This Article examines Israeli military lawyers’ practice of international humanitarian law (IHL) revolving around the West Bank and Gaza. Based on interviews with legal officers serving in the army between 1967–2009 and archival materials, it interrogates these lawyers’ work—the stories that they tell about law, their legal interpretations and their interactions with military decision makers. This interrogation is set in the context of broader structural, historical, and political shifts. Anchored around lawyers’ stories about law, their narration of law’s relationship with politics, and its position in relation to violence, this account sets out to contribute to discussions on lawyers’—and by extension law’s—past and present positions in states’ military affairs.

After the United States Civil War, many states enacted laws expanding protections for animals against cruelty. This article examines the case law relating to animal cruelty in the nineteenth century, and traces how judges interpreted the animal cruelty statutes enacted after the Civil War. It provides a lens on a transformative moment when legislatures and courts recognized the suffering of animals as a distinct harm and criminalized the infliction of pain. A powerful apparatus of policing emerged to enforce this modern sensibility of sympathy. As observed in judicial decisions, the statutes repudiated earlier intent requirements, reached animal owners and conduct on private property, and in several states expanded police powers to allow warrantless arrests to protect suffering animals. The question of whether animals needlessly suffered took precedence over the earlier focus on suppressing public nuisances and common law doctrines of privacy. The animal cruelty movement provides an essential window into humanitarianism of the late nineteenth century.

Criminal cases against domestic violence in India frequently result in unlawful “compromises” where litigants breach legal procedure and negotiate out-of-court settlements. Using ethnographic and interview data, this Article analyzes how legal cases become extralegal settlements. I argue that India’s legal environment engenders an “aspirational-strategic” legal consciousness among survivors, who simultaneously believe they deserve what the law promises while distrusting legal procedure and law enforcement personnel. Their bifurcated vision of the law leads them to negotiate illicit settlements. These findings indicate that expansions in legal rights can have contradictory effects on rule of law. Depending on the political economy of the legal institutional environment, citizens may respond to rights by simultaneously adopting new norms while ignoring legal rules and procedure.

Nonconsensual pornography, commonly known as “revenge porn,” is the dissemination of another’s sexually explicit images or videos without their consent. This article explores this phenomenon in gay and bisexual male online communities. The first part reviews the current sociological and legal literature on online dating, gay culture on the Internet, and revenge porn. Then, based on a survey of gay and bisexual male dating app users, ethnographic interviews, and an analysis of platform content moderation policies, the next part makes three related points. First, it shows that gay and bisexual men who use geosocial dating apps are more frequently victims of revenge porn than both the general population and the broader lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. Second, it shows that geosocial dating apps create powerful norms of disclosure that make sharing personal information all but required. And third, it describes how gay and bisexual male users engage in privacy navigation techniques with the goal of building trust and enhancing safety. The final substantive section then shows how inadequate protections for online privacy and inadequate legal incentives for safe platform design contribute to the problem of revenge porn. The article concludes with a summary and avenues for future research.

Even at their most salient, judicial retention elections do not increase turnout on Election Day. However, those who vote often participate in judicial retention races at higher levels than usual following salient judicial decisions. I use a series of difference-in-differences analyses to estimate the effect of the Iowa Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage on the subsequent retention races. I find that retention race participation was higher than we would have otherwise expected after the decision. Scholars often cite the infrequence with which justices are removed as evidence of justices’ relative independence from voters in retention elections, but the overwhelming retention of these justices does not mean they are independent from voters. Increases in the number of ballots cast in these races is perhaps more important than increases in negative votes when it comes to judicial independence, because each vote is an evaluation of the justices, whether positive or negative.

Governments in developing countries have adopted policies, laws, and programs to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), with the funding and rules provided by global institutions and transnational actors. The transnational legal process for REDD+, entailing the construction and diffusion of legal norms that govern the pursuit of REDD+, has been driven by discursive struggles over the purposes and requirements of REDD+. At the global level, the development of legal norms for REDD+ has been primarily influenced by coalitions committed to the discourses of ecological modernization, civic environmentalism, and to a lesser extent, climate justice. Through discourse analysis of the transnational legal process for REDD+ in Tanzania, I show how domestic efforts to operationalize REDD+ have been dominated by a government coalition that has emphasized green governmentality, made few concessions to the discourse of civic environmentalism, and completely neglected the climate justice claims of Indigenous Peoples. This case study reveals how discourse analysis may enhance the study of transnational legal phenomena by drawing attention to the complex interplay of global and domestic discourses and its role in shaping legal norms and reinforcing or challenging structures of power and knowledge within and across legal systems.

