why is this the case? This article examines the additional obstacles that women face legitimating their ethno-national membership and conferring citizenship on their children, despite the gender neutrality of the citizenship law. I argue that the patriarchal structure of evidentiary documentation and patrilineal understandings of ethnic membership transmission shared by village leaders operating as key gatekeepers influence which parent’s claim—father’s or mother’s—to taingyintha (Indigenous or national ethnicity) membership can strengthen or weaken an individual’s chances of obtaining citizenship. The ethno-national identity of women is not evaluated equally to that of men, challenging women’s ability to capitalize on their taingyintha identity for citizenship purposes and contributing to the reproduction of statelessness across generations. I focus on this intersection of gender and ethnicity in establishing ethno-national membership and citizenship across variation in regional geopolitical environments to expand socio-legal knowledge on how formal and informal discrimination together exacerbate inequalities beyond the letter of the law.

Rights constitutionalism faces a global crisis of legitimacy, and recent years have seen a surge in scholarship on the crisis. The vast majority of analyses focus on broad structural factors and processes. This article takes a different approach: sociological and bottom up. I use qualitative discourse analysis to examine how social actors in Israel justified their antagonism toward rights constitutionalism in three cases where judicial intervention for human rights encountered exceptional public opposition and political backlash. The analysis reveals that social actors used discourses of belonging—both liberal and non-liberal—to challenge rights constitutionalism as a constraint on democratic politics, when they perceived rights protection as conflicting with or undervaluing boundaries of collective identity. Based on these findings, I introduce a new concept—the challenge of belonging—that expresses the normative tension between individual rights and collective belonging. By highlighting the ethical dimension of social opposition to rights constitutionalism, the sociological approach allows a nuanced understanding of such opposition. The challenge of belonging can account for mixed attitudes in the same polity and even in the same social group on rights-oriented judicial intervention, and it points to a common normative thread linking attacks on liberal constitutionalism in vastly different sociopolitical settings.

Parole boards possess the notable power to grant release from prison, oftentimes well short of an incarcerated person’s legally allowable length of sentence. Although the exercise of that power is, at least in part, governed by law, extralegal considerations likely play an influential part in decisions to grant release. Indeed, the analysis offered here of parole board hearings in Washington State reveals, in particular, the work that board members perform to reinforce the moral significance of past criminality. In parole hearings, board members find ample opportunities to morally condemn the index offenses that petitioners have perpetrated and to express skepticism about narratives of petitioner change. Instead of helping petitioners ease the burden of being profaned for their past acts, board members often act to reinforce the mark of a criminal record. These realities underscore the significant work necessary to shift attitudes toward those convicted of crimes, and expose the cultural challenges that attempts to reduce incarceration more generally are likely to face, especially in the United States.

This article develops a new conceptual framework designed to critically study how locality and transversal power relations structure activity and developments in the global field of international criminal justice. The framework is built around the concept of “justice sites,” defined as localities in which organized and social labor—in this case, working with international criminal justice—takes place. The potential effects of social labor performed in specific sites of justice are structured partly by their locality and the resources to which it gives access and partly by their structural position in wider transversal chains of cooperation and competition that cut across different globalized and national fields. In addition to structuring the connections between justice sites, transversal power relations link sites of justice to “practice sites” embedded in other fields in which localized, social labor is not routinely engaged with international criminal justice. Such linkages demonstrate how the framework, developed to study how locality and transversal relations shape the fight against atrocity crimes, can also be used to investigate sites engaged in and across other globalized and national fields of justice, law, governance, and security.

This article aims to explain the differential use of litigation by social movements pursuing social change. While previous studies have sought to compare non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that turn to litigation with those that do not, we study organizations that have all resorted at least once to legal action. Taking Belgium and the field of antidiscrimination as a case study, our research confirms the findings of previous literature that the characteristics of the legal environment do impact on the choice of organizations whether or not to go to court. But we also find that legal action is used differentially by NGOs depending on two factors in particular: their position as an insider or outsider in the political realm and their possession of legal resources. Based on a quantitative measure of legal actions initiated by NGOs and interviews with activists, we propose a typology of civil society organizations—which we label “experienced litigants,” “occasional litigants,” and “litigants by necessity”—that could be transposed to other contexts and other types of interest groups.

What factors influence citizens’ demand for law to protect social rights? We turn to the case of social rights in South Africa, just under three decades after the end of apartheid and the adoption of social rights constitutionalism, to examine the contours of rights claims-making in the courts. Drawing on original interview and survey research, we argue that above and beyond factors such as the accessibility of the courts and support of civil society, citizens must believe that rights claims-making through courts is possible. We find that these beliefs and the subsequent demand for justice are connected to people’s personal circumstances, sentiments as rights-holders, and trust in legal institutions, rendering the legitimacy of social rights constitutionalism beholden to people’s perception that the state actually delivers on these constitutional promises.

In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, coverage of executions in the Atlanta Constitution and the New Orleans (Times-)Picayune occasionally portrayed African Americans executed by the state as legally, politically, and spiritually similar to their white counterparts. But as radical white supremacy took hold across the South, the coverage changed. Through an analysis of 667 newspaper articles covering the executions of Black and white men in Georgia and Louisiana from 1877 to 1936, I found that as lynching became the principal form of lethal punishment in the South, accounts of Black men’s legal executions shrank in length and journalists increasingly portrayed them as ciphers, nonentities that the state was dispatching with little fanfare. In contrast, accounts of white men’s executions continued to showcase their individuality and their membership in social, political, and religious communities. A significant gap between the material reality and the cultural representation of capital punishment emerged. Legal executions in Georgia and Louisiana overwhelmingly targeted Black men. But on the pages of each state’s most prominent newspaper, the executions of white men received the most attention. As a result, capital punishment was increasingly represented as a high-status punishment that respected the “whiteness” of those who suffered it.