Morality has been a key factor in naturalization. However, defining what constitutes good moral character has never been specified, leaving interpretation of the good moral character requirement to the discretion of immigration officials and judges. Based on an analysis of court cases filed by marriage migrants, this article expands our understanding of the legal interpretation of the “good morality” requirement in two significant ways. First, by examining the nature of the morality requirements applied to marriage migrants applying for citizenship, we identify that controlling sexual morality is one of the key mechanisms of gendering the path to legal citizenship. Second, our analysis questions the fairness of the judicial rulings and shows that judges are not reliable allies for immigrant spouses. South Korean judges tend to show great deference to the administrative branch and rarely rule against the decisions of the immigration officials. Further, the rulings tend to follow cultural and gendered, rather than legal, understanding of “good” wives and husbands. Ultimately, in the case of South Korea we show that that marriage migrant moral jurisprudence deviates from the developing jurisprudence that decriminalizes intimate choices and challenges the traditional gender roles within a family.

In early modern Europe, popular hostility toward criminals could be expressed through the use of the pillory (a device in which offenders were restrained and publicly displayed). Modern electronic communications have facilitated the emergence of contemporary versions of the pillory. One such example is prodeathpenalty.com, a Web site created by supporters of capital punishment that permits members to post comments about particular executions. Most such comments are markedly hostile toward the convicted offender. But is the hostility random or patterned? A new theory by Donald Black predicts that hostility will increase with changes in social space, or the movement of social time. Testing Black's theory, we find that the number of online comments hostile to the killer and supportive of the execution increases with the degree to which the murder was a movement of relational, vertical, and cultural time. Moving beyond the electronic pillory, we argue that Black's theory has much to offer to law and society scholars.

Prior to January 1974, jury selection procedures violating basic standards of randomness had resulted in juries in Erie County, New York, which were overwhelmingly male. This paper describes the biased selection procedures, their discovery by volunteers engaged in a project to ensure a fair trial for prison inmates under indictment for events occurring in the Attica uprising, and the consequences of both improved procedures and an amended law for sexual equality in jury selection.

Two linkages between law and society are explored. First, the existence of a “woman's exemption” had led the jury commissioner and staff to make systematic prejudgments about women's behavior which then resulted in their underrepresentation on juries. Second, lawyers and social scientists worked together, using procedures and concepts from both disciplines to achieve a goal of mutual interest: improvement of the methods of jury selection, so that jury composition would more closely resemble the composition of the community. Possibilities and problems of social scientists working with lawyers are described briefly.

Unlike other federally assisted public welfare programs, the Aid to Dependent Children program has periodically been subjected to sharp political and journalistic attack. The themes of these attacks center around assertions that the program has encouraged illegitimacy and contributed to an increasing number of female-centered families. Bound up in such criticism is the suggestion that the parents of many, if not most, of the children receiving public assistance are unworthy of it by reason of their conduct or their notions of proper conduct. Also included in this anti-ADC ideology are the sloganlike propositions that many poor women have illegitimate children simply to become eligible for ADC payments and that they have additional children to obtain increased payments. A closely related assertion is sometimes made that the availability of ADC payments, or the way in which they are administered, causes many men to abandon their families or to live separately but nearby, and that the program in this way promotes and perpetuates matrifocal family patterns.

The scale of the quantitative changes in the legal profession of the United States described by Curran seems to be not unusual in the Western industrialized world. Many countries have similarly experienced large increases in the absolute number of lawyers, the ratio of lawyers to population, and the proportions of comparatively young and inexperienced lawyers and women lawyers. Nevertheless, the United States remains unusual in its high proportion of lawyers in private practice.

