Ban the Box (BTB) laws are an anti-discrimination policy intended to promote employment for persons with criminal records. However, research on law and organizations shows that firms often fail to comply with legal directives or engage in symbolic compliance that fails to alter day-to-day business practices. We consider whether BTB contributed to attitudinal or behavioral shifts among hiring managers and changes in job applications. We analyze a unique set of in-depth interviews (N = 30) and entry-level job applications (N = 305) collected from the same workplaces in 2008 and 2016, assessing the impact of state BTB legislation. We find: (1) that one in five organizations were noncompliant, with noncompliance twice as likely among employers who discriminated against applicants with criminal records pre-BTB and that widespread lack of knowledge and lack of enforcement of BTB appears to affect noncompliance; (2) organizations maintained considerable continuity in hiring practices and attitudes between 2008 and 2016, regardless of personnel changes and statewide implementation of BTB; and (3) post-BTB, strong warnings about criminal background checks at later stages of the hiring process emerged as an alternative source of gatekeeping. These findings contribute to the law and organizations literature by highlighting the importance of enforcement and limits of law for combating discrimination.

Through an ethnographic analysis of Hong Kong LGBT activists’ fight for a gender recognition ordinance (GRO) that would simplify the process for transgender Hongkongers to change their legal gender, a paradox emerged: Why was a human rights framing of LGBT issues problematic when human rights were central to locals’ understanding of what it meant to be Hongkongers? Local LGBT activists’ vernacularization of human rights—or the process of localization of international human rights law into culturally relevant frameworks—hinged on reframing the need for a GRO as a matter of humanity, not human rights law. Relying on citations of human rights law among “ordinary citizens” violated the existing ways in which Hongkongers talked about human rights as a method of distinguishing Hong Kong from the rest of the People’s Republic of China. Furthermore, this need to differentiate emerged from the 2014 Umbrella Movement in which prodemocracy activists occupied various urban centers in Hong Kong for seventy-nine days. The Umbrella Movement caused a shift in which ordinary citizens became responsible for each other and defending what made Hong Kong unique. Ultimately, the vernacularization process requires closer attention to the ways in which human rights are being talked about on the ground.

This article addresses the gap between normative expectations of the right to protest in liberal democracies and the continued practice of repressive protest policing. The empirical literature has identified three types of factors explaining repressive policing: macro- or societal-level factors, meso-level factors relating to the police organization, and micro-level factors pertaining to specific events. Yet these factors provide only a fragmented understanding of the phenomenon. In this article, we put forward a novel three-tiered methodology of scaled reading, which is able to examine all these explanations together. We use scaled reading to analyze the protocols of the Or Commission of Inquiry, which investigated lethal clashes between the Israeli police and Israel’s Arab minority in October 2000. Through large-scale algorithmic topic modeling, we found that all types of empirical explanations of repressive policing co-exist within the October events. The mid-scale analysis revealed that no type of explanation exclusively belongs to a specific group of actors. The small-scale reading of the most representative documents for each topic demonstrated that this coexistence of mechanisms is also present within single testimonies. Together, our findings challenge existing empirical categories and illuminate repressive policing as a nonlinear, nonbinary, noncausal, and nonunitary phenomenon. These insights help make sense of the phenomenon’s persistence in deeply divided societies.

This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article, I offer an overview of these texts across several traditions and a defense of their importance in the study of comparative constitutional law. I then draw on fieldwork from Sri Lanka to provide a firsthand account of what a modern religious constitution looks like and how it works to govern one of the country’s largest communities of Buddhist monks. I conclude by urging scholars to view religion and constitutional law not as opposing legal domains but, rather, as homologous forms of social ordering that draw upon similar concepts and logics to address common human dilemmas.

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these people will eventually be eligible for discretionary parole release. Yet parole hearings are notoriously understudied. With only a handful of exceptions, few researchers have considered the ways in which race shapes decision-makers’ perception of parole candidates. We use a data set created from over seven hundred California lifer parole hearing transcripts to examine the factors that predict parole commissioners’ decisions. We find significant racial disparities in outcomes, with Black parole candidates less likely to receive parole grants than white parole candidates, and test two possible indirect mechanisms. First, we find that racial disparity is unassociated with differences in rehabilitative efforts of Black versus white parole candidates, suggesting that differential levels of self-rehabilitation are not responsible for the disparity. Second, we test the hypothesis that racial disparity owes to commissioners’ reliance on other professionals’ determinations: psychological assessments, behavioral judgments, and prosecutors’ recommendations. We find that reliance on these evaluations accounts for a significant portion of the observed racial disparity. These results suggest that inclusion of professional assessments is not race-neutral and may create a veneer of objectivity that masks racial inequality.

