Parole officers are central actors in the penal system as their decisions can affect the timing of a person’s release from prison and also restrict or enable their freedoms in the community upon release. Existing research on parole examines how parole officers think about and govern ex-prisoners via techniques of surveillance, regulation, and support. Few studies, however, provide qualitative insight into how parole officers experience their occupational authorities and associated power over (ex)prisoners’ future, or the emotions generated by frontline supervision work. Using data from interviews with 150 parole officers in Canada, we explore the emotions associated with parole officers’ occupational responsibilities and authorities vis-à-vis the parolee, the public, and the parole officer’s employer. Participants experienced their duty to make decisions that impact their clients’ legal and social futures, and potentially public safety, as a source of emotional stress and concern, as they worried about how their decisions could negatively affect their client, the community, and their own professional status. In illuminating parole officers’ feelings and experiences, we show how parole—the “transition” between incarceration and freedom—produces an emotionally charged experience not just for (ex)prisoners, but also for those engaged in frontline supervision work.

The traditional rationale of federal diversity jurisdiction is to protect out-of-state parties from the risk of an appearance of state-court bias in favor of an in-state adversary. Yet a strikingly high percentage—more than 50 percent—of original domestic-diversity cases are filed by in-state plaintiffs. Why these in-state plaintiffs invoke diversity jurisdiction is a question that has largely been ignored in the literature. Drawing on docket data and an original dataset based on responses to a survey sent to more than twelve thousand attorneys who represented in-state plaintiffs in domestic-diversity cases, I find that these plaintiffs can be grouped into roughly three categories. The first category is composed of tort cases, filed by individual plaintiffs against corporate defendants, that are eligible for consolidation with an existing federal multi-district litigation. The second category is composed of in-state corporate plaintiffs represented by attorneys who tend to represent defendants in federal court and who invoke diversity jurisdiction primarily based on perceptions of advantages of federal procedure, efficiencies and conveniences of federal practice, and superior quality of federal court. The third category is composed of in-state plaintiffs represented by attorneys who tend to represent plaintiffs in state court and who invoke diversity jurisdiction to preempt the defendant’s likely removal of the case. My findings offer grounds for reforming diversity jurisdiction in more tailored and nuanced ways than have previously been proposed.

Parole revocation, the process of returning individuals to incarceration due to non-compliance with conditions of community supervision, contributes to mass incarceration and is tied to the complex process of back-end sentencing. This discretionary decision is typically opaque, and theoretical understanding is limited. Applying the focal concerns framework, this study employs population-level data from an American jurisdiction on individuals who are on parole and have violated their supervision (n = 13,121). We found that practical, extralegal considerations such as the amount of time left on parole, the number of programs geared toward people on parole, and whether they participated in community programs after release from prison significantly influenced back-end sentencing. These results question the assumed relationship between individual-level and systemic factors during revocations while also providing empirical support for broadening the scope of theoretically relevant domains.

This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables that can be measured using statistical procedures that flatten the underlying complexities. Commensuration, in this sense, takes place at all levels: local, subnational, national, and international. At each stage, the process of “measuring justice” through commensuration has the paradoxical effect of becoming more precise as variables become more detached from the nuances of everyday conflicts. In Merry’s analysis, the global “seductions of quantification” reinforce the dominance of commensurability as an ideology of both scientific validity and social change. Drawing on both Merry’s work and wider comparative research in the anthropology of human rights and justice, this contribution to the symposium argues that the anthropological critique of commensuration carries important lessons for the meanings of “justice” more generally. How can justice be measured at a global level if, as Merry’s research shows, the underlying factors that supposedly reflect injustice are highly specific, contingent, and, most importantly, incommensurable? As a potential way out of this dilemma, the article explores the possibilities of conceptualizing “justice” in the vernacular, an approach grounded in local cultural and ethical realities.

