In early 2004, as Americans viewed the photographs of beatings, humiliation, and abuse of the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib with horror, they were repeating the experiences of Canadians 10 years earlier. In 1994, Canadians saw photos and videotapes of cruelty and abuse by their peacekeepers toward the Somalis they had been sent to rescue. In 2004, Americans confronted the fact that U.S. soldiers were capable of the same forms of brutality and cruelty they had come to expect from other regimes. For Canadians, proud of their status as peacekeepers to the world, this experience was also deeply distressing. How did they make sense of their behavior? Reading this event through the lens of race, Sherene Razack in Dark Threats and White Knights argues that this was not an aberrant event, the product of a few “bad apples,” or a failure of oversight but an expression of the underlying dynamics of race and imperialism that shaped the peacekeeping project in the first place.

At the very beginning of her career, Sally Engle Merry focused on the legal relations of nonlegally trained people—often members of the working class, marginalized or racialized groups. She explored the disjuncture between those people's understandings of disputing and the concepts, language, and procedural distinctions of legal professionals (Merry 1979, 1990, and more). That work brought her into contact with a number of scholars working on what Merry (1988) would call “new legal pluralism”: taking legal pluralism beyond the colonial and postcolonial contexts in which it had predominantly been deployed (“old legal pluralism”) and portraying it as a characteristic of virtually all societies and all law.

International criminal law has developed significantly over the past 20 years since the establishment of the ad hoc Tribunals and International Criminal Court. Much scholarly attention has focused on the politics and jurisprudence of these courts, with particular focus on the prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence. This article adds to the literature with comparative, qualitative research with survivors of conflict-related forced marriage in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, revealing context-specific understandings of marriage, consent and harm. We argue women exercise “tactic agency” in captivity in ways that are, taken together, “law-making” in their contestations over the socio-legal categories of marriage. Their contestations of marriage impact the norms within rebel groups as well as the development of new crimes against humanity in international criminal law. Building on the empirical findings, we argue that prosecution of crimes against humanity and reparation programs ought to be flexible and responsive enough to capture the varied experiences of women and girls abducted in war for purposes of sexual exploitation.

Conventional wisdom holds that the role of the U.S. federal judiciary was underspecified and undefined until the era of Chief Justice John Marshall. In contrast, I argue that prior to the Marshall era, the Supreme Court had the specific institutional role of providing an administrative remedy to aggrieved nations to deprive potentially hostile nations of any excuse for belligerence. Specifically, concern among the Framers about this nascent country's absence of dispute resolution mechanisms in the areas of trade and admiralty was critical in the institutional design of the judiciary. Original jurisdiction was designed primarily to remedy trade disputes. The independent judiciary made trade commitments more credible and self-help by the aggrieved less likely. By providing this administrative remedy and lowering the uncertainty associated with trading with revolutionaries, the Framers claimed a seat for the new country at the table of nations. Moreover, enhanced commercial credibility that the administrative avenue for redress provided was instrumental in the early economic development of the United States.

This study examines the effect of case-processing time on judicial sentencing decisions of economic crime in Taiwan. Studies have been conducted with cases involving misdemeanors and felony homicide, but not with serious economic offenses committed in countries outside of North America. As economic crime becomes increasingly an international problem, research from other countries will be more important. The hypotheses considered were as follows: as the time between the decision to prosecute and the judicial sentencing outcome decreases, both the likelihood of being sent to prison and the likelihood of receiving a longer prison sentence increases. Our findings indicated that case-processing time is not only an indicator of offense severity but also a factor in judicial sentencing decisions.

The article identifies and analyses the development it labels the “quantitative turn” in international criminal law. Addressing the cumulative effect of the large numbers of witnesses in international processes, the article considers quantity as an integral, and substantively beneficial, component of the law's response to atrocity crimes. The article develops a theorized understanding of the relationship between mass atrocity and mass testimony and provides a taxonomy of the functions that the quantity of testimonies fulfills in international trials: the evidentiary, didactic, epistemic, and restorative functions. Focusing on a recent case before the International Criminal Court in the matter of The Prosecutor v. Bemba, the article demonstrates how the different players in the international justice system—Prosecution, Defense, Victims, and the Court—employ the functions of quantity, while negotiating concerns over manageability and scale. The goal of this article is to prompt a debate and a more careful consideration of the potential benefits of a meaningful participation of witnesses and victims in post-atrocity proceedings. This is particularly important given the dominance of the efficiency paradigm in international criminal law (ICL) discourse, which directly impacts the quantitative turn. The article forges new ways for ICL institutions to maintain a plurality of voices and their commitment to victims while safeguarding the rights of the accused.

