Recent years have seen a growing literature on citations between courts from different countries. What explains why such cross-citations occur between some courts but not others? This article addresses this question with original data on 2,967 citations between the private law supreme courts of the twenty-eight member states of the European Union. These cross-citations form a valued network of twenty-eight nodes, which can be analyzed with tools of network analysis. The article uses the method of a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure in order to address the dependency of observations in a network. The explanatory variables distinguish between variables that proxy for legal similarities between countries and other factors, and, thus, this article contributes to the wider debate about the predominance of either legal or nonlegal factors in judicial decision-making. The main finding is that nonlegal factors play a decisive role, notably a common native language and overlapping language skills, while legal families are not found to be a significant determinant.

Despite the proliferation of transitional justice, scholars have rarely researched the emotional toll on those who implement transitional justice mechanisms. This article accordingly examines the emotion management techniques employed by eighty-five judges who served in Rwanda’s post-genocide gacaca courts. Most of the intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion management strategies we find are gendered, with men generally emphasizing strength and women underscoring empathy and understanding. Moreover, the dimensions of identity that were most salient during the conflict also shaped the judges’ interpersonal emotion management strategies. Specifically, judges who were not targeted during the genocide focused on regulating emotions tied to punishing defendants, while judges who were targeted emphasized survivors’ emotional catharses. As such, our findings show how conflict divisions and gender norms structure the expression of emotion during transitional justice processes.

This article studies relational contracts whose performance implicates the person of the promisor (as where the promisor is the promisee’s employee). We investigate whether people’s beliefs that their and others’ personalities are relatively malleable (or not) correlate with their tendency to engage in such long-term contracts. Our survey experiment shows that the more people believe that their own personality is intertemporally malleable the less they tend to make long-term commitments; by contrast, the more they believe that others’ personalities are malleable, the more they tend to engage in such commitments. Our findings imply that people’s intuitive tendencies to make long-term commitments align with those that underlie liberal contract law, which is careful about enforcing contracts that constrain the self-determination of contractors’ future selves.

Core contributions from John Hagan’s scholarship on genocide are at stake in this article. First, this article examines, for the Rwandan genocide, the applicability of Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s multi-level causal model of genocide, developed in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide. Asking how causal factors and processes highlighted in that model play out in scholarship on the Rwandan genocide, it moves toward answering the question of external validity versus historical specificity. Second, the article examines, again with a focus on Rwanda, the relationship between social scientific explanation and judicial thought. While it highlights—in line with the first author’s previous work—how judicial narratives address or select out core factors highlighted in the Darfur model, the article focuses—in line with Hagan’s Justice in the Balkans—on the question of what knowledge social science can nevertheless gain from court proceedings. An analysis of a sample of cases processed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda identifies overlaps with social science analyses, but it also highlights distinctions.

For a legal anthropologist interested in how different agents and forms of governance shape projects of sexual humanitarianism, the strategies that US-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use in their attempts to reframe an Indian anti-prostitution law as an anti-trafficking instrument generate broader conceptual questions. How do Indian NGOs articulate donor-driven concerns with the postcolonial socio-legal framework within which they work? What impact do they seek to have on the law, legal system, and legal actors? What, in turn, happens to formal law, which is already shaped by a complex history of legal concerns, moral panics, and NGO intervention (itself authorized by law) in this context? How do law and NGOs shape each other across anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking projects in the overlapping contexts of postcoloniality, globalization, neoliberalism, and sexual humanitarianism in India? How might one explore these intersections and relationships methodologically? I show how ethnography at the intersection of anti-prostitution law and anti-trafficking NGOs illuminates: (1) law’s imbrication in a broader, long-standing, and ever-expanding field of governmental action on prostitution; (2) how NGOs and legal actors act, in tension and in collaboration, upon the perceived “problem” of prostitution; and (3) how anti-trafficking NGOs and anti-prostitution law co-constitute each other as they shape contested meanings around prostitution.