In 2011, the Internal Revenue Service reversed a previous regulation that excluded lactation supplies, including breast pumps, from medical care tax benefits. This policy change was met with joy by some working mothers. Often torn between family needs and workplace duties, these lactating employees struggled with trying to be a “good worker” and a “good mother.” They saw the new tax law as validation of their efforts to express milk at work and legitimation for the accommodations they required. They felt that even an area of law as technical and complex as tax law could recognize their commitment to combining breastfeeding and employment. However, the women recognized that the law only facilitated greater ability to lactate but not more time with their babies, which they greatly wanted. Indeed, this article asks if breast pumps and supplies would even be an issue for many women if the United States provided women with the more extensive maternity leave that workers in other developed countries receive.

Procedural justice research has shown how people’s experiences with courtroom actors, such as judges, defense attorneys, and prosecutors, shape their views of the justice system and its legitimacy. However, less is known about how people’s experiences outside the courtroom that relate to their cases shape their views of this system. Based on forty-one interviews with twenty-one youths and twenty parents in Dane County, Wisconsin about their legal financial obligations (also known as monetary sanctions), this study broadens the focus of procedural justice to include another key aspect to people’s experiences with the law beyond the courtroom: their experiences navigating bureaucratic aspects to their youths’ cases and their interactions with non-court staff (e.g., clerks, Human Services, and community agencies), otherwise known as “auxiliary personnel” (Feeley 1979) or “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010/1980). We focus on legal financial obligations as a case study to show this multi-agency view of procedural justice as it reveals the families’ often disjointed experiences with justice staff both inside and outside of the courtroom.

Transitional justice lacks a coherent framework for articulating the relationship between distributive and corrective justice. Academic debates remain largely normative, focused on whether and how transitional justice should distinguish itself from the realm of the social, economic, and cultural. Where there is a bridge between legal logics and lived realities, it generally happens through victims’ consultation, but these are often thinly designed processes, revolving around questions like “what do victims want” or failing to turn expectations into action. Taking inspiration from Sally Engle Merry’s “paradox of measurement,” in which measurements produce the realities they assess, we pose a “paradox of justice” in which victims’ lived experiences are filtered and reproduced through the technology of consultation. While important, the question of “what do victims want” ultimately oversimplifies the complexities of how injustice is experienced. Drawing on a unique dataset of everyday indicators of justice from Colombia, this article establishes a framework for articulating the experiential dimensions of post-conflict justice. Ultimately, this framework highlights that justice is a process—whether in the courtroom or in a village reckoning with a massacre—and that the kinds of relationships that justice institutions build with victims are of equal relevance to what these institutions ultimately deliver.

This article explores the legal consciousness of legal gun owners in upstate New York using a qualitative, grounded theory approach. Respondents’ accounts reveal that their experiences cause them to respect and support the law in certain contexts but feel oppressed by it in other contexts. These perceptions stem from engagement with law, and especially the passage of the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013, in which they see legal actors behaving in ways that violate their beliefs about how law is supposed to operate. Respondents believe themselves to be at a legal disadvantage due to distinctive features of New York politics, particularly the belief that New York City residents have an outsized role in statewide politics. These findings offer insights into how gun owners engage with the law and, more generally, into the conditions under which groups feel engaged with—or disconnected from—legal and political processes.

This study challenges the conventional approach to the appropriate indicators of individual success in community courts (CCs) by exploring the different meanings that CC professionals ascribe to the term “success.” CCs conduct a non-adversarial process in which team members collaborate to provide a comprehensive rehabilitative intervention for recidivist participants. We conducted fifty-three in-depth interviews with CC personnel between 2016 and 2020. According to the interviewees, standard evaluation measures such as program completion, reduced recidivism, and systemic reduction of incarceration are necessary for evaluating these courts. Yet individual success is relative, subjective, multidimensional, and must be understood as a continuum. Therefore, it should also be measured by looking at significant processes of change that participants have undergone in various aspects of their lives. Study findings can be translated into measurable well-being indicators, moving the “what works” discourse forward to include more nuanced and diverse manifestations of success in studies evaluating specialized courts.