This article uses a fine-grained anthropological and linguistic analysis to expose the routine negotiating practices and power games behind the conclusion of paragraph 115 on responsible agricultural investments during the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012. These negotiations are simultaneously a telling example for the quotidian stuff of international governance—an arena in which much larger forces are played out through small language-based tactics, and they are representative of an exceptional moment when global multilateral policy making in the frame of the United Nations was challenged by the legitimation of private authority and corporate self-regulation. Combining anthropological and linguistic methods, the article focused on language use, analyzing the ways in which people interact in a highly coded language, how they “perform,” by exploring, playing with, and twisting the grammatical structures of the spoken language. At issue is the large-scale appropriation of agricultural land all over the world by multinational corporations, investment funds, and foreign governments.

Lawyers and anthropologists who are equally concerned with scientific and pragmatic questions have called for investigation of specific instances of legal change. Such men as Garland and Roth (1967), Healey (1964), Schiller (1965), Thompson (1968), and Twining (1964) have pointed out the need for concrete facts and figures for use in evaluating particular theories of and hypotheses about the process of legal change. In The Place of Customary Law in the National Legal Systems of East Africa, Professor Twining comments that “it would be of great value to have some intensive studies in depth of the introduction of the new courts system and the unified customary law” in Tanzania (1964: 51). He adds that “it is encouraging to hear that a private research project on similar lines is under way in Sukumaland” (1964: 59, fn. 42).

The impact of United States Supreme Court decisions on the administration of criminal justice by police and lower courts in this country has been the subject of extensive research. A number of empirical studies on the impact of Mapp v. Ohio (1961) (Kuh, 1962; Oaks, 1970), Miranda v. Arizona (1966) (Reiss and Black, 1967; Yale Law Review, 1967), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) (Blumberg, 1966; Sudnow, 1965) and in re Gault (1967) (Duffee and Siegel, 1971) have indicated that Supreme Court decisions have a much smaller impact upon police and court practices than might be expected and that systemic requirements of criminal justice agencies frequently override and suppress the policy objectives of these decisions. The result is the routinization of due process in a way which prevents its requirements from substantially interfering with the operation of the systems involved and the perversion of these requirements to serve organizational ends rather than the ends of justice. These studies raise substantial questions as to the efficacy of attempting to alter the operations of the criminal justice system through constitutional rule-making by the courts.

Suppose you want to write
Of a woman braiding
Another woman's hair-
Straight down, or with beads and shells
In three-strand plaits or corn-rowsYou
had better know the thickness
The length the pattern
Why she decides to braid her hair
How it is done to her
What country it happens in
What else happens in that country
You have to know these things
-Adrienne Rich, "North American Time"

Although Adrienne Rich tells us we “have to know these things,” we are often willingly blind to the rich stories of those with whom we are most intimate. You may braid someone's hair without knowing very much about her. You may even write about it, though the writing would rapidly become very dull. In this issue of Law & Society Review, the authors examine how legal regimes facilitate knowing (and ignoring) stories when making families. For people seeking to adopt a child in western national states, the law has sometimes made it easy not to know about who bore a child, why she is available for adoption, and why a family might have raised her one way rather than another—braiding her hair in cornrows or in plaits. Also, in intercountry adoption, children often arrive with no history available, a condition legal adoption allows and often facilitates. We need not know “what else happens in that country.” Recent scholarship notes the historical and cultural specificity of the practice of ignoring. Adoptees, mothers who have placed their children for adoption, and adoptive parents have all claimed a right to know their own or their child's history, sometimes for different reasons. Scholars have followed, explaining that creating an “as if” family, in which all of this knowledge is foreclosed, does not fit with the experience of families. Articles in this issue address three interlocking themes that question the practice of not knowing: the commodification of children and family in a market economy, contests over the framework of choice in the making of a family, and the identity of children.