Conservatives—both political and religious—are more likely than liberals to support laws regulating traditional or religious morality. The current study applies a moral psychological framework to argue that the association between conservatism and moral regulation law support can be explained in part by binding morality, or a moral orientation that privileges group needs above individual needs and includes concerns about absolutism, collectivism, and purity. Binding morality may directly promote support for moral regulation laws, which enforce traditional rules, discourage deviance, and require adherence to customs regarding bodily and spiritual purity. Binding morality may also indirectly promote support for moral regulation laws by motivating perceptions that “immoral” behaviors are harmful to innocent victims. I test these hypotheses using three analytic samples drawn from the General Social Survey (N = 3669, 7120, 369). Results show that, as expected, binding morality (especially purity) mediates the effects of political and religious conservatism on laws regulating pornography, marijuana, abortion, and euthanasia. Additional analyses exploring views about pornography show that binding morality (especially collectivism) is associated with perceptions of immorality as harmful, which in turn is associated with support for regulation.

Government transparency is a key component of democratic accountability. The U.S. Congress and the president have created multiple legislative avenues to facilitate executive branch transparency with the public. However, when the executive branch withholds requested information from the public, the federal judiciary has the power to determine whether agencies must release documents and information to requestors. When enforcing standards of executive branch transparency, judges must balance concerns of executive autonomy and judicial intrusion into administrative decisionmaking. While much judicial scholarship focuses on the decisionmaking on high courts, in the U.S. context, federal district courts play a key role in adjudicating transparency disputes. In this article, I examine case outcomes in disputes involving agency claims of deliberative process privilege over internal agency documents litigated between 1994 and 2004. I find that U.S. federal district courts largely defer to administrative agencies in transparency disputes. However, factors such as agency structure and the congruence between judicial and administrative agency policy preferences influence whether federal judges require executive branch officials to release requested information.

Questions regarding Brown v. Board of Education's short-term effect remain unanswered, particularly its comparative impact on federal district courts and state supreme courts. We test this through an analysis of racial discrimination cases in those venues in the twenty-year period bifurcated by the decision in May 1954. Our findings suggest that while federal district courts and state courts were similarly unresponsive to discrimination claims before that date, Brown exerted a significant impact on district court decisions but had little influence at the state level. Furthermore, a third pattern was found in federal appellate courts, where discrimination claims had a high likelihood of pro-minority decisions even before the Supreme Court directive.

In recent years, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of immigrants facing removal from the United States, many of whom make a case for their right to be granted relief from removal and stay in the country. While immigrant men of color are disproportionately represented in both removal proceedings and contemporary sociopolitical constructions of immigrant criminalization, existing literature has largely overlooked the state's cultural logics involved in decision-making about immigrant relief or removal. Drawing on theories of racialized masculinity and state gendering, I analyze how judges in immigration court utilize a politicized discourse of masculinity to justify legalization for immigrant men through their relational ties to US citizens. Using ethnographic observations of hearings for the Cancellation of Removal and the judicial decisions that support immigrant removal or relief, I develop a conceptual framework of “relational masculinity,” in which judges evaluate men as emotionally involved parents and partners in traditional family arrangements, raising culturally integrated Americans, and as economic providers of upward social mobility, to determine their deservingness for relief. These findings suggest that, alongside widespread gendered and racialized criminalization, the state also engages in an evaluation process to assess the masculinity of immigrant men who may be formally admitted into the United States. I argue that adherence to these gendered and racialized norms plays a key role in determining migrants' deservingness and membership, with important implications for how the state actively manages immigrant masculinity and bolsters caregiving support for US citizens, alongside heightened criminalization.

This paper examines a controversial area of legal activity—the enforcement of drug laws. It focuses on the experiences of the young, white drug user for whom arrest and processing for drug law violations commonly represent the first serious involvement with the legal system.

