This essay responds to the three commentators in the symposium on my book, Law's Fragile State, by describing the sociolegal study of the rule of law as an investigation into both a set of ideals (the rule of law as a normative question) and a set of practices (the rule of law as an empirical question). Studying the rule of law involves understanding the contingent nature of its ideals as well as investigating the actual work that lawyers, judges, state officials, aid workers, activists, and others have done in specific contexts to promote legal remedies to social or political ills. These overlapping layers of the study of the rule of law—ideals and practices, normative and empirical—provide a sociolegal framework for understanding the successes and failures of legal work and, ultimately, how citizens experience state power in democratic and nondemocratic societies alike.

Two separate Israeli Supreme Court cases permitted a Christian school in Nazareth to exclude a Muslim student who insisted on coming to school with her headscarf, and denied an Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox school in Immanuel permission to exclude Sephardic students. Intriguingly, the Israeli Supreme Court reached these apparently contradictory holdings using the same liberal ideals of equality and commonality. The article analyzes both holdings to show that the Court's resolutions cannot stand on their own terms. To reconcile these outcomes, we must locate the groups involved within the religious and ethnic power structure in Israel and determine the legal and social significance of defining the group as a minority or a majority. In general, we should be more tolerant of exclusionary measures practiced by a minority than those practiced by the majority. Ultimately, a constitutional evaluation committed to basic individual freedoms cannot refer to the individual without her or his group.

The Supreme Court of the New Deal era transformed the US Constitution, making the Constitution's original protection of property rights give way to democratically popular regulations. In The Evangelical Origins of the Living Constitution (2014), John W. Compton argues that twentieth-century progressives turned the Court toward this “living” interpretation of the Constitution by relying on legislative methods and judicial precedents created by nineteenth-century evangelicals. Evangelical reformers accomplished national prohibition of liquor and lotteries, but their regulations destroyed property rights that were legally valid and socially acceptable at the inauguration of the Constitution. Courts ultimately acquiesced in these novel economic proscriptions because of overwhelming majoritarian sentiment driven by evangelical populism. Relying on a recent literature of law and religion, Compton alters conventional accounts of the US constitutional tradition of protecting property. This essay reverses the path of analysis and argues that evangelical concerns with constitutional property rights challenge standard accounts of law and religion in US history. Rather than a simplistic imposition of moralism, evangelical reform was derived from antislavery liberalism. The legal and religious pluralism that had impeded antislavery, however, also hindered prohibition and spurred evangelicals to seek federal remedies to national sins. Thus national prohibition, no less than New Deal constitutionalism, centered on the US dilemma of how to wield illiberal regulations to safeguard liberalism.

I review two recent studies of judicial behavior, Posner's How Judges Think (2008) and Epstein, Landes, and Posner's Behavior of Federal Judges (2013). Epstein, Landes, and Posner's volume, the empirically richer of the two books, builds on the conceptual model for explaining judicial behavior put forward in Posner's How Judges Think. I discuss this conceptual model and argue in outline for an alternative model, complementary in part and antagonistic in part to the behaviorist research agenda. Posner and Epstein, Landes, and Posner argue for viewing the judge as a rational actor in a labor market. I argue that analyzing judicial decisions from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, without axiomatically assuming rationality, will allow us to bring more evidentiary sources to bear on the problem and will allow for a more adequate test of competing theoretical interpretations. Law and society scholars are well positioned to contribute to this line of inquiry.

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists' and native communities' conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.

Atkins v. Virginia (2002) categorically exempts intellectually disabled defendants from execution, yet some constitutionally suspect punishments suggest a gap between law and practice. This article moves beyond critiquing Atkins' formal implementation to provide a decentered analysis of the Atkins gap focused on the category of intellectual disability. It explores how drawing boundaries around intellectual disability in capital cases requires law to grapple with fluid scientific and social constructs through a study of how courts operationalize intellectual disability in capital cases. It draws from literatures considering the construction of intellectual disability and law's relationship to the scientific and the social and finds that this intersection first enables a conceptual disconnect between scientific and legal constructions of intellectual disability and, second, invites the use of stereotypes to inform the category. These processes undermine Atkins'—and other categorical exemptions'—ability to functionally limit extreme punishments and also reveal law as mutually constitutive.

Osagie K. Obasogie's Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind (2014) makes important contributions to both to the sociology of law and to critical race studies. The book challenges “colorblind” racial ideology by showing empirically that people who are blind from birth nevertheless “see” race, grasping it as a nearly omnipresent feature of social interaction and social organization. These insights, however, do not diminish the importance of the racial body. Beyond refuting colorblindness, Obasogie's book points to a neverending tension, embedded in what we call racial formation, between the social construction of race and the corporeality of race. This tension has been present since the dawn of empire and African slavery. Obasogie's achievement of falsifying colorblindness should not lead us to neglect the importance of the racial body.

Sociologist and legal scholar Osagie Obasogie's study of how blind people “see” race reveals the usually invisible, taken-for-granted mechanisms that reproduce racism. In Blinded by Sight, he distinguishes racial consciousness from legal consciousness, though he notes their common emphases on studying how cumulative social practices and interactions produce commonsense understandings. I argue that there is much to be gained from connecting these two fields, one emanating primarily out of critical race theory and the other out of law and society scholarship. Legal consciousness offers an important avenue for bridging macro studies of race making with micro studies such as Obasogie's, which focus on individuals' experiences and practices of constructing race and learning racism.

Laura Gómez and Michael Omi and Howard Winant offer thoughtful commentaries on Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind that expand an important discussion on the constructed and constitutive aspects of race. This response attempts to continue this conversation by putting the book's substantive innovations in dialogue with its methodological contributions.

This essay offers a critical examination of use of the term “long civil rights movement” as a framework for understanding the legal history of the battle against racial inequality in twentieth-century America. Proponents of the long movement argue that expanding the chronological boundaries of the movement beyond the 1950s and 1960s allows scholars to better capture the diverse social mobilization efforts and ideas that fueled the black freedom struggle. While not questioning the long framework's usefulness for studying the social movement dynamics of racial justice activism, I suggest that the long framework is of more limited value for those who seek to understand the development of civil rights, as a legal claim, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century. The tendency of long movement scholars to treat civil rights as a pliable category into which they can put any and all racial justice claims is in tension with historical understandings of the term. Susan Carle's Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880–1915 suggests an alternative approach. Her detailed and nuanced account of a period in American history when racial justice activists understood civil rights as a relatively narrow subset of legal remedies within a much broader struggle for racial equality indicates the need for an alternate history of civil rights—one that places the evolving, contested, and historically particularized concept of civil rights at the center of inquiry.