In the 1970s, LGBT students at fourteen US colleges and universities took their institutions to court after newly established gay student groups were denied official recognition. While the students suffered defeats along the way, by the end of the decade they had won the war for recognition. This article provides a broad overview of these cases, discusses their significance, and argues that we cannot understand the struggle for gay student group recognition without considering its relationship to the state regulation of sex. Advocates for gay student groups won most of their battles by responding to the claim that recognition would be tantamount to aiding and abetting criminal sexual activities. They did so by pursuing strategies of desexualization, which denied that gay student groups encouraged same-sex sex. The article explores these strategies by focusing on three 1976 Virginia cases, one about gay student group recognition, one about the criminalization of same-sex sex, and one about the application of the state’s sodomy law to an interracial threesome. The divergent outcomes help us understand the strategic effectiveness and political limitations of LGBT desexualization strategies.

This article demonstrates a method to measure the extent and variation of ethnoracial disproportion in world prison populations. Using a novel data set covering eighteen democracies for the year 2016, this method shows that conspicuous ethnoracial disproportion in prisons is pervasive in democracies for which data is available. Socioeconomically marginalized ethnic and racial groups are overrepresented in the prisons of every case. Further, this pattern extends to countries known for penal progressivism, which otherwise are regarded as models of fair and rational criminal justice implementation. Correlation between prison disproportion and national socioeconomic and criminal justice characteristics suggests the complexity of the issue. A selection of single-case analyses drawn from the sample describe prison disproportion emerging under significantly varied national conditions. I discuss causal hypotheses for why ethnoracial disproportion would occur in such differing places.

The vast multidisciplinary literature on marital dissolution tends to conceptualize divorce as a personal, individualist act that naturally resides in the domestic sphere. The article challenges this prevailing scholarly perspective by dissecting a substantially underexplored dimension of divorce as a citizenship-certifying act located squarely in the public sphere. Drawing on a pioneering qualitative study among Palestinian Christians in Israel as a case study, we argue that Israel’s divorce law, which locks Catholics into indissoluble marriages, should be recognized as a key state instrument for delineating the contours of citizenship—a boundary-demarcating apparatus between insiders and outsiders who are excluded from full and equal membership. The article provides novel insights into the complex interrelations between divorce, gender, and citizenship, showing how Palestinian-Christian women pay the price of a purportedly sex-neutral, no-exit regime. The article also illuminates a seldom-studied phenomenon we call “divorce conversion”: the act of changing one’s denomination for the sake of marital freedom, which is a hallmark of Palestinian-Christians’ third-rate status in the Jewish state. We conclude that divorce should be reconceptualized as a right to egalitarian female citizenship, serving as a basic precursor to women’s full participation in all spheres of life.

This essay evaluates the current United Nations approach to preventing and punishing genocide by considering micro-level research on behavioral variation in genocide and proposing two ideas for intervention. The first idea extends the theory that economic inequality explains people’s decisions to kill or not kill in genocide and suggests specific economic remedies to intervene in ongoing violence. The second idea extends the theory that local authorities shape civilians’ decision making about violence and suggests specific ways to bolster moderate meso-level authorities to mitigate violence. The essay concludes by considering how social science research and theory can practically impact international law concerning genocide.

Although women have made significant strides in the legal profession, female attorneys continue to earn far less than male attorneys. Relying on survey data from a large sample of full-time attorneys in Texas, we find a gender pay gap of thirty-five thousand dollars at the median that cannot be explained by differences in human capital or occupational segregation. We also provide evidence that the legal market especially disadvantages women who excel in law school. Whereas high academic achievement boosts male lawyers’ incomes substantially, it does not have the same effect on female lawyers’ incomes. High-achieving female lawyers earn less than high-achieving male lawyers across practice settings and earn less than their lower-achieving male counterparts in private practice. We conclude that discrimination in the legal profession operates partly by devaluing female attorneys’ human capital, such that sterling academic credentials and other traits that are valued in men are far less valued in women.

