How and to what extent do defense actors use publicity in trials of protesters in contemporary Russia? Why do they fight over strategic uses of publicity if “everything is decided in advance”? Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article finds, first, that publicity accompanies legal resistance to politicized prosecutions and is inventively used by the defense. Second, mobilization of publicity creates opportunities for the defense to bargain with and keep the prosecution in check. Third, the relationship between publicity and legal resistance in repressive settings is ambiguous. Some human rights lawyers embrace publicity and others avoid it. I argue that this divergence should be interpreted in relation to lawyers' embeddedness in different professional ecologies. At the same time, lawyers' publicity strategies are altered by the interactional dimension of the trial. The latter manifests itself on two levels: at the micro-level of a courtroom and in the public sphere where different publics engage in debates that interfere with lawyers' defense strategies. This paper has broader implications for the analysis of defensive legal mobilization in dual legal systems beyond the Russian case.

What are the causes of the inefficiency of bankruptcy proceedings and who has to suffer as a result? The authors conducted a nationwide study of insolvencies and the legal procedures to deal with them in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1976. A report on this study was presented in 1977. In the following article the authors use the results of the study as a springboard for some sociolegal reflections on the functioning of law in general and bankruptcy law in particular. They emphasize the three main functions of bankruptcy law in any capitalist society (distribution, conflict resolution, and prevention) and describe social organization of these functions in West German bankruptcy law. Bankruptcy, as revealing a situation of breakdown and crisis, poses problems that are not only practical but also theoretical, problems that can stimulate sociolegal reasoning and help us to understand the social foundations of law.

It is well established that educational attainment is related to career opportunities. Increasingly, society is requiring highly trained personnel for more complex jobs. A college education is becoming an essential part of the normal preparation for many occupations.

This paper examines the way in which a United States district court decision in Texas catalyzed state legislation in that state. The events leading from the decision to the enactment of the statute are chronicled. The paper also describes the processes of bargaining and cooperation among the major actors who used the decree to obtain the new legislation. In the conclusion, factors that facilitated the catalytic impact of the judicial decision are discussed.

Lawrence Friedman (1969: 29) has written that “many basic questions of the relationship of law to social change and to cultural development have been completely neglected. … How does law brighten or darken the road to political… stability. … What happens when laws are borrowed from more advanced countries?” This paper examines the reception of English administrative law in Anglophonic Africa in an effort to discover some general propositions to answer Professor Friedman's questions.

We make lots of things into texts these days (movies, conversation, dreams) in order to bring them into our discussions. The hope is that something is gained. Here we have a public speech that has become an essay. I hope we don't lose too much in treating it that way. In addressing the written text of Santos's “Three Metaphors …” (1995), I would like to recall the speech of which the text is a part. The speech took place in a large and fabulously ornate room in the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. It was a luncheon speech presented to gathered scholars who had, as I recall, just completed a chicken salad plate and run through a series of awards. The speech came near the end of the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association.

A question of interest to political and legal scholars is: Does experience in a judicial role produce political perceptions and attitudes which systematically differ from those produced by the lawyer-advocate (nonjudicial) role? To date, the efforts of the judicial behaviorists have centered on an elicitation of attitudes from either judges or advocates, but few studies have been structured to examine both roles in respect to a common stimuli set. A rare opportunity to make such a comparative survey presented itself to the investigators in conjunction with their participation in a more extensive study of state constitutional conventions. In conjunction with a study of the New York Constitutional Convention of 1966-67, interviews were conducted with 175 of the 186 delegates to that convention. Of these 175 delegates, 22 were judges and 101 were lawyers. This situation was unique, for it allowed a direct comparison

This article examines the relationship between time and authority in courts of law. Newness, in particular, poses an obstacle to a court's efforts to establish authority because it tethers the institution to a timeline in which the human origins of the court and the political controversies preceding it are easily recalled. Moreover, the abbreviated timeline necessarily limits the body of legal authority (namely, the number of judgments) that could have been produced. This article asks how a court might establish its authority when faced with such problematic newness. Based on extensive ethnographic research at the Caribbean Court of Justice, I demonstrate how the staff and judges at this relatively young tribunal work to create a narrative in which the Court transcends its own troublesome timeline. They do this by attempting to construct a time-transcendent principle of Caribbeanness and proffering the Court as a manifestation of this higher authority. The Court's narrative of its timelessness, however, is regularly challenged by far more familiar tales of its becoming, suggesting that in this court, as in all courts, the work of building and maintaining authority is ongoing.