This study empirically examines whether and how the introduction of disability rights impacted the portrayal of disability in personal injury court decisions in Israel and offers a method for doing such research in other legal realms and contexts. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of Israeli district court judicial rulings over twenty years to measure whether a discursive shift occurred from a medical-individual view of disability to a social constructionist and a rights-based understanding of disability. Our coding system included descriptive and conceptual indicators, forming two indexes: a conventional index and a progressive index. Our findings reveal a steady dominance of the conventional discourse and a gradual yet limited rise in progressive discourse. Moreover, individual court decisions often manifest both types of discourse but are still dominated by a conventional view of disability and rarely apply direct disability rights terminology. These findings provide pioneering empirical evidence that substantiates the disability critique of tort law, demonstrating that judicial decision making is slow to adopt a disability rights perspective. More broadly, our findings show that the infusion of a disability rights orientation does not necessarily replace the older medical-individual view of disability but adds to it, resulting in a mixed discourse that includes both conventional and progressive elements.

Chinese legal historians and Chinese Communist Party ideologues engage with historical materials in order to advance various ideological projects, including subversive ideological perspectives. At the same time, historical scholarship appeals to many Chinese legal scholars because it is not seen and experienced as being as ideologically sensitive a field as other branches of Chinese legal scholarship. Chinese legal historians themselves have acknowledged their ability to discuss controversial topics—their “historiographic license”—through legal historical research. This article describes Chinese legal scholars’ historiographic license through the tools of rhetorical theory. The subversive elements of Chinese legal historiography can be attributed to the use of figurative language, which conveys forbidden meanings through innocuous surface text. Figurative language allows Chinese legal scholars to subtly question ideological doctrines—which they may support in other social contexts—without having to negate these doctrines explicitly. Historiography arguably even offers Chinese legal scholars a means to question their own ideological beliefs.

Despite prior negative experiences with the law and licensure barriers, individuals with conviction histories are increasingly seeking entry into the legal profession. To understand their unique educational journeys from a joint stigma and legal consciousness perspective, we conducted in-depth interviews with prospective, current, and former law students with criminal convictions. Findings reveal that early disadvantage and subsequent system involvement provided them with valuable insights into their place in the carceral system. This realization prompted empathy for similarly situated others, a desire to pursue social justice reform, and the deliberate choice to access the power of law to that end. Thus, rather than averting people from the profession, a conviction history can serve as a driving force for pursuing a career in law.

In the context of a national movement to defund police departments, many American cities are starting to reimagine public safety, as activists demand new practices that maintain safety while minimizing harm, as well as ensuring accountability when harms occur. Drawing on Everyday Peace Indicators methodologies, we argue that “community-centered” measurement, combined with researcher-practitioner partnerships, can help move both researchers and policymakers toward a more meaningful approach to policy design and evaluation. However, the application of community-centered measurement to the context of American policing raises important theoretical and practical concerns—in particular, the question of how community is defined, and who gets to define it. In this article, we ask: how do we define “community” in participatory research contexts where the concept of community is overlapping and contested? Using the example of a recent study carried out in the City of Oakland, we illustrate the complexities of applying a community-centered measurement process to the case of public safety and, more broadly, to police reform in American cities. We conclude with a discussion of both the benefits and limitations of our own approach, as well as a set of considerations for those engaging in participatory research.

This article enquires into colonial officials’ invocations of the “rule of law” and the persistence of racial difference in the modern British Empire. To unravel this contradiction, I examine the debates over the freedom of women during the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances in the directly ruled Crown Colonies of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1886 and 1890. Although the apparent purpose of these laws was the containment of venereal diseases, officials employed them to police prostitution and subject working-class, “native” women to medical surveillance. Despite the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances across the empire, officials in both colonies continued to regulate prostitution in the name of native women’s freedom, invoking the rule of law. Through the historical ethnography of the rule of law, I demonstrate how the language of this ideal rendered an evocative frame of beneficence, legality, and protection against which officials articulated social difference in racialized, and intersectional, ways—what I call racialized legalities. In comparing the colonized in terms of racialized legalities, officials designed a differentiated sovereignty in determining the protections granted to native women. Expressing the cultural power of law, the rule of law was a constitutive myth.

