How are the rights of migrant workers mobilized in non-immigration regimes? Drawing on an ethnography of human rights NGOs in Israel and Singapore, two countries that share similar ethnic policies but differ in their political regime, this study contributes to scholarship on migrants’ rights mobilization by expanding cross-national analysis beyond the United States and West Europe and diverting its focus from legal institutions to the places where rights are produced. Findings show that differences in the political regime influence the channels for mobilizing claims but not the cultural politics of resonance that NGOs use when dealing with the tensions between restrictive ethnic policies and the expansion of labor migration. While restraints in authoritarian Singapore operate mainly outside the activists’ circle, in the Israeli ethno-democracy they operate through self-disciplining processes that neutralize their potential challenge to hegemonic understandings of citizenship. Paradoxically, success in advancing rights for migrants through resonance often results in reinforcing the non-immigration regime.

Drawing on socio-legal literature and fieldwork in South Sudan, this article argues that international aid groups operating in conflict settings create and impose a rules-based order on the local people they hire and on the domestic organizations they fund. Civil society actors in these places experience law's soft power through their daily, tangible, and mundane contact with aid agencies. As employees they are subject to contracts and other rules of employment, work under management and finance teams, document routine activity, and abide by organizational constitutions. In analyzing how South Sudanese activists confront, understand, conform to, or resist these externally imposed legal techniques and workplace practices, this article decenters state institutions as sites for understanding law's power and exposes how aid organizations themselves become arenas of significant legal and political struggle in war-torn societies.

What factors affect whether ordinary citizens believe that workplace decisions involving African-American employees rise to the level of discrimination? When do observers believe targets of possible race discrimination should consider mobilizing the law? We use a factorial design vignette study administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,087 ordinary people to address these questions. The “vigilance hypothesis” predicts that minorities will be more likely to perceive discrimination than whites. Our analysis partially confirms this: African Americans perceive anti-Black discrimination at higher rates than do whites and Latinos, while Latinos do not show a significant difference from whites. Where respondents believe discrimination occurred, we analyze what influences whether respondents might recommend legal mobilization. The “cynicism hypothesis” suggests that people of color may be less likely to favor using law. We find, however, that African-American and Latino respondents express more confidence in civil litigation, compared to whites. Further, African Americans express the strongest support for legal mobilization (recommending that a “friend” contact an attorney), while whites and Latinos do not differ in mobilization recommendations.

This article addresses the question of what gets transmitted in cross-national diffusion and why. It does so by analyzing the spread of rights-based activism from Japanese to South Korean leprosy (Hansen's disease) survivors in the 2000s. Previous scholarship would predict extensive diffusion of mobilizing frames and tactics, especially since Korean lawyers learned an effective legal mobilization template while working with Japanese lawyers to win compensation for Korean leprosy survivors mistreated by Japanese colonial authorities before 1945. Yet the form of subsequent activism by Korean leprosy survivors for redress from the Korean government differed from the original Japanese model. This case suggests the need for scope conditions on theories about isomorphism and the agency of brokers. In particular, it draws attention to how the structure of a country's public sphere—and especially its legal profession, news media, and activist sector—affects the feasibility of imported innovations related to activism and legal mobilization.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city of Seattle received federal Department of Housing and Urban Development “Model cities” funds to address issues of racial disenfranchisement in the city. Premised under the “Great Society” ethos, Model cities sought to remedy the strained relationship between local governments and disenfranchised urban communities. Though police-community relations were not initially slated as an area of concern in the city's grant application, residents of the designated “model neighborhood” pressed for the formation of a law and justice task force to address the issue. This article examines the process and outcome of the two law-and-justice projects proposed by residents of the designated “model neighborhood”: the Consumer Protection program and the Community Service Officer project. Drawing on the work of legal geographies scholars, I argue that the failure of each of these efforts to achieve residents' intentions stems from the geographical imagination of urban problems. Like law-and-order projects today, the geographical imagination of the model neighborhood produced a discourse of exceptionality that subjected residents to extraordinary state interventions. The Model cities project thus provides an example of a “history of the present” of mass incarceration in which the geographical imagination of crime helps facilitate the re-creation of a racialized power structure.

