This article argues that some of the weaknesses in the longitudinal study of courts derive from an excessively macro-law focus on legal processes relatively uninformed by micro-law processes. Greater attention to the micro-macro relationship offers new opportunities for longitudinal studies themselves and for the integration of their findings into the mainstream of law and social science.

This article examines the legacy of lynchings on contemporary whites' views of blacks as criminal threats. To this end, it draws on prior literature on racial animus to demonstrate the sustained influence of lynching on contemporary America. We hypothesize that one long-standing legacy of lynchings is its influence in shaping views about blacks as criminals and, in particular, as a group that poses a criminal threat to whites. In addition, we hypothesize that this effect will be greater among whites who live in areas in America where socioeconomic disadvantage and political conservatism are greater. Results of multilevel analyses of lynching and survey data on whites' views toward blacks support the hypotheses. In turn, they underscore the salience of understanding historical forces, including the legacy of lynchings that influence contemporary views of blacks, criminals, and punishment policies.

Using data from trial courts in four Illinois counties for the period 1870 to 1960, this article explores the utility of a model for explaining patterns and changes in caseload dynamics. The model sees patterns and changes in caseload dynamics as the result of three sets of factors: long-term local environmental trends; short-term fluctuations in local environmental conditions; and institutional contraints. It assumes that change is essentially a nonlinear and contingent process, these characteristics of change being the consequences of the sensitivity of caseload dynamics to the initial environmental conditions of a locale and the infrequent and varied socioeconomic transitions that different locales experience. Such transitions, the article argues, are the key to identifying the underlying similarities beneath the apparent diversity in caseload dynamics among different sites.

This article presents the findings of the first research study of the Institutional Hearing Program (IHP), a prison-based immigration court system run by the U.S. Department of Justice. Although the IHP has existed for four decades, little is publicly known about the program's origin, development, or significance. Based on original analysis of archival records, this study makes three central contributions. First, it traces the origin and growth of the IHP within federal, state, and municipal correctional facilities. Notably, although the IHP began in 1980 as a program to deport Cuban asylum seekers held in civil detention in an Atlanta prison, it now operates to deport noncitizens serving prison sentences in twenty-three federal prisons, nineteen state prison systems, and a few municipal jails. Second, this article uncovers the crucial role that prison-based immigration courts have played in shaping the design of carceral institutions around the priorities of an immigration system that primarily targets Latinos for deportation. Third, this article shows how immigration courts embedded in carceral spaces have served as influential, yet overlooked, incubators of changes to immigration law and practice that today apply to all immigration courts, not just the IHP. These findings have important implications for contemporary understandings of the relationship between immigration detention, racialized control of migration, and penal punishment.

Ethnographic study of American poverty from the Progressive Era to the present has provided a sympathetic window on the lives of the poor. Ethnographers bear witness to the world of need, oppression, and survival, but the best ethnography has always provided more than the stark facts of life in poverty. Carol Stack, Elliott Liebow, Joyce Ladner, and earlier generations of scholars helped us do more than put faces on the poor; their mission was to understand poverty in its social and institutional context—how the institutions of a democratic society create poverty and limit the capacity of the poor to participate fully in social life. Their scholarship grew first from a powerful moral and political principle: unless such institutions “work” for the poor as well as the better off, we cannot say that the poor have received an equal opportunity to become autonomous, successful participants in our society. Second, their scholarship exposes the myth of universal citizenship rights in the American welfare state, revealing such rights to be contingent upon identity.

This article examines how the conservative legal movement's successful countermobilization of the politics of rights enables U.S. Supreme Court outcomes that exacerbate racial and ethnic inequities while solidifying the privileged position of others in the name of equality. A comparison of two pivotal Supreme Court cases involving native entitlements—Morton v. Mancari (1974) and Rice v. Cayetano (2000)—illustrates how appeals to formal, as opposed to substantive, equality work in effect to support existing hierarchies. At the same time, the conservative legal movement's success provides progressive social actors with opportunities to reframe the discourse. We suggest that a critical questioning of strategies predicated on appeals for equal rights may be necessary to advance the interests of native populations in the current environment, and we identify an alternative way of working for native interests, one that escapes the constraints of equality doctrine by appealing to broader claims of social justice.

A substantial scholarship has studied the extent to which states across the political and geographic spectrums rely on legal, bureaucratic, and judicial institutions to govern religion. However, a deeper inquiry into the mechanisms through which regulation occurs has yet been achieved. This article foregrounds conversion, understood as mobility between social groups in which belief and sincerity may figure but is not reducible to either, to observe these dynamics. Through an analysis of Egyptian jurisprudence on the right to change religion as well as interviews with complainants and litigators, the article challenges widespread assumptions about who and what constitute the regulatory field. It also shows how religious difference is produced in the legal-bureaucratic encounter. By accounting for institutions that are not typically considered part of the regulatory field nor thought to be bound by the strictures of legal positivism, this article further occasions a rethinking of the public–private distinction within critiques of secularism.

