With a growing number of strict obligations and harsh sanctions for welfare recipients, the Netherlands has increasingly become a punitive welfare state. This article looks at what this means for welfare clients and their commonsense understandings of the law. To analyze how welfare officials shape clients' legal consciousness, I draw on an online survey among Dutch welfare clients (N = 1305) and a correlation analysis. The findings show that there is a clear relationship between welfare clients' own legal consciousness and their assessment of welfare officials' beliefs about the law. However, not all elements of their legal consciousness are relationally influenced by the same factors. Also, clients' self-reported compliance behavior is less relationally influenced than other elements of their legal consciousness. This study adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that constitute the production of relational and second-order legal consciousness and it contributes to the development of new research methods to study people's perceptions of law.

How is law made worthless to the marginalized? Drawing on ethnographic observations in Paris and New York City, I establish a typology of devaluation practices in deportation hearings. I analyze how informal court practices devalue court actors, the hearing, and the law itself. Despite different levels of formal protections for migrants, deportation adjudication is pared down and devalued in both cities. This devaluation, however, followed distinct logics. New York hearings were characterized by a utilitarian law logic, where process and ritualistic elements deemed inessential were shed, leaving a stripped-down core focused on case processing. The minimal protections available to migrants were weakened further. By contrast, hollow law emerged in Parisian hearings, where everyday court practices eroded the more generous protections granted to migrants through formal law. While analyses of immigration adjudication have focused on decision-making, determinants of legal outcomes, and the interpretation of formal criteria, I instead conceptualize the courtroom as a space where value is actively unmade through informal practices, drawing on insights from the sociology of valuation and evaluation.

Law and globalization studies have documented how Global South lawyers compete over the adaptation of international norms. Yet, little is known about how this adaptation legitimates worldviews beyond the law. To advance this literature, this paper proposes a discourse-centered field analysis of the legal globalization of anti-corruption ideas in Brazil. It examines Brazilian lawyers' disputes over a 2016 anti-corruption bill. The bill supporters mobilize global anti-corruption discourses that are exogenous to the legal field to defend harsher criminal law. Their critics counter the reform by mobilizing endogenous legal ideas against criminal law expansion. In so doing, they do not challenge reformers' ideas about corruption. I show how this discursive mismatch leads to a form of globalization by stealth, whereby local dynamics allow global ideas to remain unchallenged in local fields.

The law and society community was heartbroken to learn in February 2023 that Lauren B. Edelman (“Laurie”) passed away. Laurie obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin before earning a Juris Doctor degree from University of California, Berkeley and a doctoral degree from Stanford University. She spent the first part of her career as a Professor at the University of Wisconsin Sociology department before joining the University of California, Berkeley Law and Jurisprudence and Social Policy program as the Agnes Roddy Robb Professor of Law and Sociology in 1996.

Well, that's a fine pickle! I really want to write this essay to honor Lauren B. Edelman (Laurie to me and many others). But, I also don't want to write it because writing it means acknowledging that Laurie has died—way, WAY too early. I haven't really wanted to acknowledge this incredibly distressing reality. I shall miss Laurie in perpetuity as one of my closest intellectual interlocutors and colleagues and also as one of my dearest friends.

We have lost a great one. Laurie Edelman was a gentle, generous, ingenious, and generative giant in socio-legal studies. Her passing is devastating for me, for many others, and generally for our field of intellectual inquiry.

I was not a close personal friend with Laurie in the way that many were, especially those who worked and lived in close geographic proximity to her. But I interacted and collaborated often with Laurie for most of the last 30 years, especially since she took a faculty position at Berkeley in 1996. We were roughly the same age and our treks through academic life were parallel in many ways. From our earliest encounters, she was for me a constant source of inspiration, a role model, a catalyst, a teacher, and more. These engagements were more than enough for me to witness her ironic sense of humor, her gracious support of others, her love of intellectual exchange, and her profound commitments as a scholar, teacher, public intellectual, and professional colleague. I will not try here to summarize her many, many activities and accomplishments, although I urge people to spend some time reading her lengthy CV, various profiles, and testaments from others to appreciate all that she did and how she mattered. Instead, I will focus my reflections on the various points of direct interaction with Laurie that mattered most to me and qualify me for commentary.