For decades, human rights organizations have exposed egregious abuses carried out by states across the globe. Yet, simultaneously, other national and transnational civil society actors have waged war on these human rights organizations to shield rights-abusive states from accountability. These assaults have increasingly resulted in the normative claims of human rights organizations being sidelined while rights-abusive laws and policies gain further ground. This article uses Israel as its primary case study to interrogate these civil society wars and their effects on human rights. Examining the work of Israeli and pro-Israeli civil society actors in bolstering apartheid and shielding the state from criticism, I highlight three strategies—native dispossession, lawfare, and advocacy—that civil society actors use to enable apartheid. I go on to show how these actors adopt liberal tactics to protect, reproduce, and facilitate apartheid and to attack human rights defenders. By way of conclusion, I argue that the dominant paradigm informing human rights NGOs needs to be modified and their remit needs to be extended to include civil society actors that contribute to the perpetuation of social wrongs.

This article draws on a case study of how Massachusetts treatment courts responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to address two intersecting theoretical and policy questions: (1) How do actors who work within criminal legal organizations use the law to solve complex social and political problems? (2) How do organizations working within multiple, fragmented organizational fields respond to an exogenous shock? The findings draw on interviews with eighty-four treatment court judges and practitioners and build from neo-institutional approaches to the study of courts to show that legal actors and organizations pursue pragmatic approaches, strategically adapting to their external environments through buffering, which is protective, and innovation, which is transformative. Each strategy reflects the courts’ autonomy or dependence on other organizations in the criminal legal and social service fields. The findings also provide insight into the social process of legitimation as personnel aligned beliefs with adaptation strategies, shifting understandings of surveillance practices and the utility of sanctions to meet overall court goals.

Reparations payments are commonly measured as either paid versus not paid, or present versus absent. I argue that this approach causes researchers to overlook systematic variation in the types of abuses that governments include in their reparations commitments. This article makes the case for revising quantitative reparations indicators to reflect the fact that governments often promise and/or pay reparations for some human rights violations and not others. Using original data on reparations promises for nine types of state-sanctioned human rights abuses committed during internal conflicts or dictatorships that occurred in twenty-seven countries in Europe between 1939 and 2006, I show that reparations promise rates vary by type of abuse. I also show that they vary over time as human rights norms change, meaning that a static designation of “paid” or “not paid” is incompatible with the dynamism of reparations programs.

International law obliges governments to assure adequate and effective reparations for human rights violations. To date, most evaluations of such programs focus on outcomes while overlooking the process of how the state engaged victims, or not, in the determination of what they needed to feel repaired. A consensus now points toward the need to better involve beneficiaries in reparations programs in the process of determining these outcomes, yet there remains a need to better understand how to assure meaningful and effective participation. In response, the authors present an expansive view of the right to participation that would oblige governments to assure the quality of this participation in all stages of reparation programming, including design, implementation, and evaluation. They argue that reparative processes are, in themselves, forms of reparation, which go toward citizen restitution. They offer preliminary guidelines on how to assure reparative processes, as well as their evaluation, through a dialogical model that helps reorient the view of “victims” to being active agents in determining not only appropriate reparations but also larger transformations. Reparative processes shift the focus of evaluation to look beyond outcomes and toward the quality of the design and implementation processes, which, if flawed, may ultimately undermine the overall impact of any reparation program.

Applying tools of linguistic anthropology to ethnographic research conducted in a California child welfare court, this article analyzes how commentary by attorneys and judges about the language practices of parents and other communicative practices normalized the dismissal of the voices of marginalized lay actors throughout their cases. This commentary is an example of what linguistic anthropologists describe as “metapragmatic discourse,” or the use of language to foreground language itself and what language can accomplish in social exchanges. I introduce the concept of “metapragmatic dismissals” to describe how attorneys and judges in the child welfare context positioned parents’ language practices and overall personhood as suspect, often before parents even entered the courtroom. I identify practices of silencing, voicing figures of disbelief, and the use of metapragmatic labels of “lies” and “excuses” as common forms of metapragmatic dismissals that are supported by norms of court procedure, standards of evidence, and institutionalized discretion. This concept provides new insights into legal experiences in child welfare courts and, more generally, offers a valuable analytical framework for scholars who study the intersection of law, language, and power.