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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

In the United States, legal representation increases the likelihood that undocumented immigrants win legal claims. Yet private attorneys are expensive, and free and low-cost attorneys are scarce. How do legal services providers make representation decisions when demand outweighs capacity? Drawing on interviews with attorneys in thirty-eight nonprofit organizations who represent affirmative, humanitarian status seekers, this article describes how lawyers face pressure to represent winnable cases. Attorneys assess case winnability in two ways. First, attorneys aim to maximize clients’ cultural legibility as “deserving immigrant victims.” Simultaneously, attorneys aim to minimize case representation burden by considering the time, resources, and expertise needed to represent each claim. Attorneys assess both cultural legibility and case burden at every stage of the representation process (client selection, attorney assignment, relief pursual, and application production). In doing so, attorneys try to represent clients as the most deserving of status and in the most efficient way. These findings extend past research on attorneys’ selection processes that occur well before a client’s application is filed with the federal immigration bureaucracy. By highlighting how attorneys’ constrained decisions exacerbate legal stratification, these findings complicate calls for an immigrant legal inclusion strategy that depends on the labor of attorneys rather than on changes to the state’s demands on immigrants themselves.

This article provides the first detailed account of the structure, functioning, and impact of Guatemala’s Femicide and Other Forms of Violence against Women Criminal Courts. I assess the achievements and limitations of these courts from two views: a bird’s eye view, which explores how cases proceed through these specialized courts, and an insiders’ view, which explores the perspectives and practices of their judges. Combined, these views demonstrate that judges’ personal commitments and the courts’ institutional frameworks benefit the minority of women whose cases are heard in them but that these benefits are undercut by the broader social and institutional contexts in which judges and courts operate. This can be seen both in a panoramic view that reveals key locations where cases involving violence against women and girls stall in the judicial process and also through judges’ critiques of the systems in which they are embedded. Both views provide insights that should guide policy makers and activists seeking to better fulfill the promise of these courts.

Individuals within the same jurisdiction often have different perceptions of the legal system, a phenomenon we call legal disagreement. Cross-country analyses of legal institutions generally ignore this kind of within-country variation. This article defines the concept of legal disagreement, identifies its potential causes and consequences, and shows that it can be measured using data from cross-country surveys. We argue that legal disagreement is likely to be caused by differences in individuals’ sources of information about the legal system, how the system treats cases of a given type, or how individuals process legal information, all of which may be related to differences in social position. We also suggest that understanding why individuals disagree about legal systems is valuable for several reasons, particularly when the disagreement reflects systematic differences in beliefs across people in different social positions. We use data from World Justice Project population surveys to create quantitative measures of legal disagreement for 128 countries or jurisdictions. We identify correlations between legal disagreement and measures of its potential causes and consequences, such as perceptions of discrimination and ethnic fractionalization. We also provide evidence that those variations are driven by differences in perceptions that track differences in gender, financial well-being, and class.

The establishment of community corrections in China marks a restructuring of the Chinese penal field and a possibly differentiated arrangement of penal power. Social forces and community actors are now enabled and encouraged to participate in penal affairs and to share devolutionary penal power with the authoritarian state. Yet little research attention has been allotted to examine how these burgeoning social organizations, professional service providers, and community actors manage their participation in rehabilitative work and negotiate their rehabilitative aspirations with state ideologies and policy mandates as they work within Chinese community corrections (CCC). Drawing on observational data and in-depth interviews with social workers within CCC, we show the ways in which social workers actively create strategies to pursue their professional values of service and implement rehabilitative ideals and caring ethos while, at the same time, minimizing the risk of challenging state authority and jeopardizing penal policy priorities. Three devised approaches are presented, and their implications are discussed.

The latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century witnessed a global wave of constitution writing. Scholarly examination of these new charters found that most embodied liberalism and democracy. Additional study, however, found that textual convergence among these “higher law constitutions” belied important heterogeneity in constitutionalism—that is, in the principles underlying these charters and associated attitudes and behaviors. Scholars adopted several conceptual strategies to accommodate this variation, including attaching adjectives to constitutionalism (for example, “globalizing constitutionalism” and “abusive constitutionalism”). This article analyzes this conceptual innovation, drawing on an original dataset of all mentions of the word “constitutionalism” paired with a qualifying adjective found in the title/abstract of articles or in the title/first substantive page of books/dissertations, written in English, published between 1945 and 2019 and referenced on the Internet. We identified 1,621 “adjective-constitutionalism combinations,” including 564 unique combinations, suggesting both extraordinary empirical variation and little coordination among scholars with regard to conceptualization. Moreover, scholars’ conceptualizations of constitutionalism rarely reference equality, justice, or state responsibility for pursuing those ideals, despite these values being logical extensions of higher law constitutions’ core precepts; indeed, some conceptualizations even reflected illiberal or rights-limiting principles of governance. These findings raise the specter of a disconnect between constitutions and constitutionalism that we hope future studies will examine.

As a form of land ownership, condominium enables subdivision and produces local government. Designed to facilitate the production of apartments as distinct parcels of land, ownership within condominium now dominates many urban housing markets. In some jurisdictions, including British Columbia, condominium (labelled strata property) may also be deployed to subdivide land for single-house lots within a structure of private local government. The principal effect of extending condominium to unbuilt land is not to enable subdivision, which is something that was already possible and common, but, rather, to endow groups of single-house lot owners with fiscal capacity and governing authority to assume important aspects of local government. Through an analysis of bare land strata property in British Columbia, we reveal how the condominium form, which brought an architecture of ownership and government from the homeowners association of the American suburbs to the North American city, has spread back from the city into the suburban, exurban, and rural, producing a sprawl of ownership within private local government.

The field of public health law has been honing important transdisciplinary methods such as legal epidemiology and legal mapping. These methods can and should be integrated into socio-legal studies because they provide us with a way to capture the legal elements of interlocking power structures, offer ways to meaningfully compare and predict what access to rights will look like across jurisdictions, and capture a new way to study legal pluralism across and within jurisdictions. To illustrate the benefit of such methods for studying legal pluralism, this article offers the State Reproductive Autonomy Index, which compares all fifty states on seventy-five variables. Modeled on legal epidemiology’s survey of multiple types of law, including laws that can be classified as infrastructural (laying the institutional or policy parameters), interventionist (specifically targeted to produce a result), and incidental (distally related, not intentionally), this method integrates the work of reproductive justice scholars with the work on legal pluralism to illustrate the vast inequalities in access to reproductive autonomy across the United States. The State Reproductive Autonomy Index also shows why reproductive justice, rather than reproductive rights discourse, is a more accurate frame for understanding laws relating to reproduction and bodily autonomy.