Despite the fact that three-fifths of Czech judges are women, it would be a mistake to consider the Czech judiciary “feminized”: it is characterized by vertical gender segregation and a slow “defeminization” in positions of power and influence. The key to understanding both women’s presence overall and absence at the top is the gendered division of labor, especially in the home. The same reason why many women enter the judiciary—better reconciliation of private and professional lives than in other legal professions—is the reason why women do not progress—their “second shift” at home prevents them from ascending the career ladder.

What labor rights do police workers have? How are they legally delimited? This article addresses these questions through a case study of government responses to attempts by police constables in post/colonial South Asia to express job-related grievances and establish employee unions. Drawing on ethnographic observations, interviews, and archival documents collected in India over fifteen years, the analysis demonstrates that, for more than a century, class warfare within police organizations has manifested in counter-insurgency “lawfare” between senior officials and subordinate personnel regarding whether and how the latter may collectively organize to transform their living and working conditions. It further shows how in this context law as a social field has worked to subjectify rank-and-file police as an ironically exploitable and expendable class of laborers who are always already suspect of rebelling against the state that they have sworn to serve. Through revelations of a long history of structural servitude compelling subaltern police in South Asia to do questionably legal types of labor, this study raises challenging questions about how police work has been conceived and practiced globally as “security labor” and how, moving forward, we must work to reimagine what police work is, what it can be, and what it ought to be.

As conventionally understood, anti-corruption programs rely on legal rules to define and control the abuse of official power for private gain. This study explores the limits to law-based standards of corruption where state officials obscure bribery and the abuse of power beneath a veneer of legality. Drawing on an empirical study of two public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Vietnam, it asks whether the failure of anti-corruption laws to curb malfeasance in PPPs is attributable to insufficient enforcement, to targeting the wrong behavior, or to both of these issues. It argues that if anti-corruption laws are blind to the opportunistic manipulation of laws in PPPs, then we must consider other ways of conceptualizing and controlling corruption. This argument links the way in which corruption is conceptualized to the efficacy of policy instruments used to curb corruption in PPPs. In particular, it examines whether public interest corruption provides a framework that makes malfeasance in PPPs visible and thus offers a mechanism for holding officials accountable. This study concludes that public interest corruption broadens the analysis of corruption in PPPs from transgressions of legal boundaries to an examination of public inclusion and exclusion from decision making.

We live in an age of datafication wherein nearly all aspects of our lives can be transformed into data and evaluated. The authors seek to make sense of the heightened datafication-enabled social control under China’s Social Credit System (SCS) by developing the concept of the data state. A “data state” is defined as a governance model enabling the state to comprehensively monitor, evaluate, and control its subjects through datafication, leaving them little room to defend their autonomy. We identify the multiple functions of the SCS in its development up to 2020 and analyze its inherent defects, including the decontextualized evaluation of individuals and the semi-automated imposition of disproportionate punishment. We argue that, if the SCS were to fully integrate its functions and connect to other data-driven governance initiatives, it would eventually allow the data self, carefully groomed by the state, to dominate the bio-self and turn China into a data state. Whereas China’s SCS may be unique and not easily replicated elsewhere, understanding its intricacies helps to enable the citizens of democratic societies to guard against the relentless growth of datafication that may result in an invincible and irreversible ecosystem for the emergence of a data state.

In this article I use a unique hand-coded dataset of all expropriation exercises in Jerusalem over a twenty-five-year period to test the distribution of the expropriation burden across political communities. I identify the ethnoreligious group to which the impacted landowner belongs and the community that would benefit from the decision. I find that Palestinian property constitutes 38 percent of all land taken over the years, while only 10 percent of all land taken has been repurposed for their local community needs. Conversely, Jewish owners have contributed only 4 percent of all land taken while benefiting from 33 percent of the land taken for their community needs. I also find that land not owned by Jews has a higher propensity to be taken for citywide purposes by ten to twenty-three times than Jewish land, depending on the purpose and the type of property rights involved. This sharp gap can be attributed to the political power relations in the city. The case study enables me to test the relationship between weak property rights and infrastructure provision. As property rights are formally recorded and recognized selectively in some but not in all parts of the city, the article provides the first empirical evidence to the effect of weak property rights on the risk of expropriation. I find that the propensity for noncommunity purpose takings of nonformalized land for which Palestinians claim ownership but have no official records to is significantly higher when compared to formalized Palestinian land. This outcome contradicts the conventional wisdom in the literature that weak property rights help explain limited infrastructure development.

