Marijuana continues to be legalized throughout the world. In the United States, a unique approach to legalization is taking hold that focuses on the creation of commercial marijuana markets. This article examines the everyday realities of this approach to legalization through a focus on one of marijuana’s most legally significant attributes: its smell. In the context of prohibition, the smell of marijuana was a key tool of criminal law enforcement. In the context of legalization, its significance has expanded to include nuisance laws governing the presence of unwanted odors and commercial laws that facilitate economic activity in the marijuana market. By focusing on the sense of smell in the context of marijuana legalization, this article shows the implications of the market-based approach for drug policy reform. More broadly, this focus highlights the importance of the senses to sociolegal change and the ongoing construction of legality in the context of capitalism.

Most scholarship addressing implementation gaps of violence against women (VAW) laws focuses on countries with high levels of violence in the lives of women—accompanied by weak policing and judicial responses. These studies tend to argue that the most egregious forms of political or social violence explain this gap. However, there has been little attention to countries with lower levels of gender-based violence and relatively responsive state institutions. We analyze the application of VAW laws in Costa Rica, with a focus on the impact of adjacent laws, or laws that are seemingly unrelated to VAW laws but are applied in tandem with and often in conflict with VAW laws. Based on a decade of fieldwork in Costa Rica, we argue that adjacent laws on land, labor, and immigration can be leveraged in ways that undermine the interpretation and implementation of VAW laws. These failures constitute legal violence: the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of laws that can result in various forms of violence. While legal violence causes implementation gaps in almost every country, our case study reveals that the underlying sociolegal system upon which these laws rest contributes to a significant gap between VAW laws and practice.

The role of fiduciary law in the development of North American capitalism has been overlooked by institutional economists, who interpret fiduciary law as a form of contract and make the judicial enforcement of contract central to the transaction-cost theory of economic development. This article argues that the emergence of distinctive, equity-based fiduciary laws and norms significantly influenced the development and growth of early-nineteenth-century American markets. Our historical research identifies lawyers as important economic actors, who served as catalysts for the emergence of this governance culture. Lawyers adopted fiduciary principles that allowed them to become trusted intermediaries, thereby addressing the agency-cost problems inherent in complex economic exchange that vex the institutionalists’ contractual account of economic development.

As quantification has become socially ubiquitous, the disclosure of numerical data emerges as a key feature of legal reform and global governance. Scholars document how seemingly value-neutral statistical indicators shape, and are shaped by, institutional interests. Although less attention has been paid to cases where states resist numerical disclosure, prohibitions on the disclosure of such indicators also produce social effects. This article extends scholarship on the governance effects of quantification to include secrecy by exploring the case of capital punishment data in China, which is reportedly the world’s leading executioner state. Amid a major death penalty reform effort, China steadfastly refuses international calls to publicly disclose relevant statistics. I analyze capital cases and draw on seventy-three interviews with legal insiders in China’s death penalty system to identify the impact of state efforts to conceal capital punishment indicators while undertaking reforms in three areas: transparency; legal representation; and criminal procedure. I show how tension between the disclosure and nondisclosure of death penalty numbers does not simply suppress data; it also shapes and becomes data, influencing both policy and action in the legal sphere in ways that are seemingly far removed from quantification.

Social movements have increasingly incorporated legal strategies into their repertoires of contention. Yet, both sociolegal and social movement scholarship lack a systematic and theoretically coherent way to conceptualize legal mobilization. In fact, scholars disagree (sometimes in fundamental ways) about what constitutes legal mobilization, which has resulted in conceptual slippage around how the term is used. This article proposes a more self-conscious approach that will facilitate the aggregation of findings across studies. To do so, it sets forth a systematic conceptualization of legal mobilization and situates it within a typology of uses of the law. It also contextualizes the typology with respect to emerging literatures within social movement and sociolegal scholarship and proposes areas for further research that would benefit from a more rigorous conceptualization of legal mobilization.

