Our article offers an in-depth account of the role of the transnational practices of collaboration, storytelling, and learning in the diffusion of rights-based climate litigation (RBCL). Drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and quantitative data, we trace how the performance of these practices by lawyers, litigants, communities, scholars, and NGOs have fostered and sustained the transnational generation, exchange, and flow of resources, relationships, narratives, and knowledge underlying the field of RBCL. We argue that all three practices have fostered the diffusion of RBCL by influencing the local determinants of legal mobilization through enabling, discursive, and relational pathways. Finally, we show that these practices have had structural effects that have shaped the ideas and identities of the practitioners in the field of RBCL. Over time, the discursive and relational dimensions of practices have given rise to and have been strengthened by the formation of multiple communities of practice. The emergence of distinct communities provides the possibility for deeper forms of socialization and acculturation among their members, but they also make conflict and competition between different communities more likely. Overall, our article emphasizes the importance of understanding legal mobilization for climate justice as a set of practices that are shaped by the transnational social-legal context in which they are performed.

Bringing critical race theory and settler colonial theory to bear on legal mobilization scholarship, this article examines the ongoing campaign to strike down the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA sought to end the forced removal of American Indian children from their tribes. If successful, the challenges to ICWA’s constitutionality stand to undermine tribal sovereignty writ large. Drawing on a content analysis of documents from 17 major court cases (2013–2023) and a unique dataset of public-facing documents from the leading ICWA challengers, I interrogate the argumentative architecture of this legal mobilization. I find that the campaign to strike down ICWA is structured around three ideological maneuvers: erasure, settler normativity, and reclassification. These maneuvers scaffold a fourth – colorblindness – and the claim that ICWA is an unconstitutional race-based statute. I show how ICWA adversaries use these ideological maneuvers to legitimate white possession of Indigenous children and delegitimize tribal sovereignty. While existing work tends to treat colorblind racism and settler colonialism as analytically distinct, these findings shed light on the linkages between the two. They also marshal empirical analysis to illustrate how the embeddedness of settler colonialism and racism in the law enables broad claims to and defense of whiteness as property.

Quantifying the causal effects of race is one of the more controversial and consequential endeavors to have emerged from the causal revolution in the social sciences. The predominant view within the causal inference literature defines the effect of race as the effect of race perception and commonly equates this effect with “disparate treatment” racial discrimination. If these concepts are indeed equivalent, the stakes of these studies are incredibly high as they stand to establish or discredit claims of discrimination in courts, policymaking circles and public opinion. This paper interrogates the assumptions upon which this enterprise has been built. We ask: what is a perception of race, a perception of, exactly? Drawing on a rich tradition of work in critical race theory and social psychology on racial cognition, we argue that perception of race and perception of other decision-relevant features of an action situation are often co-constituted; hence, efforts to distinguish and separate these effects from each other are theoretically misguided. We conclude that empirical studies of discrimination must turn to defining what constitutes just treatment in light of the social differences that define race.

A central goal of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to deconstruct the “jurisprudence of color-blindness” that is infused with the language of equality while operating to maintain racial hierarchies. Color-blind ideology extends to the procedures governing criminal juries, ensuring they are disproportionately white while constraining diversity of perspectives, especially regarding policing issues. In this paper, we merge CRT insights about color-blindness and race-consciousness in the criminal jury context and in the Fourth Amendment law governing policing, to advance empirical socio-legal scholarship on race and jury decision-making. We analyze deliberations data from mock jury groups that decided on verdict in a federal drug conspiracy trial, focusing on how groups talked about law enforcement testimony. We find that negative discussions of the law enforcement testimony is associated with shifts toward acquittal, there are more skeptical discussions about this testimony when the defendant is Black, and that the presence of at least one Black juror in any given group is associated with more skeptical discussions of law enforcement testimony. Our qualitative analysis illustrates how Black jurors, in particular, raised concerns about policing, including unjust treatment of Black citizens, then successfully tied those concerns to the specific legal considerations at issue in the case.