This article focuses on constitutional developments and legal policies in Central Europe since 1989 and elaborates on their temporal analysis with special emphasis on the distinction between demos and ethnos in the political and legal discourse. Using various social theories of time, identity, and codification of social traditions, I argue that the difference between civility and ethnicity does not involve simply a conflict between liberal democratic aspirations and ethno-nationalist myths of authoritarian politics, but rather represents two distinct traditions manipulated by political agents and codified in the process of recent constitution-making. The process of selecting different traditions and political manipulations of the past is reflected at the level of both constitutional symbolism and specific governmental policies in post-Communist Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The final part of the text analyzes relations between the abstract symbolic language of constitutional documents and concrete, “ethnos-” based legal policies implemented in these countries of Central Europe.

The concept of thematization—the process by which actors select a frame of reference for their communications—captures an aspect of dispute resolution that is fundamental to Macaulay's description of noncontractual commercial relations and to many recent dispute resolution studies. Thematization both describes the identification of events as relevant to relations between the parties and links these events to special resources and sanctions. In the thematization process managers apply their knowledge of commercial relations and of transaction structures to ensure freedom to choose between modes of handling matters. A pilot study of Danish firms illustrates the workings of the process. The author's preliminary analysis suggests that thematization within the firm determines how various forms of norms are applied at different times. Businessess continue to employ laws and litigation when other forms of governance of economic relationship fail. Thus law is still an important source of power in business.

During the past decade students of the judicial process have devoted considerable resources to an examination of the influence of political party affiliation on judicial decision making. The consequences of this research are substantial due to the key position held by the political party variable in judicial “social background” theory and value questions will necessarily be raised if partisan membership is found to activate certain decisional propensities in a judge's behavior.

Research on the influence of party affiliation on judicial decision making, however, has not been distinguished by clear findings and has left us in a position from which we are unable to generalize to courts not yet studied. Early work on the political party variable concluded that its relationship with decision making did indeed exist. Schubert (1959: 129–142) and Ulmer (1962), in studying workmen's compensation decisions handed down by the Michigan Supreme Court, demonstrated the important role played by partisan politics on that particular tribunal.

Joel Handler's presidential address to the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association examines the intellectual debates that animate recent studies of social change. This talk is his attempt to understand and question these studies of transformative politics which, Handler claims, are deeply influenced by a turn toward postmodernism. After ruminating over the postmodernist argument and its broader intellectual currents as well as its impact on studies of what he calls “protest from below” (e.g., Ewick & Silbey 1992; White 1990), he compares this work to earlier, more structurally informed approaches (e.g., Genovese 1974; Stack 1974; Piven & Cloward 1977). Handler believes that this earlier work remains more persuasive. Because the work of the 1970s is firmly rooted in an analysis of politics and economy that forms the basis for a theory of progressive social change, he concludes that it is more compelling, provocative, and socially meaningful. Handler is skeptical about the current research that is influenced by strains of postmodernism, although he does not seem to advocate a wholesale return to the earlier, social-structural approach. Thus, he does not take the difficult step of outlining a more useful and progressive analytical and political strategy.

The authors set out two key hypotheses. To address these hypotheses, (1) that inmates (deviants) reject the rules of the conventional order and (2) that they consciously do so as part of a subcultural group, the authors examine offenders' ideals about sanctions for rule breaking. The prison culture literature emphasizes the existence, most prevalent in custodial-oriented institutions, of an inmate subculture characterized by opposition and solidarity. These generalizations are primarily sustained by examining inmates' conformity with staff rules and expectations. This leaves open the question whether this solidary opposition and rejection of conventional norms extends beyond prison walls to broader societal norms regulating deviance. To measure the overall pattern and the relative importance of legally relevant and irrelevant criteria, the researchers obtained responses from a random sample of incarcerated offenders to vignettes describing criminal acts and other potential determinants of sanctions. Neither hypothesis was supported. Inmate sanctioning ideals most nearly resemble, in quality and quantity, those that they individually attribute to the contemporary judiciary. Yet most inmates believe that the other inmates, in contrast with themselves, would reject a coherent system of legal sanctions. The authors discuss the implications of the resulting (collectively self-contradictory) myth of inmate lawlessness.