To enhance the welfare of smallholder farmers, development agencies increasingly promote “value chain agriculture” where farmers partner with more powerful entities, such as corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to create new sources of economic value. Via a qualitative study of how small farmers negotiate with the buyers of retail and agribusiness corporations in India, this article explores why the promise of value creation can appear so elusive on the ground. It makes two primary contributions. For global value chain scholars, it illustrates how studying value chains “below” the level of the firm illuminates complex ways in which new pathways for economic development are constrained by actually existing local economies—and how these local economies, rather than easily replaced, shape what counts as a source of value for small farmers. For negotiation scholars, it illustrates how, in some contexts, an equitable distribution of risk and social relationships may need to precede anything we call value creation.

This article examines how ill-defined legal norms around modern slavery are being outlined in supply chain legislation and then interpreted by management professionals. Building on an infrastructural analysis of supply chain governance, I uncover the set of practices that underlie recent regulations around modern slavery. I track the implementation of these laws by following the “chain of translation,” whereby information is transformed from on-the-ground raw data, to quantitative metrics of modern slavery risks, and, finally, to polished corporate statements. This analysis focuses on the critical role being played by the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex), which is a platform for sharing responsible sourcing data. While Sedex is not an auditor and is not governed by lawyers, it is nonetheless serving an important function in interpreting legal norms around modern slavery and facilitating the implementation of supply chain laws. Yet there are potential costs to its expansive role. Sedex is translating modern slavery into a management problem largely based on quantitative metrics such as indicators and risk scorecards. While Sedex provides limited opportunities for public participation, it needs to be more transparent with respect to the methodology behind its metrics and provide further opportunities for comment by parties underrepresented in its governance.

Deliberative democracy has grown into an influential normative paradigm for political theory and reform programs alike, but doubts persist about its desirability in a world where strategic action and inequality are prevalent. This problem has spurred efforts to understand the empirical dynamics of power relations in institutionalized participation. This article argues that sociolegal scholarship has yet to join this turn to power but that doing so can help it to specify law’s causal and normative relevance in deliberative governance. This is because the legal environment within which actors interact affects causal mechanisms by distributing opportunities for the exercise of power between potential participants, actual participants, and participants and government. The utility of a power-distributional perspective is illustrated through a study of São Paulo’s health councils, one of the world’s largest experiments in deliberative governance. The study demonstrates that the councils’ trajectory and current functioning—including some of their normatively problematic aspects—cannot be understood without reference to legal arrangements. This article is meant as a building block for sociolegal scholarship to continue investigating deliberation.

Despite a number of compelling entrapment claims in post-9/11 US terrorism cases, these claims have nearly always failed. While previous research suggests possible reasons for this almost complete failure of the entrapment defense, no research has yet systematically examined the mechanisms responsible for this result. Drawing on thirty-seven interviews with individuals with in-depth knowledge of particular cases, as well as textual analysis of court decisions and quantitative analysis of a terrorism database, this article identifies several factors contributing to the entrapment defense’s failure. These include strategic choices by defendants to plead guilty or use other defenses, prosecutorial misconduct, evidence manipulation by informants and police, deficient entrapment doctrines, and procedural irregularities. Consistent with the general trend of counterterrorism law enhancing government power while reducing accountability, the multiple opportunities for authorities to manipulate the legal process leave defendants with little realistic chance of acquittal on entrapment grounds.

Since the 1970s, police departments have subjected the use of force by their officers to increasingly stringent oversight, but those efforts have struggled against the difficulty of codifying the complex and idiosyncratic judgments that police work requires. In response, some departments have developed new models of oversight that use routine incident reviews partly as a tool for learning in order to document the continually surprising circumstances that officers encounter in the field, to scrutinize existing responses, and to articulate alternatives. This article analyzes the logic of this emerging model through a case study of use-of-force reviews in the Portland Police Bureau. I argue that this emerging model relies on an approach to practical inquiry that has not been adequately understood in criminal justice scholarship and practice—one that uses the routine review of organizational experience to pursue normative progress as well as technical understanding and that makes it possible to adapt complex policing practices to the local environment in which they operate.

