The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide. While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of Sonagachi, one of India's largest red-light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exist highly internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including sex workers, who, variously endowed by a plural rule network—consisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms, and market structures—routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi's sex industry.

We examine sources of variation in possession and use of the death penalty using data drawn from 193 nations in order to test theories of punishment. We find the death penalty to be rooted in a country's legal and political systems, and to be influenced by its religious traditions. A country's level of economic development, its educational attainment, and its religious composition shape its political institutions and practices, indirectly affecting its use of the death penalty. The article concludes by discussing likely future trends.

Problem‐solving courts (drug courts, community courts, domestic violence courts, and mental health courts), unlike traditional courts, attempt to get at the root of the individual and social problems that motivate criminal behavior. Theoretical understandings of problem‐solving courts are mostly Foucauldian; proponents argue that these new institutions employ therapeutic techniques that encourage individuals to self‐engineer in ways that subtly increase state power. The Foucauldian approach captures only some elements of problem‐solving courts and does not fully theorize the revolution in justice that these courts present. Problem‐solving courts, domestic violence courts in particular, orient not just around individual change but also around social change and cultural transformation. Combining the Foucauldian idea of a therapeutic state (as developed by James Nolan) with an understanding of the deliberative democratic mechanisms of larger‐scale structural transformation (found in Habermas and others) leads to a more balanced and empirically open orientation to the actual motivations, goals, and achievements of problem‐solving courts.

This article investigates the recent rise of criminal background screening in rental housing as a case study of the diffusion of actuarial social control. That case study suggests that actuarial techniques have spread more widely through the crime prevention field than sociolegal scholars have recognized, replacing disciplinary efforts to diagnose and alter the behavior of individuals with actuarial efforts to identify and isolate high-risk groups. This actuarial strategy has proliferated not only because new discourses encouraged it but also because new institutional structures facilitated it. That conclusion illustrates the importance of structural (rather than cultural) factors in shaping society's response to crime—particularly the growing availability of the collective institutional capacity that actuarial social control requires.

Kalven and Zeisel's (1966) classic study, The American Jury, concluded that juries were “in revolt” from the law when they acquitted when judges would have convicted. Using data collected by the National Center for State Courts to examine jury decision making in four different communities, this article reexamines the question of the judge and jury's respective fidelity to the law and evidence by examining the influence on judge and jury of the defendant's evidence, his criminal record, and his reason for refusing to plead. No data can tell us definitively whether the judge is correct and the jury in error when they disagree, but the data analyzed in the present study can tell us whether the factors that move the jury and fail to move the judge are or are not consistent with the innocence of the accused.

It has become commonplace among historically inclined legal scholars to look to the history of the United States’ elimination of bans on mixed-race sexual relationships for guidance about the recent controversy over same-sex marriage. This article argues that, while the analogy is helpful, it is not perfect because of the particular historical circumstances of the battle over antimiscegenation laws. Because regulations against interracial marriage were at the heart of defining and perpetuating the political and institutional system of white supremacy, they served a different purpose than the bans on same-sex marriage. The analogy can be pursued, however, to promote a critical consideration of the history of marriage as a heteronormative institution, generating a broader agenda for empowering change. Such a use of history takes the experience of the struggle against the antimiscegenation regime as a cautionary tale rather than a guidepost.

Group-specific family laws are said to provide women fewer rights and impede policy change. India's family law systems specific to religious groups underwent important gender-equalizing changes over the last generation. The changes in the laws of the religious minorities were unexpected, as conservative elites had considerable indirect influence over these laws. Policy elites changed minority law only if they found credible justification for change in group laws, group norms, and group initiatives, not only in constitutional rights and transnational human rights law. Muslim alimony and divorce laws were changed on this basis, giving women more rights without abandoning cultural accommodation. Legal mobilization and the outlook of policy makers—specifically their approach to regulating family life, their understanding of group norms, and their normative vision of family life—shaped the major changes in Indian Muslim law. More gender-equalizing legal changes are possible based on the same sources.

Toronto prides itself both on being diverse and on celebrating rather than merely tolerating diversity. Urban diversity has been studied by demographers, sociologists, and planners, but sociolegal analyses of the negotiation of diversity are scarce. The study described here has three elements: a study of the Toronto Licensing Tribunal, a challenge to the property standards by‐law, and a campaign to reform the rules governing street food. The key substantive finding of the research is that municipal legal processes, in a city that takes pride in its diversity, still work to effect and naturalize distinctly ethnocentric norms. The content of (some) norms is subject to revision but the normative power of law as such remains unchallenged.

Methodologically, the article, inspired by Bruno Latour and Actor Network Theory, shows the usefulness of treating local legal processes as a series of networks in which nonhuman objects (such as weeds, courtroom Bibles, and hot dogs) can sometimes be protagonists of legal dramas rather than mere objects.

This study examines the coverage of the Supreme Court of Israel functioning as the High Court of Justice (HCJ) in the popular and elite press over a period marked by growing activism of the Israeli Supreme Court and an increasingly adversarial and critical media. Our results show that more prominent coverage of the HCJ over time, especially in the elite press, accentuates the salience of the Supreme Court in public life. In addition, the topics, the stages of the HCJ proceedings, the petitioners, and the outcome of the cases covered by the press, as well as the generally uncritical reporting of the Court decisions help create the frame of an autonomous, powerful Court that frequently opposes and restrains the government. We suggest that this pattern of media coverage of the HCJ benefits both the Court and the media: it reinforces the image of the media as a critical watchdog of the government, while at the same time it legitimates the Court's expansion of power and strengthens its image as an apolitical and independent institution.