In 1919, the Territory of Alaska enacted a tax to finance its school system, in which Native children could attend public schools alongside non-Native children only if they were “of mixed blood” and led “a civilized life.” As originally enacted, the scope of the tax included every man within a certain age bracket, meaning that all Native men would have been required to pay a tax designed to finance a racist and discriminatory policy. However, the Alaska governor and his attorney general quickly decided to narrow the scope of the tax to Natives who were either “civilized” settler colonial subjects or “uncivilized” workers in settler spaces. But what did this revised scope reflect? This article uses the history of the 1919 Alaska school tax to unpack the role of tax law in shaping subaltern political and sociocultural identities. It argues that the tax provided two of the territory’s most powerful men an opportunity to express and reinforce their ideological views on indigeneity. The tax also helped them advance settler colonialism, both by ensuring that segregated territorial schools would thrive and by crafting a legal instrument that allowed them to decide who was “civilized” enough to be a taxpayer.

This article examines the role of law in shaping visual commercial culture by telling the story of the hoarding—the outdoor advertising surface for posters—in the formative decades of mass advertising in Britain, from roughly 1840 to 1914. The hoarding emerged in this period as a distinct property and a focal point of contestation over ways of seeing. Its meaning as a visual environment hinged on questions, which are still resonant today, about the interaction between economic and aesthetic categories: advertising and art, capital and beauty, commerce and culture. Historical actors—among them the organized billposting trade, the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, a civil society organization that took up the cause of protecting public spaces from advertising, governmental and local lawmakers, and citizens—enlisted private and public legal means to respond to these questions. This analysis draws on an expansive interdisciplinary archive to trace them. As it shows, legal means were engaged in cultural demarcation or what Thomas Gieryn has aptly termed boundary work. In establishing cultural boundaries, law defined the terms on which advertising became an integral element of daily visual experience, at once omnipresent and derided. The legal history of advertising thus offers deep insights for visual legal studies.

This article analyzes the processes shaping the emergence of a professionalized legal academia in Chile. Through a case study informed by quantitative and qualitative evidence, the study shows that the control and orientation of a professional school is a contested space, where the interactions between the profession, the market, and the state shape the trajectory of the legal education field. The article argues that the neoliberal remaking of higher education of the 1980s created a regime that increasingly relies on performance indicators modeled on the paradigm of the research university, which have been used as an opportunity by law schools seeking elite status to increase their academic reputation through the formation of bodies of full-time legal scholars. This new institutional environment has produced, however, an important degree of malaise among the new professional legal academics, the majority of whom resent that their research is increasingly swayed by the standards imposed by governmental or university-wide bureaucratic structures rather than by the needs of legal practice.

Explanations of altruism remain fragmented across disciplinary lines and focus heavily on phenomena such as philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and volunteering outside the workplace. Yet numerous professions, including law, claim a duty of service that calls on their members to volunteer. Using a mixed methods approach that draws on thirty interviews and a survey of 845 lawyers, the authors develop an integrated framework on altruism to account for how volunteering takes place in the course of law practice. The analysis reveals psychological traits, collective norms, exchange relationships, and organizational dimensions that shape lawyers’ volunteering. In particular, a cultural norm endorsing volunteer efforts is a powerful driver of volunteering legal services. At the same time, organizational features, such as time constraints, condition cultural norms to hinder volunteering, while business opportunities for client recruitment condition cultural norms to foster volunteering. We conclude with directions for advancing our integrated approach to altruism in the context of lawyers’ professional service.

American Vietnam War resisters participated in one of the largest politically motivated emigrations in US history. John Hagan provided the most comprehensive study of American war resisters living in Canada in his award-winning book Northern Passage. Hagan documented how law resistance intersected with social movement participation and sustained activism. In this article, I extend Hagan’s life course analysis of law resistance by interviewing fifty-one adult children of the war resisters originally in Hagan’s sample, supplemented with eighteen surveys completed by the parents about their child, producing eighty-two distinct parent-child relationship pairs. This unique intergenerational study finds that American war resister parents radically influenced their offspring’s activism. The adult children of war resisters highly resemble their parents’ political views and activism. Further, I elaborate on the concept of a participation identity to suggest four fundamental mechanisms that facilitate activism of the offspring of war resisters: (1) resonates with their identities and life histories; (2) inspired by their parents’ activism; (3) adoption of an injustice frame; and (4) optimism that social movements are effective vehicles of social change. This research demonstrates that American war resister children in Canada are both attitudinally disposed to, and structurally available for, activism.