It is within the interactions and institutional experience of legal processing that the young drug user alters, reconstructs or solidifies a meaning structure which defines and justifies his behavior (Blumer, 1969). This shaping of definitions and perceptions takes place primarily within a particular institutional setting—narcotics court. The purpose of the court (as it is perceived by the regular actors within the court setting) is to publicly identify the "deviant" thereby setting an example for potential or undetected lawbreakers and to punish the perpetrators of deviance in order to deter them from engaging in further deviant activity (cf., Schwartz and Skolnick, 1962:133).

Existing literature regards flexibility and authority as key characteristics of informal justice. We further contend that the combination of the two is crucial for informal justice to be effective. We investigate the process of dispute resolution by a Chinese labor agency. Following the life cycles of a sample of 810 labor disputes, we find that this informal justice forum was efficient and effective, made possible by the combination of flexibility and authority. Flexibility means that the agency attracts certain types of cases that are usually screened out of the formal legal system and that agency officials use “informal,” hence flexible, techniques. Authority means that the administrative agency possesses additional powers over the disputants; hence, the disputants are under pressure to follow its suggestions and decisions. A comparative analysis of various cases of informal justice reinforces the importance of combining flexibility and authority. We further demonstrate that flexibility without authority is insufficient and that some informal justice forums are effective because they enjoy both.

Proposals for the decriminalization of heroin are examined and then analyzed in terms of the ideology of tolerance which informs anti-psychiatry, labeling sociology, and the concept of the victimless crime. Marcuse's discussion of repressive tolerance is brought to bear on this issue in order to suggest that tolerance for deviance may have consequences not immediately expected by those who advance reformist proposals regarding narcotics policy.

We investigate the causes of protracted violent conflict by examining the dynamics of a so-called family feud in one Appalachian county in the 19th century. Using data from the civil and criminal court docket and sociohistorical sources, we find that protracted local violence was neither an alternative to dispute resolution through the courts nor a simple function of economic development. Rather, feud violence reflected the social and economic relations and cleavages that accompanied local state building. We discuss the implications of these findings for a historically specific understanding of the relation between local governance and protracted disputing.

The observation that Great Britain and the United States are two countries separated by a common language has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas, and Winston Churchill. The Law and Society Association's (LSA) Presidential Addresses tend to be one of the occasions when this overworked observation clearly rings most true. More precisely, since language is but one dimension of culture, an equally widely credited truism, it is always the point in the Annual Meetings at which an alien tends to feel most alien. For me, the achievement of Kitty Calavita's Address lies in the way that it helps me to define that feeling of strangeness.

Three major child support guideline models are currently used in the United States to stimulate adequate levels of child support. To evaluate the effects of these guidelines, we examined cases filed before and after their introduction in three states that enacted different models. Overall, we found a modest increase in child support awards and few differences across models. The most substantial increases occurred in low-income cases in settings in which awards had historically been low. Guidelines also appeared to decrease the likelihood of a zero dollar award in cases that had previously lacked orders: those in which the father was unemployed and in which the obligor was female.

Post-guideline order levels in low-income families still fall short of the best available estimates of expenditures on children in intact households; they match expenditures in intact households in middle-and upper-income families. We consider several factors that may explain the limitations as well as the successes of guidelines in stimulating change.

How and why do groups employ law strategically in different venues? This article combines theoretical and methodological insights from sociolegal and interest-group studies to investigate how and why nonfederally recognized Indian groups used administrative and legislative strategies for federal recognition from 1977 to 2012. By detailing the circumstances leading Indian groups to employ varying strategies, it provides a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic interplay among the goals, motivations, and constraints influencing groups to use administrative and legislative processes over time.

Writing in 1950, Hurst (1950: 183) noted that there was far more opinion on the function of courts than actual knowledge of their work. Thirty years later his assessment was only slightly more encouraging, but he noted at least some positive developments. Among them was “a substantial increase in ordered collection and assessment of facts about the flow of court business” (1980–81: 407), some of which tried to cover broad areas of the country and reached back into the nineteenth century. Much of this came from a number of longitudinal studies of court business the findings of which began appearing in publications in the mid-1970s. These were ambitious, pioneering, and often theoretically challenging studies that have spawned a thriving subfield in both the United States and Europe. One of these works is a sixteen-state study of supreme courts covering the years 1870 to 1970, conducted by Robert A. Kagan, Bliss Cartwright, Lawrence M. Friedman, and Stanton Wheeler. My purpose here is to provide an overview of the seven articles reporting on this study that appeared between 1975 and 1987, and to provide a critical review of the four central articles in the series.