This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into how young people make sense of conflict in their everyday lives, as well as insights as to how the images and decisional bases embedded in their storytelling connect to adult-centered discourses found in popular media and formal education. Our analyses identify a range of story types (“tales”), each marked by a different narrative style, that students fashion as they write about peer conflict: “action tales,” “moral tales,” “expressive tales,” and “rational tales.” In our study, students wrote a majority of stories in the action-tale narrative style. We propose three alternative explanations for this pattern using class code, moral development, and institutional resistance perspectives. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our work and raise questions for future research.

In this article we examine how the concept of hate crime has been transformed in judicial discourse from a broad ambiguous category, which generated substantial controversy and opposition, to a focused determinate legal construct, which has been largely accepted as a legitimate legal practice. We track changes in judicial rhetoric across 38 appellate court opinions that consider the constitutionality of hate crime cases (1984-1999), and we propose a theoretical framework for analyzing the “settling” of legal meaning. A qualitative interpretive analysis demonstrates that the meaning of hate crime that emerges across the series of cases is much richer and nuanced than the collection of words contained in the statutes, and that the domain of hate crime has expanded across the series of cases to include a broader range of behaviors and mental precursors. Quantitative analysis shows that, over time, judges have developed a more economical and formulaic rhetoric for responding to petitioners' constitutional challenges to hate crime statutes and have converged around sets of arguments for negotiating challenges. We discuss the implications of these findings for traditional jurisprudential analyses, sociolegal research on judicial decisionmaking, and research on the social construction of deviance.

In this article, I consider how a second face or dimension of covert political power was used to deny legal immigration status to Vietnam War military resisters who sought refuge in Canada during the early years of the largest politically motivated migration since the American Revolution. Recently declassified historical records and interviews with former politicians and administrators reveal that the Canadian Immigration Department and its minister misled the public in advancing an official myth about the evolution of this migration. Until successfully exposed by persistent and innovative investigative journalism, the backstage use of political power kept American Vietnam military resisters who were seeking to legally immigrate defensively framed in a symbolic package that defined them as culturally unsuitable. Several thousand American military resisters lived illegally in Canada until conflict about their plight was successfully broadened and transformed into an effective collective grievance and claim under Canadian immigration law. Once the gap between Canadian immigration law and its practice was fully exposed, the conflict about this policy grew rapidly to include a number of cultural elite groups and a master framing of these American servicemen as unexpected symbols of Canadian sovereignty. A fully elaborated explanation of the collective transformation of sociolegal grievances into successful legal claims requires combined attention to the macrolevel interaction of political power and cultural symbolism.

In the mid-1980s, many blood transfusion recipients and close to half of Japanese, American, and French hemophiliacs realized that they had been infected with HIV-contaminated blood. In this article I argue that the legal conflicts over HIV-tainted blood in those three nations defy conventional comparative claims about courts, conflict, and compensation. I first describe the similar policy responses of France, Japan, and the United States as public health officials came to realize that HIV threatened the safety of the blood supply. I then focus on what happened when infected individuals began to demand redress. I argue that the mobilization around law by plaintiffs, the centrality of the courts in handling conflicts over HIV and blood, and bold, innovative responses by the judiciary were not distinctive characteristics of the American conflict. Instead, law and courts in all three nations were central players in the battles over blood. Most strikingly, in comparison to courts in the United States, those in France and Japan have been significantly more responsive to plaintiffs' claims. When one looks beyond the courts to legal and legislative action more broadly, the United States has been the least accepting of the plethora of demands for recompense.

Looking at power struggles primarily within national boundaries reifies the nation-state and misses larger issues of control in the international system. Using the example of female genital cutting (FGC), we consider the relative importance of local constituencies versus international normative influence in creating national policies. We find that the occurrence of anti-FGC legislation in countries where many individuals support the procedure, the timing and character of national legal action directed against FGC, and the uniformity of political action all lend weight to the importance of international norms. At the national level, we find (1) reform is often a top-down process in which national laws are developed to change rather than reflect local attitudes, and (2) African states tend to work around local communities by adopting bureaucratic policies to combat FGC (Western countries, in contrast, tend to adopt formal laws). At the international level, our findings suggest (1) the structural position of international actors influences whether they deploy assimilative or coercive reform strategies, (2) contradictions among international ideals limits Western hegemony, and (3) international ideals can simultaneously empower (by offering options) and disempower (by disengaging states from local constituencies) local individuals.

I employ a theoretical framework developed on the basis of the writings of Max Weber to analyze historical developments in the formation of international police organizations. I rely on a comparative analysis of selected cases of international police networks and centrally focus on the most famous and enduring of such structures, the International Criminal Police Commission, the forerunner of the organization since 1956 known as “Interpol.” Using a Weberian perspective of bureaucratization, I maintain that the formation of international police organizations was historically made possible when public police institutions were sufficiently detached from the political centers of their respective states to function autonomously as expert bureaucracies. Under such circumstances of institutional autonomy, police bureaucracies fostered practices of collaboration across the borders of their respective national jurisdictions because and when they were motivated by a professionally defined interest in the fight against international crime. In conclusion to this analysis, I argue for the value of sociological perspectives of social control that are not reductionist, but that instead bring out the specific socially and sociologically significant dimensions of control mechanisms.

The focus on actuarial tables and rating systems by state regulators is insufficient to ensure that protected groups are not discriminated against by the insurance industry. The most powerful tool used to exclude unwanted groups from the insurance pool lies in the subjective underwriting guidelines companies utilize, yet the rhetoric surrounding the insurance industry shifts attention away from this area.