Socio-legal scholars these days devote themselves routinely to the study of international law. It was not always thus. In the late twentieth century, no more than a handful of law-and-society scholars asked themselves how international law worked. Even fewer ventured into the field. John Hagan was one of those who did and the first sociologist to study empirically—and rigorously—what we now call international criminal law. In this article, I use Hagan’s oeuvre to reflect on the intellectual history of international legal scholarship in the twenty-first century. I argue that Hagan brought three things to the study of international law: criminology, methodology, and ideology. I trace each of these contributions in detail, assess their intellectual import, and relate them to alternative ways of seeing international law. The story I tell is of a pioneering scholar who charted an empirical path toward the sociology of international law, but whose moral compass—acquired during his socialization in the Vietnam era—also occasionally blinded him to the dark sides of virtue.

While scholars have considered the role of courts in authoritarian regimes generally, less attention has been paid to judicial-military relations. In this article I consider how courts are militarized and made subordinate and loyal to military rule. In military regimes, the courts are at risk of militarization and the process of rendering judges loyal to the military through practices such as career path socialization, selection, and restructuring of the courts. This raises an entry-exit dilemma for judges. The dilemma lies in the fact that if judges committed to civilian rule do not join the bench, they are potentially leaving the judiciary to military partisans with little prospect for reform. Yet joining the judiciary means the danger of being co-opted and adding legitimacy to the military regime or the risk of being forced out if politics shifts from civilian to military rule. Through a case study of judicial profiles in Myanmar, I explore how the loyalty of judges to the military depends on whether they are military insiders, military affiliates, civilian affiliates, or civilian outsiders. The case of Myanmar is a vivid reminder to scholars of judicial behavior that in military authoritarian regimes, judges face an entry-exit dilemma.

In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, coverage of executions in the Atlanta Constitution and the New Orleans (Times-)Picayune occasionally portrayed African Americans executed by the state as legally, politically, and spiritually similar to their white counterparts. But as radical white supremacy took hold across the South, the coverage changed. Through an analysis of 667 newspaper articles covering the executions of Black and white men in Georgia and Louisiana from 1877 to 1936, I found that as lynching became the principal form of lethal punishment in the South, accounts of Black men’s legal executions shrank in length and journalists increasingly portrayed them as ciphers, nonentities that the state was dispatching with little fanfare. In contrast, accounts of white men’s executions continued to showcase their individuality and their membership in social, political, and religious communities. A significant gap between the material reality and the cultural representation of capital punishment emerged. Legal executions in Georgia and Louisiana overwhelmingly targeted Black men. But on the pages of each state’s most prominent newspaper, the executions of white men received the most attention. As a result, capital punishment was increasingly represented as a high-status punishment that respected the “whiteness” of those who suffered it.

Too often, scholarship on immigration conflates sanctuary ordinances with the non-cooperation policies, often embedded in these ordinances, which limit cooperation between local officials and federal immigration authorities. In this article, I disentangle the two by tracing the rise of non-cooperation policies in health and welfare agencies since the New Deal. Doing so challenges assumptions about the origins, targets, consequences, and significance of early sanctuary policies. It reveals that non-cooperation was federal policy between 1935 and the early 1970s, when local, state, and federal officials began to experiment with cooperation. When the consequences of such practices became clear, welfare and health officials were forced to reaffirm non-cooperation just before the sanctuary movement burst onto the scene. This research clarifies why scholars see early sanctuary ordinances as largely symbolic: because many local, state, and federal officials had largely abandoned cooperation in practice. It also challenges the widespread assumption that non-cooperation fundamentally represents local resistance to federal power. Instead, I demonstrate the key role played by the federal government in the rise of non-cooperation in health and welfare agencies. Lastly, this research reaffirms the significance of the fragmented nature of federal institutions for promoting immigrant rights.