The articles by Carruthers and Halliday and by Hagan, Levi, and Ferrales in the present issue of Law and Social Inquiry provide a wonderful opportunity to carry out a brief reflection on the broader field of research on globalization and law. As the discussant and organizer/chair, respectively, of a panel on “Law between Globalization and National Institutions,” from which these two articles emerged, we use the following pages to: (1) show how both articles exemplify, in two different ways, what we call the “process turn” in globalization research, (2) identify four theoretical themes these articles speak to, relating them to the broader literature, and (3) draw some lessons for future law and society scholarship in an age of globalization.1

Legal scholars and social scientists are increasingly calling on legislators, lawyers, and judges to recognize and embrace expanding definitions of the family. Implicit in such calls is the expectation that legal recognition of expanding definitions of the family will protect children's attachment relationships with adults, irrespective of their biological ties to those adults. Through a detailed, historical examination of custody decisions in disputes between biological and nonbiological parents in the state of Iowa, this research suggests that judicial recognition of more expansive definitions may not result in decisions that protect children's attachment relationships. This is true because the legal impact of family definitions appears to be contingent upon cultural and political factors that may undermine the expected effects of changing definitions. This research also suggests that judicial recognition of children's rights may be the most apt way to promote legal changes that will protect children's attachment relationships.

This study of Megan's Law contrasts scholarly narratives that describe and analyze sexual predator laws with a case study of implementation in New Jersey. A critical feminist perspective shows that Megan's Law employs a radically underinclusive notion of sexual violence that conflicts sharply with feminist arguments about the cultural and institutional roots of sexual violence. The law excludes many of the most common offenders from reach of the law, thus deflecting attention away from assaults committed by family and friends in favor of reviving stereotypes about deviant strangers. The most significant effect of Megan's Law is not to expand the power of the punitive state but to advance a political and legal interpretation of rape that undermines the basis for and gains made by feminist rape law reforms of the 1970s.

Anti-Indian racism, as typified by anticasino backlash, is a part of the “common sense” of race relations in the United States, which increasingly impacts federal administrative procedures used to acknowledge the existence of tribal status. Using ethnographic and archival research, this article shows that the backlash over Mashantucket Pequot recognition and casino success has taken the form, primarily, of racialized attacks on the Mashantucket Pequots’ Indian identity. It argues that such backlash carries over to impact groups who seek recognition of their tribal status, and the legitimation that such recognition might bring to their identity. Examining the colonial legacies of anti-Indian racism shows us that such racial antagonism in the United States is nothing new. However, understanding the contexts within which its recent resurgence has occurred may help bring fairness to the acknowledgment process, and may further illuminate intersections of common sense racism and legal spheres in American life.

This article examines the distribution of legal rights in the Israeli occupied West Bank. It argues that legal rights are distributed through a “jurisdictional politics” that tries to stabilize the contingent relationship between political community, territory, and legal subjects. In particular, this jurisdictional politics seeks to delimit the contradictory boundaries of the Israeli state by creating distinct categories of person out of the populations that live and work in the region. These issues are addressed by examining a dispute concerning the jurisdiction of Israeli law over Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The article ends by arguing that in the context of multiple movements of people, capital, and military force, attention must be paid to the often contradictory ways in which jurisdictional regimes seek to produce particular types of citizens and subjects.

This article draws from a larger research project on the globalization of bankruptcy law that includes (1) a time-series analysis of all bankruptcy reforms worldwide from 1973 to 1998; (2) participation observation, several hundred interviews and documentary analysis of international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), international professional associations (International Bar Association, International Federation of Insolvency Practitioners), and world governance organizations (OECD, U.N. Commission on International Trade Law); and (3) case studies of Indonesia, Korea, and China.

The globalization of law is a negotiated process. Our research on international organizations and case studies of China, Indonesia, and South Korea indicates that negotiation of the global/local relationship varies by the vulnerability of a country to global forces. Nation-states vary (1) in their balance of power vis-à-vis global actors; and (2) in their social and cultural distance from the global. Yet even where the global/local gap is wide and the asymmetry of power is pronounced, local responses to global pressures are negotiated as much as imposed. Negotiating globalization relies on direct and mediated interactions by several types of intermediaries who translate global scripts into four kinds of outcomes. The impact of intermediaries in this process varies by the phase of the reform in which they participate. Finally, globalizing law proceeds through recursive cycles of lawmaking and law implementation.