Through the mid-twentieth century, jurisprudents considered sociological jurisprudence to be one of the most influential theories of law in the United States. By end of the century, however, it had virtually disappeared. The publication of Roger Cotterrell’s Sociological Jurisprudence: Juristic Thought and Social Inquiry (2018) provides an occasion to examine what this theory of law was about, why it disappeared, and its prospects for revival. The topics covered in this essay are the circumstances surrounding the origin of sociological jurisprudence, the tenets of sociological jurisprudence, the successes of sociological jurisprudence, its relationship with sociology of law, its relationship with legal realism, its place in contemporary jurisprudence, and finally, the need to keep jurisprudence open.

Market regulation has traditionally focused on disclosure duties, yet mounting evidence questions their effectiveness. The efficacy of nudges is similarly doubted, especially when suppliers counter their effects. Consequently, there is growing interest in mandatory regulation of the content of contracts. Previous studies have examined public opinion about nudges but not about mandatory rules.

We explore how the formulation of mandatory rules might affect their judged desirability, focusing on the choices: (1) between negative and positive formulation; and (2) between merely establishing substantive mandatory rules and supervising the wording of the contract as well. We also examine laypersons’ general attitude toward mandatory rules.

We report the results of four studies, conducted with a representative sample of 968 US adults and 795 MTurk master workers. Contrary to our conjecture, we found that subjects generally judged wording rules as more desirable than merely substantive ones, and positive rules as more desirable than negative ones. There also appears to be strong support for pro-customer mandatory rules, even among conservative people. These results arguably legitimize more, and more effective, mandatory rules. They also suggest that the relative paucity of mandatory rules in US law is not due to public opposition to them but to other reasons.

American rights discourse makes it difficult to generate responsibilities for the well-being of the communities within which human personhood is formed. Gregory S. Alexander’s Property and Human Flourishing (2018) focuses on the obligations that property owners owe to the communities in which they are embedded. Drawing on a communitarian ontology—as opposed to atomist ontology—and writing in the spirit of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and thinkers of the liberalism of flourishing, Alexander endorses human flourishing as the central ideal of the good life, and argues that ownership of property is justified insofar as it facilitates the opportunity of persons to live flourishing lives.

How do authoritarian states define and communicate notions of appropriate work conduct and professional excellence? This article examines three channels of communication used by the Chinese state to signal professional expectations to the bar: the bar exam, the administrative rules governing lawyers, and the state-sanctioned National Outstanding Lawyer Award. We find that China’s state narrative about “the good lawyer” celebrates lawyers willing to work closely with the authorities and asks more stringent critics to separate private beliefs from public behavior. In contrast to assumptions often made in research on authoritarian law, this article highlights how lawyers can participate in politics without opposing the regime and how much work goes into curating an appealing state strand of legal professionalism rather than relying on coercion alone. We end with a call for future work on “varieties of legal professionalism” to better understand which state signals are most visible and persuasive to different segments of the Chinese bar, as well as the conditions under which alternate ideas about professionalism gain traction.

Shari‘a (commonly translated as Islamic law) is at the epicenter of anti-Muslim discourses in the United States. How do Muslims in the United States understand and experience shari‘a in the context of virulent attacks on it and on Islam and Muslims more generally? This article explores the meanings Californian Muslims give to and the intentions they derive from shari‘a when dominant discourses represent shari‘a as a cause for concern in American life. Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with Muslims across California, as well as scholarship on legal consciousness and lived religion, we document three interrelated stages of shari‘a consciousness: perceiving shari‘a and discriminatory depictions of it; educating oneself about shari‘a’s social and political relevance; and forming an intention for social action. Documenting these interrelated stages and theorizing the relationship between legal consciousness, religion, and inequality, this article reveals how religious identity formation is a significant precursor of legal mobilization and how nonstate normative orders provide interpretive frames for understanding human rights and social justice. Ultimately, legal consciousness may stem from sacred sensibilities and the desire to be a more ethical servant of God and not merely to be a more ethical subject of the state.