Although legitimacy is crucial for courts’ efficacy, the sources identified as legitimizing domestic institutions are weaker or absent altogether for international institutions. We use an original, preregistered, nationally representative survey experiment to show that perceived home-state interest strongly affects the legitimacy afforded by UK citizens to the International Criminal Court. Importantly, this relationship is moderated by nationalism. Our findings have implications for state actors in a position to act vis-á-vis international courts, elites seeking to alter opinions toward courts, and courts themselves weighing possible institutional costs of acting against noncompliant states.

This inquiry explores how data analyses about US Federal sentences have transformed sentencing practice beginning in the mid-1980s. I consider this inquiry an early case of the datafication of law, a pervasive process that translates legal practice into data and embeds it in digital networks so it can be tracked and analyzed in real time. To explore datafication historically and in relation to legal practice and power, I consider it not as an objective and passive undertaking but, rather, as an ideological and performative process that encodes and enacts normative presumptions and desirable futures. The empirical inquiry traverses “levels of analysis” and thus bridges prominent perspectives in sociolegal research. In so doing, I identify four mechanisms that mediate “large-scale” processes and “local” practices: field assembly, symbolic projection, material inscription, and boundaries spanning. Substantively, I show how datafication has not simply described, but also transformed, sentencing practice according to a colorblind-carceral imaginary that strives to fix the present in place. By relentlessly translating decisions into data forms that derive from this carceral imaginary, datafication affects judicial action and partakes in sustaining legacies of oppression. Yet, like other technologies, datafication also reveals dialectic dimensions in opening up to new actors and subjecting its ideological underpinnings to contestation and change.

Prior to the modern understanding of sex as fundamentally biological, a person’s sex status—that is, whether they were male or female—was largely a legal issue. How was this legal fact established in cases of doubt? To answer that question, this article tells the story of the regulation of cases of doubtful sex (the cases of people who were then referred to as hermaphrodites) between 1629 and 1787 in England and Colonial America. Trials of doubtful sex from this period show that, rather than being based on a single piece of evidence (such as genital appearance), determining a person’s sex required a rich and context-sensitive evaluation by witnesses and juries. However, toward the end of the eighteenth century, scientific and medical authorities gradually sought to classify hermaphrodites according to their “true sex” and to remove any doubt from that classification. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that the early modern common law tradition did not conceptualize sex as purely binary and did not hinge on medical opinions throughout most of the eighteenth century. These findings highlight the continuous engagement of courts in actively shaping the meaning and ontology of sex rather than merely reflecting it in their decisions.

International courts (ICs) with human rights mandates have recently faced instances of backlash aiming to curb their authority. Taking cues from research on the functioning of ICs, we argue that ICs will be resilient—able to maintain their competences and authority in the face of backlash—to the extent that they are embedded in domestic “legal complexes.” Our framework identifies key sites of embeddedness and stresses the importance of synergies between them, including: (1) the incorporation of treaties into domestic law; (2) independent courts; (3) acceptance and use of IC jurisprudence by domestic judiciaries; (4) strong national human rights institutions; (5) incorporation of international law into legal training and research; and (6) the presence of NGOs that rely on ICs. This article explores resilience in the Inter-American System of Human Rights. First, we discuss and map the state of each source of resilience across Latin America. Second, we show how the activation of sources of resilience helped preserve the integrity of Inter-American institutions in the face of backlash orchestrated by several countries between 2011 and 2014.

This article uses evidence from Tanzanian lawyers and legal experts to advance a novel lawyer-centered explanation for Tanzania’s low levels of rights litigation. Like in many countries, Tanzanian citizens who pursue litigation depend on the presence, ideas, and guidance of lawyers. To understand patterns of litigation in Tanzania, therefore, we need to understand how lawyers make choices about their cases. Such knowledge is crucial to understanding litigation in Tanzania and in many other countries where lawyers bear similar responsibility in determining patterns of litigation. Here, I argue that three factors—legal education, laws and institutions, and judicial receptivity—dissuade lawyers from making rights-based arguments in cases where they might be appropriate. Lawyers’ avoidance of rights-based arguments in turn leads to low levels of rights litigation in Tanzania.