As the pace of legal harmonization in developing East Asian states increases to comply with international trading treaties, a disjunction is forming between legislative expectations and everyday business practices. Evidence considered in this article suggests that Vietnam is no exception. State control over public discourse favors the interests of business elites, while small-scale entrepreneurs struggle to make their views known. Lawmakers exposed to this asymmetric discourse rarely adjust global legal rules to suit the transactional requirements of small-scale entrepreneurs. As a consequence, the largely imported commercial legislative framework is increasingly reflecting the interests of business elites. The article concludes that for the state to develop a more inclusive regulatory regime, it needs to relax its control over public deliberation and give small-scale entrepreneurs more opportunities to convey local precepts and practices to lawmakers.

Today it is widely recognized in both academic literature and the mainstream media that prosecutors have substantial discretion. Yet prosecutorial decisions involve, in our view, something more than a straightforward exercise of discretion. In this article we move from the language of discretion to that of sovereignty to describe prosecutorial power. In so doing we want to move from the language of administration to the language of power. Focusing on the decision not to prosecute, we argue that prosecutorial decisions participate in, and exemplify, the logic of sovereignty and its complex relationship to legality.

By drawing on Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, we seek to recast prosecutorial decision making as something that allows prosecutors to grant exemptions from the reach of valid law. The sovereign power of prosecutors is most vividly on display when they decline to bring charges where there is a legally sufficient basis for doing so. By exercising what is, in most jurisdictions, an all but unreviewable power, they can and do exempt individuals from the reach of valid law.

This article explores the role of legality in conceptions of state and society among bureaucrats in the Taipei, Taiwan city government. When administrators confront the global arena, the existence of law emblematizes modernity and the ability to participate in the international system. In interactions among administrators, law is laden with impossible ideals and fraught with assumptions of hypocrisy. In dealings with people outside the government, legality often signals the breakdown of other, more valuable social norms. Far from legitimating administrative action, legality itself is legitimated by reference to the same values as other social action: it is held up to an ideal of consensus and cultural coherence and judged by its ability to fulfill obligations and nurture relationships. Law does not hegemonically structure administrators’ conceptions of state and society. Rather, it defines one aspect of governance at the margins of legitimacy, dependent on justification through other ethical norms.

The great ambition of Japanese colonialism, from the time of its debut at the end of the nineteenth century, was the reformulation of Chinese law and politics. One of the most extraordinary examples of this ambition is The Administrative Law of the Qing Empire [Shinkoku Gyōseihō], a monumental enterprise undertaken by the Japanese colonial government in Taiwan intended not only to facilitate Japanese colonial administration of Taiwan but also to reorder the entire politico‐juridical order of China along the lines of modern rational law. This article examines the legal analysis embraced in The Administrative Law of the Qing Empire and recounts its attempt to reconstruct the Qing's “political law” (seihō) by a strange, ambiguous, and hybrid resort to “authenticity.” The strangeness of this Japanese colonial production comes from Japan's dual position as both colonizer of Taiwan and simultaneously itself colonized by “modern European jurisprudence”(kinsei hōri). In uncovering the effects of modern European jurisprudence on the Japanese enterprise, we will discover Japan's pursuit of its own cultural subjectivity embedded in The Administrative Law of the Qing Empire, epitomizing the campaign of national identities observable in the process of East Asian legal modernization.

A recurring theme of sociolegal studies is how legal procedures function to reproduce social inequality by disadvantaging less powerful groups. However, there is little research about how disadvantaged groups achieve occasional victories in legal settings. Using transcripts of state legislative committee hearings in which birth activists seek certification or licensure for independent midwifery, I identify and investigate five ways in which legal ideals structure interaction and rhetoric in legislative hearings. While these ideals are instantiated in ways that disadvantage less powerful groups, activists can be seen adapting to this context by developing strategies to play law's ideals to their advantage. Such findings develop our understanding of how the gap between law's ideals and legal procedures can provide opportunities for collective activity seeking social change.

This article examines the instrumental and constitutive effects of California Assembly Bill 540. The law grants undocumented immigrant students an exemption from out-of-state tuition, thereby making some forms of higher education more accessible. Despite the narrow actionable aspects of the law, it unintentionally legitimizes this disenfranchised group. This longitudinal study of undocumented immigrant youth consists of in-depth interviews before, shortly after, and four years after the passage of the law. The findings demonstrate that AB 540 immediately relieved stigma and later provided a socially acceptable identity that, within a legal consciousness informed by meritocracy, empowered these students to mobilize the law in a number of unforeseen ways. The case strongly suggests that it is possible for unintended constitutive functions to have more transformative effects on the daily lives of targeted beneficiaries than the intended instrumental objectives of law.

Using data from a nationwide study of sexual harassment in the United States’ federal workplace, this article investigates how legal understanding, opinions about the regulation of sexual harassment, and social status affect whether people define uninvited sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. The results indicate that how people define sexual harassment is directly related to the extent to which they view sexual harassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to workplace norms. Moreover, results show that while women generally define sexual harassment more broadly than men, they actually resist defining sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. Finally, knowledge of the workplace sexual harassment policy moderates the effect of beliefs on definitions of sexual harassment. These findings suggest a complexity in the way people reconcile their knowledge of the law with their personal views about power and social interaction in the workplace.