Employment has been cited as one of the most effective protections against recidivism for formerly incarcerated people; however, job seekers with criminal records face barriers to employment after prison. They find themselves in a legal double bind where they are simultaneously compelled to obey the law (by finding “legit” work) but also legally barred from doing so. To navigate this conflictual legal positioning, job seekers with felony records develop strategies of working around the law to find employment. Through thirty qualitative interviews with people with felony records, I examine this alternative form of legal consciousness and detail the ways in which individuals navigate the legal barriers to acquiring “good” work. Ultimately, job seekers’ often extralegal strategies of law abidance blur the line between compliance with and defiance of the law.

The Hong Kong government made tactical use of legal instruments to end the Occupy Movement in 2014, yet there were divergent responses to the injunctions at the two main protest sites. Through a within-case comparison, this study argues that diverging legal frames explain the different reactions at the two sites. Law, as a constitutive symbol of certain collective action frames, constructs the boundaries of a movement and creates expectations among protesters regarding how to address legal instruments. The protesters in Admiralty tended to adhere to a law-abiding frame that required them to respect and obey the law when confronted with legal tactics. In contrast, the framing contest and self-selection of participants made activists in Mongkok susceptible to a law-defying frame that disposed them to resist the actions of law enforcement authorities. This study sheds light on the conditions under which protesters will obey the law.

While the boundaries between child, adolescent, and adult are difficult to define, there is a consensus that children and adults are different in kind. Extreme acts of violence put pressure on that consensus. Children that kill, for many, create a kind of border problem for juvenile justice. That public opinion tends to align with the general claim that children who break the law should be given a break belies a deeper set of confusions. On what grounds should a seventeen-year-old that kills be treated more leniently than his eighteen-year-old counterpart? For the U.S. Supreme Court majority, the solution is to root its doctrine in a scientifically supported “developmental approach.” This article argues that this approach is philosophically confused. One must abandon, or significantly amend, that dominant understanding to explain how a principled concern with proportional punishment simultaneously justifies and limits the legal response to children that kill. The final pages sketch an alternative account that may be able to address the shortcomings of appeals to development. To punish children as adults, I suggest, is an attempt to reap the benefits of paternalism without bearing the accompanying political, social, and moral costs.

The essays in this symposium on the work of Dirk Hartog encompass meditations on legal positivism and the histories of slavery, civil rights, and women’s rights as well as contemporary analyses of spousal abuse and the dependency of adult children. That wide range of subjects, approaches, and concerns might be puzzling were it not for the wide substantive, methodological, and theoretical range in Hartog’s own oeuvre. Hartog’s work has been so generative for other scholars because of his simultaneous engagement with history and law, with fact and theory, with the whole sweep of the nineteenth century and the most minute detail of a person’s life. In describing in this introduction what makes Hartog Hartog, I emphasize the unique blend of professional commitments and personal sensibilities he brings to his work: the sensitivity with which he approaches history; the humanity with which he treats his historical subjects; the dexterity with which he analyzes the law; and the sophistication with which his human and legal stories yield up jurisprudential insights. I also, respectfully, disagree with Hartog himself on the essence of his work. Where he laments that he exists in a “muddle in the middle”—writing histories of a problematic “inbetweenness”—I see him as making the messy lived reality of legal history cognizable to modern reader. His work reveals the simultaneity of multiple and overlapping legal regimes as they shaped and were shaped by the human needs of real people.

What are the implications of international law for attitudes toward wartime violence? Existing research offers contrasting views on the ability of international legal principles to shape individual preferences, especially in difficult situations involving armed conflict. Employing cross-national survey evidence from several conflict and post-conflict countries, this article contributes to this debate by evaluating the relationship between individuals’ knowledge of the laws of war and attitudes toward wartime conduct. Findings show that exposure to international law is associated with a significant reduction in support for wartime abuses, though the results are stronger for prisoner treatment than for targeting civilians. Analysis further reveals that legal principles generate different expectations of conduct than alternative value systems that are rooted in strong moral foundations regarding the impermissibility of wartime abuses. The findings are relevant for understanding the relationship between international law and domestic actors, and how legal principles relate to the resort to violence.

