Humanitarian visas provide one of few potential pathways to citizenship for foreign nationals victimized within the United States and are an important aspect of immigration law. Yet one form of humanitarian visas—T nonimmigrant status (T visa)—has received scant attention in the socio-legal studies literature. “T visas” were designed to aid survivors of human trafficking and, though the US government estimates that tens of thousands of individuals are trafficked in the United States every year, only 15 percent of the five thousand T visas available annually have been granted since the program’s inception in 2002. Why are T visas such an underutilized form of immigration relief? Drawing on twenty in-depth interviews with immigration lawyers, law enforcement personnel, and non-governmental organization service providers routinely involved in T visa applications, we find that the low rate of applications and approvals is driven by a combination of structural barriers and expansive discretion of key actors in the legal process to interpret and apply the law, which results in a narrow and often misinformed construction of victimhood. We add to the literature on the discretionary power of street-level bureaucrats to shape the law and determine how it is applied with considerable consequences for survivors of trafficking.

During the twentieth century, privacy evolved from an ambiguous legal idea into a defined state-centric right, while privacy claims against non-state entities became more marginalized. Whereas prior studies treat this as the direct outcome of cultural shifts or landmark interventions by legal elites, I document legal institutionalization as a three-stage process of domain formation and meaning making. Using a combination of citation network analysis and qualitative research, I show that the concept of privacy first entered the legal field when journalists raised concerns about the unauthorized use and commodification of personal data; that US jurisprudence produced two competing schools of legal thought as judges and legal scholars struggled to give substance to an abstract concept and structure to an evolving domain of judicial practice; and that privacy was consecrated as a constitutional right when state courts and the US Supreme Court selectively mobilized the language of privacy to confront the expanding reach of the American state. These findings demonstrate the processual nature of legal institutionalization, draw attention to intra-legal contestation and the implicit pluralism of American jurisprudence, and highlight an emerging distinction between the legal regimes governing bureaucratic rule and market exchanges in the early twentieth century.

This article analyzes how litigation, court rulings, and legal mobilization have influenced law and policy making related to death from overwork (karōshi) and suicide from overwork (karōjisatsu) in Japan over the course of half a century. It highlights the gradual, but substantial, impact of litigation and court rulings on different levels of governmental measures. By taking a longer-term perspective to assess the political effects of different stages of the judicialization process and focusing on the actors of legal mobilization—particularly, cause lawyers—this study provides a more accurate depiction of the overall process of social and legal changes observed in the recent Japanese labor law reform.

Can commitment to international human rights law promote human rights when the commitment is not yet legally binding? I argue that treaty signature can be used by non-governmental organizations and other rights actors to mobilize around rights standards and hold states accountable in the lead up to binding treaty ratification. Using the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) as a case, I argue that CEDAW signature can have a positive impact on women’s rights. I find overall support for the argument that, following signature, states are significantly and positively associated with higher women’s rights. The findings hold across numerous robustness checks. Using an illustrative case of CEDAW signature and mobilization in the United States, I demonstrate that activists drew on the treaty following signature in the absence of ratification. The argument and results contribute to the study of international law and women’s rights mobilization, highlighting the importance of signature commitment as a tool for advancing women’s rights in advance of treaty ratification.

This essay examines the intellectual history of the idea of judicial restraint, starting with the early debates among the US Constitution’s founding generation. In the late nineteenth century, law professor James Bradley Thayer championed the concept and passed it on to his students and others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, who modified and applied it based on the jurisprudential preoccupations of a different era. In a masterful account, Brad Snyder examines Justice Frankfurter’s attempt to put the idea into practice. Although Frankfurter arguably made a mess of it, he passed the idea of judicial restraint on to Alexander Bickel and others. Today it remains a topic of much academic debate, while Supreme Court Justices occasionally give the idea lip service when it advances outcomes they desire.

I propose that the intellectual history of judicial restraint reflects the all-too-human inability to refrain from exercising power. The founders, focused on the need to mitigate the flaws of human nature in designing the executive and legislative branches, failed to sufficiently foresee how the same flaws would affect members of the judiciary. The failed idea of judicial restraint stands as the legacy of the founders’ mistake.