I propose a three-way model of negotiation on judicial mediation: the judge as a negotiator. Primarily drawing on ethnographic observations of a civil judge in a basic-level court in hinterland China, I document Chinese judges’ tactics at the micro level. I find that the Chinese judge not only “expands” and “narrows” claims. In addition, included in her repertoire are “repression,” “conversion,” and “facilitation.” Following this, I explore the inequitable consequences of the judge’s apparent success in disposing cases. In negotiating the claims, the judge convinces or cajoles litigants who are economically vulnerable, inexperienced in the courtroom, legally bewildered, or timid in confronting the judges’ authority, into the settlement. But she often facilitates the claims of litigants who can mount credible political resistance. The interests of those who are vulnerable in one way or another, but not in a position to initiate political threats, are often dispensed. Inequalities are thus generated, reproduced, and reinforced. This three-way negotiation model provides a new perspective to study judicial mediation comparatively.

Contemporary dictators routinely co-opt institutions crucial for democratic governance. Although an extensive literature examines why and how aspiring autocrats bring elections and parties under their control, constitutions—and the judicial or quasi-judicial bodies charged with interpreting constitutions—are often assumed to reflect the existing balance of power. But following regime change, constitutional courts’ power of review makes them integral for establishing political supremacy. We detail how President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan captured the Constitutional Court via its transformation into the Constitutional Council. The uncertainty and upheaval of the post-Soviet collapse created opportunities for formal institutional changes that made the court susceptible to executive capture. Nazarbayev subsequently used the council rulings to lay claim to democratic and constitutional legitimacy in a clear example of authoritarian constitutionalism. To trace the process of capture and legitimation, we examine key court rulings throughout the president’s tenure using a database of Constitutional Council decisions.

Immunity from tort liability for losses that are inflicted during warfare is often justified by a supposedly intuitive concern: without immunity, states and combatants will be over-deterred from engaging in combat. In this article, I test this common perception using three frameworks. First, I theoretically analyze the impact of tort liability on relevant state actors’ incentives to engage in warfare. This analysis suggests that tort law is likely to under-deter state actors in relation to their decisions on whether and how to conduct hostilities. Second, I test this conclusion through an original mixed-methods exploratory research, using Israel as a test case. My findings reveal that while tort liability under-deters state actors from engaging in warfare, it can prompt them to implement regulatory measures to minimize the state’s liability. Third, I offer a legal history analysis, exploring why Israel established an immunity from tort liability for losses it inflicts during combat in 1951, and why and how this immunity has expanded since. I show that as the Israel-Palestine conflict prolonged and intensified, state actors began viewing Palestinians’ tort claims as a civilian means of warfare and immunity from liability as the weapon needed for defending Israel’s interests.

The threat of negligent hiring lawsuits is thought to play an important role in the widespread use of criminal background checks among US employers. This article examines the construction of negligent hiring within the trade literature of the human resources (HR) field using a qualitative content analysis. While courts tend to view criminal record checks as unnecessary for occupations that do not carry foreseeable risks, the article finds that the HR field has broadly endorsed criminal record checks as the default practice for screening job candidates. The article argues that this divergence stems from the structured uncertainty of compliance under the common law tort of negligent hiring, which shapes organizational behavior in ways that defy the substantive clarity of relevant case law.

Building upon participant observation in a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, run by activists of an Islamic feminist movement in India, and its networks with similar alternative dispute resolution forums run by male qazis (non-state actors trained in Islamic law and Muslim personal law), this article explores the modalities of interaction between non-state actors who adjudicate Muslim personal law in India. It also delineates how gendered agency is shaped in these interactions. This article identifies three aspects of this interaction between male and female non-state actors: (1) everyday cooperation between male and female qazi despite their doctrinal differences; (2) the gradual assertion of female qazi in and through everyday cooperation with male qazi; and (3) institutional competition interlaced with everyday cooperation. I explore a range of interactions including contestation and collaborative contestation between non-state actors, a domain that has not been explored in existing scholarship on legal pluralism. I also draw attention to how we might think about women’s agency in a legal pluralist context beyond a straightforward challenge to male authority and as it is forged at the intersection of individuals, interactions, and institutions. Through a critical exploration of women’s agency, I show how women both inhabit and transform gender norms at an individual and institutional level in their interactions with non-state actors and institutions, expanding scholarship on legal pluralism and gender beyond reified “women’s interests.”