Using quantitative and qualitative data from a large national sample of lawyers, we examine self-reports of perceived discrimination in the legal workplace. Across three waves of surveys, we find that persons of color, white women, and LGBTQ attorneys are far more likely to perceive they have been a target of discrimination than white men. These differences hold in multivariate models that control for social background, status in the profession and the work organization, and characteristics of the work organization. Qualitative comments describing these experiences reveal that lawyers of different races, genders, and sexual orientations are exposed to distinctive types of bias, that supervisors and clients are the most frequent sources of discriminatory treatment, and the often-overt character of perceived discrimination. These self-reports suggest that bias in the legal workplace is widespread and rooted in the same hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation that pervade society.

Every year, the US government detains thousands of noncitizens in removal proceedings on the basis that they might pose a threat to public safety if released during the pendency of their removal proceedings. Using original audio recording data on immigration bond hearings, this study examines immigration judges’ determinations regarding which noncitizens pose a danger to the community. My multivariate analysis that controls for a variety of detainee background characteristics and criminal-conviction-related measures produced three main findings. First, I find that Central Americans are more likely to be deemed dangerous than non-Central Americans. Second, I find that detainees with attorneys are less likely to be deemed dangerous than pro se detainees. Finally, my analysis shows that whereas felony and violent convictions are associated with higher odds of being deemed dangerous, the recency of criminal convictions and the total number of convictions are not predictive of danger determinations. Together, these findings provide new insights into the socio-legal construction of immigrant criminality.

This article considers how legal systems capture different cultural perceptions of work in an individual’s life. We inquire how two models—“human capital,” based on the works of Adam Smith; and “vocation,” based on the works of G. W. F. Hegel—are reflected in legal regulations and judicial rhetoric in the United States and Germany. Specifically, we examine how these two legal systems treat the practice of using personal names—the most direct referents to individuals’ identities—in business. We discuss three sets of cases: cases involving the use of personal names as trademarks, cases involving conflicts between parties with similar names, and cases involving the transfer of rights in personal names. The article demonstrates that the US legal system treats work as a commercial asset, as “human capital” in Smith’s sense, whereas German law perceives work as an integral part of one’s identity, echoing the Hegelian line of “vocation.”

Hendrick Hartog’s Pigs and Positivism is well known as an investigation of legal pluralism. The legal pluralism angle of the article focuses on the multiplicity of legal sources. In that sense, it reads “positivism” through the sources thesis: the idea that only those social facts recognized by the legal system as sources of law can exert an impact on the validity of a legal norm. This Essay highlights a different aspect of the article, which is the “definition of law as an arena of conflict within which alternative social visions contended, bargained, and survived.” Crucially, the alternative social visions at stake have different roles for the law itself. In other words, the conflict is not limited to a particular social arrangement (will there or won’t there be pigs on the streets); it is at least in part a conflict over the question of how law will fit into social conflict, or politics.

Hendrik Hartog’s article “The Constitution of Aspiration” paved new ways of thinking about the historical formation and political significance of rights-consciousness. This Essay considers the contribution of social histories of rights-consciousness to our understanding of the underpinnings and consequences of constitutional change. In particular, we consider the impact of this literature on debates regarding questions of periodization in American constitutional history and on debates concerning the relationship between egalitarian and counter-egalitarian strands of rights-consciousness. We critically evaluate the importance and limits of these contributions by focusing on methodological and interpretive questions that emerge from recent literature on struggles for racial and gender equality.

In civil cases that took place in southern courts from the end of the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century, black men and women frequently chose to bring litigation and then negotiated the white-dominated legal system to shape their cases and assert rights. In some ways, these civil cases were diametrically opposite from the criminal cases of black defendants who did not choose to enter a courtroom and often received unequal justice. However, this article draws on almost 2,000 cases involving black litigants in eight state supreme courts across the South between 1865 to 1950 to argue that in both civil and criminal cases African Americans were at times shaping their cases and fighting for their rights, as well as obtaining decisions that aligned with the interests of white elites. Southern state courts during the era of Jim Crow were thus spaces for negotiating for rights and sites of white domination, in both criminal and civil cases.

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Mood, and Donald Haider-Markel, is an important piece of law and society scholarship that isolates investigatory police stops as an institutional practice with profound consequences for racial inequality. Pulled Over also speaks to scholarship on race and ethnicity by addressing an ongoing tension between a focus on the socially constructed nature of racial categories and their stratifying significance. Pulled Over offers an important model for future studies by incorporating social constructionist insights into how race is measured, empirically documenting institutionally produced racial inequalities, and linking these inequalities to the evolving meaning of race itself.