This case study of a family conflict in Taiwan explores how legal consciousness is emotionally driven, intersubjective, and dependent on relational factors that are deeply connected to an individual's perception of the self–other relationship and affinity therein. As the members of the Lee family negotiated emotionally on issues involving elder care and inheritance, their adoption of law was at times absent, at others influential, but always shaped by certain Chinese concepts such as zìjǐrén (自己人), which constitute the emotional complex of belonging in Taiwan. This cultural patterning identifies a person as included, accepted, and respected by the group and when in conflict, is the driving force behind a disputants' pursuit of an identity that places them on moral high ground as a form of justice. Rather than depending on rational decision making or legal norms, their legal consciousness was determined by the sense of self, rectitude, emotion, and subjectivity.

Since both law and society and law and economics apply social science concepts and methods to the problems of the legal system, one might think that the two disciplines are natural allies. Indeed, with the largely empirical focus of law and society and the strong emphasis on theory in law and economics, the benefits from collaboration between the two would seem to be particularly great. Perhaps surprisingly, though, they have often been at odds with one another, with both groups willing to concede only grudgingly that the other has made useful contributions to the study of legal and public policy issues. The hostility is reflected in the fact that, at recent law and society meetings, very few devotees of law and economics have been in attendance, either as speakers or as members of the audience. What then can explain this chill?

The article investigates the impact of legal mobilization and judicial decisions on official minority-language education (OMLE) policy in the Canadian provinces outside Quebec, using the “factor-oriented” and “dispute-centered” theories of judicial impact developed by U.S. scholars. The Canadian Supreme Court's decision in Mahé v. Alberta (1990), which broadly interpreted Section 23 of the Charter of Rights to include management and control of OMLE programs and schools, along with federal funding to the provinces to implement OMLE policy, are important to explaining OMLE policy change as predicted by the factor-oriented approach. The dispute-centered approach, on the other hand, helps us understand how the Charter of Rights and judicial decisions shaped the goals and discourse of Francophone groups in the policy process and, more instrumentally, provided opportunity structures that Francophone groups exploited effectively. The article concludes that both approaches to explaining judicial impact could be accommodated within an institutional model of judicial impact that construes institutions as state actors, as sets of rules, and as frameworks of meaning and interpretation. Such an approach would allow for the development of a more comparative model of judicial impact.

Local systems of law are constantly forced to adapt to powerful external legal orders. As well as employing tactics of resistance and accommodation, some communities respond by maintaining boundaries around their legal sphere, safeguarding a measure of judicial autonomy. This article examines one such instance, from the Indian Himalayas. It argues that, much more complex than a case of domination and resistance, this autonomy represents a long history of deference and distance toward external forces. The maintenance of legal autonomy ultimately represents community ontology, but it is also a means of engaging with wider forces within the modern world.

Several philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists have recently begun to reexamine the problem of explanation in social science. Instead of describing man in terms of organized traits, needs, drive-cathexes, coping and defense mechanisms, or self-actualizing tendencies, the new movement is concerned with “man as rule follower.” This paper outlines the essentials of such an approach (nomotics—from the Greek nomos, “law, convention”–refers to the study of human rule systems), beginning with an examination of four behavior systems which can be conceptualized as networks of rule-governed activities. We describe some key properties of rule systems, point out certain important differences in the manners in which they are used, and suggest methods for studying rule systems in general. We also present an analysis of the topic of obedience, a central factor in the operation and preservation of any given system.

This essay explores the theme of the 1998 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association: “Making Connections across Disciplines, Theories, and Methods,” focusing in particular on the connections between researcher and subject and between researcher and researcher. The essay discusses three recent articles, by Joseph Sanders and V. Lee Hamilton, by Barbara Yngvesson, and by Margaret Montoya. These articles illustrate recent creative efforts by law and society researchers to forge new kinds of connections to their subjects. The articles also illustrate fundamentally different conceptions of the role of the researcher and of the methodologies on which sociolegal studies might be based. These differing conceptions are considered as part of a more general argument that epistemological contradictions are an essential part of our efforts to apprehend the world we seek to describe. They connect law and society researchers to one another and ensure the vitality of our field.