When are U.S. Supreme Court justices more likely to recuse themselves from cases? This article proposes a strategic model of recusal behavior, hypothesizing that the justices balance statutory guidelines concerning recusals against other policy and institutional goals. Using data from the Supreme Court Database, I find evidence that recusal behavior is influenced by a combination of statutory, policy, and institutional considerations. Consistent with statutory explanations, which emphasize the elimination of bias or its appearance, justices are more likely to recuse themselves from cases when business interests are before the Court, when they have served for shorter terms, and when they have previously acted as Solicitor General. However, I also find that the justices are less likely to recuse themselves when cases are likely to be close or when the justices' policy goals are likely to be advanced by participating. These findings suggest that while the justices do follow statutory recusal guidelines, they also have other institutional and policy incentives that lead them to participate in cases despite their conflicts of interest.

This study draws on a qualitative study to examine, using the attitudes of high school male and female students, the possibilities for change in current practices concerning women's rights to inherit property and to take the custody of children in the event of divorce. The results show that male participants view their sisters as temporary residents in the family, and believe her inheritance may benefit her husband and her children who do not belong to her father's clan. Therefore, they strongly contest her inheritance right. However, a minority of boys were receptive to certain notions of women's rights and quite ambivalent about the gender status quo. Female participants, on the other hand, perceived the customary laws and patrilineal attitudes as a hindrance for women and girls to claim their inheritance's rights although the Congolese Family Code grants them such a right. Although the law grants both husband and wife this right, socio-cultural norms and customary law render women victims of violence. Both male and female participants also mentioned that in case of divorce, women are denied child custody.

This article explains how minority women in rural China managed to use state legal and political institutions to obtain a divorce, despite numerous obstacles. Beginning with a legal controversy over why women from the Yi minority were going to court for “fun” and then divorcing their husbands, I proceed to look at the many factors that may have contributed to divorce in rural China, such as state ethnic policy, generational empowerment, culture, and the role of community in mediation and collective action. While such factors were influential, I argue that women's divorce in Yunnan was largely the result of a particular, time-bound confluence of revolutionary political forces that were unique to China, and not the direct product of the law or ethnic culture and status.

The Magistrate Act of 1968 (Pub. L. 90-578, tit. I, § 101, 82 Stat. 1113) introduced a new tier of judicial officers into the federal district courts. As a result of this act and two amendments (Pub. L. 94-577, § 1, 90 Stat. 2729 (1976); Pub. L. 96-82, § 2, 93 Stat. 643 (1979)), magistrates may now work on a wide variety of civil and criminal pretrial tasks at the discretion of Article III judges; indeed, with the consent of both parties, magistrates may hold jury trials in civil cases. In addition, the act and the amendments encourage courts to delegate “additional duties” to magistrates with a view toward developing innovative work relations between two tiers of judicial officers.

Since both groups are lawyers, magistrates and Article III judges share the same formal training and professional expertise. Organizationally, however, magistrates work for federal judges. There is the potential, therefore, for a wide variety of work relations between these two tiers of judicial officers. The history of magistrates' “professional project” (Larson, 1977) to expand their formal duties, their autonomy and control over decision making, and their organizational status provides a useful entry point for analyzing recent developments in judicial work relations, the subject of this article.

I will first report the results of a study of U.S. magistrates. These findings suggest a typology of three distinct patterns of response to these new judicial officers: additional judge, bureaucrat, and team player. I next consider why courts opt for the occupational models they do. Finally, I speculate about the implications of the variations for understanding contemporary developments in judging and judicial process.

One special public which presumably pays a good deal of attention to the United States Supreme Court is the bar. As part of the “company” attached to the judiciary, attorneys may have a philosophic interest — and surely have a bread-and-butter interest — in the activities of the country's highest tribunal. This article seeks to explore that concern.

The growth of research in psychology and law during the last decade is easy to document. The Annual Review of Psychology has included two chapters on the subject, the first in 1976 and the second in 1982. In 1981 the American Psychological Association approved a new Division of Psychology and Law and selected that theme for the 1982 Master Lecture series at its convention. New journals (e.g., Law and Human Behavior) and collections of articles (e.g., Sales, 1981; Kerr and Bray, 1982; Konečni and Ebbeson, 1982) have reported on the burgeoning literature.