This article offers the first systematic analysis of the effects of domestic atrocity laws on human rights prosecutions. Scholars have identified various political and sociological factors to explain the striking rise in human rights prosecutions over the past 30 years, yet the role of domestic criminal law in enabling such prosecutions has largely been unexamined. That is surprising given that international legal prohibitions against human rights atrocities are designed to be enforced by domestic courts applying domestic criminal law. We argue that domestic criminal laws against genocide and crimes against humanity facilitate human rights prosecutions in post-authoritarian states by helping to overcome formal legal roadblocks to prosecution, such as retroactivity, amnesties, immunities, and statutes of limitations. Using original data on domestic atrocity laws and human rights prosecutions in new democracies, we find that atrocity laws increase the speed with which new democracies pursue prosecutions, as well as the overall numbers of trials they initiate and complete.

The state has long relied on ordinary civilians to do surveillance work, but recent advances in networked technologies are expanding mechanisms for surveillance and social control. In this article, we analyze the phenomenon in which private individuals conduct surveillance on behalf of the state, often using private sector technologies to do so. We develop the concept of surveillance deputies to describe when ordinary people, rather than state actors, use their labor and economic resources to engage in such activity. Although surveillance deputies themselves are not new, their participation in everyday surveillance deputy work has rapidly increased under unique economic and technological conditions of our digital age. Drawing upon contemporary empirical examples, we hypothesize four conditions that contribute to surveillance deputization and strengthen its effects: (1) when interests between the state and civilians converge; (2) when law institutionalizes surveillance deputization or fails to clarify its boundaries; (3) when technological offerings expand personal surveillance capabilities; and (4) when unequal groups use surveillance to gain power or leverage resistance. In developing these hypotheses, we bridge research in law and society, sociology, surveillance studies, and science and technology studies and suggest avenues for future empirical investigation.

This comment argues that to understand the role of trial courts in maintaining a particular order of differences in society, attention must be directed beyond official legal arenas and official rules to the actions of ordinary citizens and of “marginal” legal officials who make law and shape the court through practices that are excluded from official accounts. This move provides an account of the meaning of courts, of cases, and of law that is relational, and that attends to the agency of everyday people in producing and resisting forms of domination.

Repeat players and plaintiffs seem to have an advantage in the negotiation phase and in the trial phase of civil disputes. We suggest that their advantage may turn to a disadvantage after the court's judgment, when the award has to be collected. We contacted attorneys for all cases in three trial courts in The Netherlands in which the plaintiff's claim had been granted in whole or in part in a final decision three years earlier (N=970). We asked them to what extent the defendant complied with the judgment. The results show that plaintiffs have difficulty in collecting their awards. On average, only a little more than half the award is collected after three years. Repeat players continue to prevail if they are plaintiffs, but are worse off than one-shotters if they are defendants.

In this article I review court records from the early period of settlement in Puritan Massachusetts (1629–50). The study avoids the great controversies of the day, focusing instead on the patterns that appear in the adjudication of a great number of cases over time. In the first part of the study, a quantitative analysis is performed on a data set comprising crimes (the independent variable) and punishments, evaluated according to an ordinally ranked scale of severity. In the second part, I review the records in detail and suggest conclusions concerning the purposes of punishment and the organizing concepts that are shown to have governed the adjudication of cases in the early Massachusetts courts. The study finds that over a period of decades and a large number of cases (N=793), the actions perceived to be necessary for the restoration of communal order dictated the severity of punishment imposed. I argue that this pattern demonstrates impressive fidelity to the doctrinal principles that served as the public legitimating principles for these courts. These findings, in turn, encourage us to question accounts that purport to show that these principles were merely veils for religious, economic, or social aggrandizement, particularly when such accounts are based on interpretations of individual cases or events.

Feminists' opposition to a state trial judge in a retention election provided an opportunity to explore important issues about legal consciousness and differences between negative and affirmative resistance. Three questions about legal consciousness and resistance are addressed: What effect does an encounter with an allegedly bad judge have on people's legal consciousness? Under what circumstances will people engage in negative or affirmative resistance against a legal encounter they perceive as unjust? What instrumental effects on institutional practices and what constitutive effects on legal consciousness can such resistance have? The article draws on narrative analysis to explore the conditions for transformation of legal consciousness and mobilization of political action in a judicial retention election.

Allan Horwitz and I are in full agreement about the value of studying the extralegal sources of statutory law (such as vagrancy legislation) or of governmental social control (whether or not it is identified as law). A good deal of my own work has concerned just this (Greenberg, 1977; 1980; forthcoming; Humphries and Greenberg, 1981; forthcoming; Loftin et al., 1981).

Skeptics of Supreme Court power have pointed to abortion policy as an example of surprising limits on the justices' power to change society. I argue, however, that the Court's ruling in Roe v. Wade played a critical role in transforming how Americans think and talk about abortion. I develop an account of the development of the social conception of abortion from a critical reading of twentieth century American journalism and then test some predictions of that account through the use of quantitative content analyses. I conclude by discussing some implications for the study of judicial politics and public constitutionalism.