As someone who was privileged to call Laurie B. Edelman a mentor and also a friend, I write this short essay to highlight the international diffusion of her research and in particular, the important legacy she has left to French scholarship on law and society. Laurie certainly preferred Italy, Bellagio, and Lake Como notably, but she did not hate Paris either, and she traveled here several times for academic events. Beyond this, however, her work has been very influential for many young French researchers in recent years. As an actor facilitating the diffusion and discussion of Laurie's work in France, I want to pay tribute to her by describing how the legal endogeneity theory that she gradually forged based mostly on her work in employment discrimination law has been understood by French sociologists, institutionalist economists and political scientists over the last 20 years. In the remainder of this essay, I first point to some milestones in the attention to and diffusion of her work in France. These include theses, invitations to colloquia, and the publication of books and special issues of journals. Second, I evoke various publications and how they have been further mobilized in French law and society scholarship. Third, I point to two main avenues of thought that have been opened up so far.

To help prevent discrimination, particularly against women and ethnic minorities, policymakers in the United States (US) have written and passed civil rights laws that require employers to address hate or harassment at workplaces. Sometimes, however, the programs that corporate managers create do not actually give workers a full opportunity to resolve their complaints; the programs are, instead, symbolic attempts to comply with federal and state civil rights legislation. Moreover, judges have come to see the mere existence of these programs, inadequate as they are, as evidence that corporations protect workers' rights.

There are multiple ways that I can describe the impact of Laurie Edelman on my life. I think the first one, and the one that most of you are familiar with, would be intellectual. The second, her mentorship, was far less public. In both ways—as an advisor and as a mentor—Laurie was extraordinary.

I came to the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP) at Berkeley Law with very little understanding of socio-legal studies, or academia as a profession. Having volunteered with refugees in the US and in countries still struggling from the ravages of conflict, I was simply dedicated to understanding how to help people rebuild their lives after war. I used to say I was a do-gooder wanting to learn how to do good better.

My last email to Laurie Edelman, sent in September 2022, forwarded a Tenth Circuit Judicial Council Order discussing allegations against a District of New Mexico magistrate judge related to a special committee's finding that it “had reason to believe that she had engaged in sanctionable misconduct.” In letting Laurie know that this was “piece of evidence 1,000,001” that she had long “been so very correct” in her scholarship, I noted that the Order had found that many of the magistrate judge's employees chose not to report the conduct “because they feared retaliation” and still others “did not know if her behavior would constitute abusive conduct or a hostile work environment.” This was exactly what her scholarship has always described as two significant weak points in the enforcement of employment discrimination law and the realization of a fair and equitable workplace (Edelman 2016). In my mind, this September 2022 email epitomized what I had come to know—first as Laurie's former graduate student and research assistant, and now as a practicing lawyer—that Laurie was right. Her theories about endogeneity, symbolic structures, and the challenges of enforcing regulatory laws had broad applicability and this was just another instance of how, in practice, her theories and predictions proved to correctly identify real-world problems.

How do six collaborators—a medical sociologist, two law professors, and three graduate students at different stages of their PhD programs—meld their disparate perspectives into one coherent essay memorializing Lauren Edelman, who brought them together for a multi-year study of judicial reasoning in federal disability discrimination cases and then left them, so suddenly and so young, to carry on without her?

Faculty members, students, policymakers, practitioners, and laypersons will learn from Laurie Edelman's brilliant scholarship for generations to come. She developed not only a new theory and a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the interplay of law and organizations—think, “legal endogeneity,” “managerialization of law,” or “symbolic structures” (Edelman, 2016)—but also a more precise account of the mutual influence between law and society. In this essay, we hold her scholarly contributions aside for a moment to explore what the three of us learned from Laurie in two of her most cherished professional roles as mentor and research collaborator. In many ways, she seemed happiest in these roles, whether advising students and early-career faculty (especially those most likely to be marginalized in academic circles, such as persons identifying as women and/or LGBTQ+, persons of color, persons with disabilities, or first-generation scholars) or working with scholars of diverse expertise and statuses on large, empirical projects.