This article examines the localization of global legal institutions by the case study of a lower court in China's Hebei Province. Using data on the changes in the formal organizational structure, the composition of personnel, the case docket, and case dispositions in this court between 1978 and 2000, the author demonstrates that global legal institutions have survived in China's judicial practice by adapting to indigenous social and political demands and becoming localized. The day-to-day judicial work of Chinese lower court judges is only loosely coupled with their formal roles, and the judicial decision-making process is contingent upon the historical origin of the judiciary, administrative influence, and the legal consciousness of local communities. The underlying reason for the localization process is the complexity of legitimacy at the local level. Global prescription, economic pressure, political influence, and local social order all require certain types of legitimacy from the legal institutions. As a result, beyond the symbolic functions of global convergence, the practical meanings of the legal institutions are socially constructed in the judicial practice to reconcile the conflicts between global and local sources of legitimacy.

This article attempts to gain a better understanding of the sociology(ies) of law in a comparative perspective through a structural and comparative explanation of the American and the French legal fields. It is argued that comparative sociology of law will not be able to explain the difference among countries, scholars, movements, and schools of thought in short, it will not be able to compare—as long as it avoids the analysis of some social and cultural presuppositions related to the context in which these differences take place. It focuses mainly on two of these presuppositions. First, legal fields, with their history, their internal structure, and their power relations, and second the type of relation between the legal field and the state. The empirical examination provided in this article explicitly seeks to offer insights for the reconstruction of Bourdieu's structural theory of the legal field.

This article develops a conflict approach for studying the field of international criminal law. Focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, we draw on Burawoy's (2003) elaboration of reflexive ethnography to determine how external political changes affect the work of an international legal institution. We explore how political frameworks of legal liberalism, ad hoc legalism, and legal exceptionalism result in internal office, organizational, and normative changes within this Tribunal, thereby linking national political transformations with the construction of the global. Drawing on rolling field interviews and a two-wave panel survey, we conclude that the claims to universals that underwrite transnational legal fields cannot be understood solely through an analysis of external political forces, but must be combined with attention to how these are refracted through internal organizational change within international institutions.

This article argues that Jewish merchants have historically dominated the diamond industry because of their ability to reliably implement diamond credit sales. Success in the industry requires enforcing executory agreements that are beyond the reach of public courts, and Jewish diamond merchants enforce such contracts with a reputation mechanism supported by a distinctive set of industry, family, and community institutions. An industry arbitration system publicizes promises that are not kept. Intergenerational legacies induce merchants to deal honestly through their very last transaction, so that their children may inherit valuable livelihoods. And ultra-Orthodox Jews, for whom participation in their communities is paramount, provide important value-added services to the industry without posing the threat of theft and flight.

Compared to the practice in other professional schools and academic fields at universities, law professors are hired at a young age based primarily upon their academic merit determined through grades, class rank, and school rank. This emphasis upon narrowly defined academic merit—apart from achievement demonstrated through original scholarship or experience in professional practice—first emerged during “the professionalization of the American law professor” between 1870 and 1900 at Harvard Law School (HLS). Though normative today, this outcome was neither necessary nor uncontested. In the late nineteenth century the new standard of hiring faculty according to their academic merit was energetically opposed by those favoring the antecedent standard of professional experience and reputation. Only when financial considerations counterbalanced that traditional standard did hiring decisions tip in favor of the new principle. Not until the early 1900s, when the second generation of academic meritocrats dominated the HLS faculty, did the new hiring standard become unequivocally established as policy in the school and, by extension, in legal education.

Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, we develop a detailed ethnography of a social space in a major law school and explore its socialization of the students there. “Coffee House” is a weekly social event sponsored by Canadian law firms and offering free drink and food to the students present. We argue that this event and the actors involved profoundly change student identities and alter educational aspirations. Although the students themselves insist that “nothing is going on,” our ethnography suggests that in “Coffee House” identity is developed through performances, and in the accumulation of symbolic capital, until ultimately students come to feel their future career path is not a matter of choice, but destiny. We explore the important work of Bourdieu through this setting, but ultimately we resist his determinism, and suggest instead that, following the work of Butler, identity is a more complicated and fluid dynamic between space, repetition, and performance. It appears that a personal unconscious transformation among law students attending Coffee House is underway; yet opportunities to change the meaning of this space and these performances remain.

This article applies theories of legal compliance to analyze the making of this country's first “illegal immigrants”—Chinese laborers who crossed the U.S.-Canadian and U.S.-Mexican borders in defiance of the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943). Drawing upon a variety of sources, including unpublished government records, I explore the ways in which Chinese laborers gained surreptitious entry into the United States during this period and ask, what explains their mass noncompliance? I suggest that while an instrumental perspective is useful for understanding these border crossings, it overlooks other important determinants of noncompliance: normative values and opportunity structures. Specifically, the exclusion laws were widely perceived by the Chinese as lacking social and moral legitimacy, and thus not worthy of obedience. In addition, the existence of smuggling networks and liberal immigration policies in Canada and Mexico played a critical role in facilitating noncompliance. The article concludes with a discussion about the benefits and challenges of using this theoretical framework to analyze noncompliance in immigration law.