This essay critically examines Keith Bybee's All Judges Are Political, Except When They Are Not. Although Bybee's creative use of the cultural form of courtesy helps us better understand the consensus-building and legitimating features of rule-of-law systems, it overlooks the role that rude dissent can play in exposing the violent, exclusionary, and materially disadvantaging aspects of such systems. Using examples of outing closeted public figures and the rude AIDS activism of the 1990s, this essay explores the rule of law from the perspective of those who are subject to it.

This review essay engages Kristen Stilt's recent book, Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt (2011), in a fashion that highlights its contributions to the study of Islamic law. In particular, it underlines the methodological arguments made in the book that might help us think about Islamic legal practice in sophisticated and historically grounded ways. As elaborated in the article, these arguments have important implications for modern as well historical settings. Specifically, Stilt's discussion of “Islamic law in action” reveals the inherent flexibility of Islamic legal practice to accommodate political change. The article also discusses how further research on the topic could benefit from specific approaches and orientations.

This essay reviews the contributions to deterrence theory that Tom Baker and Sean Griffith make in Ensuring Corporate Misconduct (2010) and argues that their work highlights the limits of deterrence theory for shaping corporate conduct. Baker and Griffith extend the deterrence framework to account for the mediating effect of third-party institutions, like insurers, on deterrence calculations, and they suggest how corporate governance decisions, such as what type of insurance coverage to purchase, encode signals about corporations' compliance motivations and capacity. Although these insights might prove useful for enhancing the efficacy of deterrence regimes aimed at white-collar crime and other types of corporate misconduct, they suggest the difficulty of shaping corporate conduct that is influenced not only by the norms embodied in securities law, but also by the alternative normative system of shareholder value maximization. I discuss the failure of deterrence theory to address adequately noncompliant behavior that springs not solely from material self-interest, but from adherence to an alternative set of norms, and I explore the possibility of viewing corporate compliance as a norm-change project.

The author explains the origins of All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (2010) as a response to a fundamental question posed by legal realism: How can the judicial process be permeated with politics and yet remain an accepted part of a legitimate legal system? The author demonstrates the ongoing importance of this question by examining debates over the place of constitutional law in the law school curriculum and by assessing public perceptions of the Supreme Court's ruling on health care reform. The author then addresses the critical appraisals presented by the symposium contributors. The critiques are taken as road maps for extending the author's arguments in new directions.

This review essay on Aryeh Neier's The International Human Rights Movement: A History (Princeton University Press, 2012) discusses Neier's central themes: the origins and maturation of the movement and its effects, including the expansion of human rights and humanitarian law, enhanced criminal accountability for human rights crimes, and the appearance of criminal tribunals, culminating in the International Criminal Court. An overview is interspersed by imaginary conversations between Neier and scholars who speak to his themes, especially legal scholar Jenny Martinez, political scientists Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, historians Devin Pendas and Tomaz Jardim, and sociologists John Hagan, Daniel Levy, Natan Sznaider, Joachim Savelsberg, and Ryan D. King. Linking a practitioner's account with scholarly analyses yields some benefits of “Pasteur's Quadrant.”

The implementation and enforcement of civil rights laws in the aftermath of the mid-twentieth-century rights revolution has been a prominent concern for a multidisciplinary group of scholars. This article reviews a recent literature that is devoted to better understanding the dynamics of judicial authority and enforcement power and, in particular, how courts are frequently empowered to enforce laws through complex interactions with an array of public and private actors. The article emphasizes new books by Charles Epp and Sean Farhang, which each examine different features of this enforcement process. In The Litigation State: Public Regulation and Private Lawsuits in the U.S. (2010), Farhang explores the frequency with which Congress has chosen to enforce its civil rights statutes through incentivizing private litigation. In Making Rights Real: Activists, Bureaucrats, and the Creation of the Legalistic State (2010), Epp examines how civil rights are enforced and transformed through the relationship between administrators, activists, and lawmakers within bureaucratic organizations. Together, these books expand our understanding of the politics and processes of implementing rights in practice and, more broadly, challenge and enrich our perspective on the effectiveness of the American state in enforcing rights. The often complex series of self-conscious legislative, judicial, and administrative choices and interactions necessary in order to deliver rights protections requires that we view policy enforcement from a broader institutional and political perspective. From that perspective, we can see that effective implementation is far from automatic.