This article explores the ideals of open Internet governance in Brazil. I examine Brazil’s Internet law, the Marco Civil da Internet (MCI), which promotes the right to Internet access, online privacy, and net neutrality. The MCI’s ideals of a free and open Internet are challenged by Internet companies, such as Facebook, which offer “zero-rating” promotions that provide limited, free mobile data to low-income subscribers. I juxtapose the ideals of openness embodied in the regulatory sphere of the MCI with those of Brazil’s cultura livre (free culture) movement to show the ascendance of open values in Brazilian governance and culture. Accordingly, I employ the rhetorical question, “Is Facebook the Internet?” to demonstrate the ways in which commitments to open Internet governance, expressed in both the cultural and regulatory realms, run counter to the more proprietary ideals of the transnational tech community.

Using interviews with forty formerly incarcerated people in the Greater Toronto Area, I explore how criminal record holders describe seeking work. People articulate being driven by a desire to be selective to whom, when, and how they disclose their past criminal record; they simultaneously want to talk about their past, at least to some people, some of the time. Many say they are quite selective in what types of jobs and employers they seek out, and their efforts to secure employment are driven by broader projects of stigma management. In light of these findings, I coin “selective, voluntary disclosure” (SVD) as a new set of policy configurations that aim to facilitate not only employment but also dignity, privacy, and empowerment. SVD is well attuned with what former prisoners describe doing on an everyday basis, and it accords with their goals, aspirations, and rehabilitative self-projects.

In Visions of Social Control (1985) Stanley Cohen provided a typology of scholarly works on the punitive turn: “uneven progress,” “good intentions-disastrous consequences,” and “discipline and mystification.” This Essay applies these categories to recent punishment and society scholarship, finding a clear preference for the third category, arguing that current works do not merely point to systemic evils—they impute bad intent to individuals in the system. Against this current, I identify two works—James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own (2017) and Heather Schoenfeld’s Building the Prison State (2016)—and show the strengths of analyses that take individual actors on their own terms. Finally, relying on the recent example of the Ban the Box initiative—a well-intended but failed policy—I argue that flexibility in viewing actors’ motivations, rather than relegating them to the role of cogs in a system fraught by inherent flaws, is important not only for scholarly accuracy but for policy and strategic reasons.

The second edition of Santi Romano’s book, The Legal Order, now appearing in its first English translation (2017), is a pioneer text of legal pluralism. Its interest lies in its extreme radicalism and in the fact that, although it is written by a lawyer, its argument has many important political implications and addresses core conceptual issues in contemporary sociolegal studies of legal pluralism. The social and political context of Romano’s book in early twentieth-century Italy is far from being solely of historical interest. Issues that surrounded his juristic thinking in its time resonate with important political and social issues of today.

This article examines the legal constructs governing the use of violent interrogation methods in Israel since 1987. It explores the shift from a sweeping suspension of the prohibition on torture to a fractured legal regime in which the different elements of interrogation—the perpetrator, the victim, the time of the interrogation, and the space in which it takes place—are effectively excluded from the prohibition on torture by means of separate legal constructs. I show how each of these constructs creates a narrow, seemingly proportional exception to ordinary law. Together, the four types of exception facilitate the sanctioning of state violence. I use this case to analyze the available configurations of the state of exception, distinguishing them from each other by what they exclude from ordinary law. By showing how the proliferation of legal constructs produces an entire ecosystem of different exceptions, I point to the inherent link between the suspension of the law and its proliferation: both create legal categories that rationalize and legitimize state violence.