This research note summarizes some of our work on the allocation of maintenance (alimony payments) in Belgium, specifically the obligation of a husband to provide maintenance and the entitlement of his former wife to receive it following a divorce grounded in fault. The converse situation of a maintenance-obliged wife and a maintenance-entitled husband occurs only rarely, and it is excluded from our study. So too, we do not consider the obligations of either or both divorced parents to provide maintenance for their children.

Though most countries have established public defense systems to represent indigent defendants, this is far from implying their offices are in good shape. Indeed, significant variation likely exists in the systems' effectiveness, across societies and at the subnational level. Defense agencies' performance likely depends on their configuration, including their funding, their internal arrangements, and their selection and retention mechanisms. Centered on public defense in Argentina, this article compares the performance of public and retained counsel at the country's Supreme Court. Public defenders' offices received a boost in the last two decades, and are institutionally well positioned to square off against prosecutors, putting them at least on par with the averaged retained counsel. Using a fresh dataset of around 3000 appeal decisions from 2008 to 2013, the study largely tests representational capabilities by looking at whether counsel meets briefs' formal requirements, a subset of decisions particularly valuable to reduce potential biases. It finds that formal dismissals are significantly less frequent when a public defender is named in an appeal, particularly when a federal defender is involved. It also discusses and tests alternative mechanisms. The article's findings illuminate discussions of support structures for litigation, criminal justice reform, and criminal defendants' rights.

When activists use the law to promote social change, how does the branch of law (criminal law, civil law, etc.) matter for movement outcomes? To examine this question, the article builds on legal mobilization scholarship, and on a qualitative study comparing three litigation strategies to contest racialized policing in France: mobilizing criminal law to hold officers accountable for police killings, mobilizing civil law to sue the state for racial profiling, and combining criminal and civil law to contest racialized police harassment. The findings suggest that three characteristics of legal branches matter for legal mobilization: (i) the branch's dominant paradigm (e.g., punitive vs. compensatory) determines how the problem gets framed and which actors are blamed for it; (ii) the legal provisions of each branch shape which aspects of the problem get highlighted, and which are obscured; (iii) the procedural and evidentiary rules determine the extent to which activists and victims can intervene in the fact-finding process and thus how much they can influence the strength of their claims in court. When they mobilize the law, social change actors strategize around the opportunities and constraints of various branches of law, to try influencing judicial decisions and the media coverage of cases.

A critical review of two recent discussions of problems in the law of the welfare state helps to explain the contemporary appeals of a theory of legal evolution originally developed by social democratic theorists in conjunction with the rise of collective labor law in settings as disparate as Germany and the United States. Influential contemporary formulations treat collective labor law as merely one example of a generalizable decentralization of regulative and constitutive law, taken as a distinguishing feature of a new evolutionary stage. But the question is raised whether the plausibility of this model does not tacitly depend on a positive reading of the labor experience, and consequently whether its present relevance is not seriously put into question by the deep crisis of the labor movement, whose social and political power was acknowledged by the original theorists to underlie the legal structures taken as paradigmatic.

Sociological perspectives in the study of law have a long history in German scholarship. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century the “Historical School of Jurisprudence” had insisted that the law is embedded in the developing patterns of social and cultural life, and that this aspect should guide the analysis of law as well as govern legislation. Still, it was only during the decades before and after 1900 that more specifically sociological analyses began to appear. German jurisprudence was not characterized by close contact and intimate interaction with social and economic reality. Among the reasons for this were the following:

1. (1) the coexistence of regionally fragmented and relatively traditional legal practice with legal scholarship shaped by the tradition of Roman law;

2. (2) the relative segregation of legal personnel by class and subculture from people without a university education and from business and enterprise; and

3. (3) the dominant role of government bureaucracies, staffed mainly by lawyers, which in many instances did not have to be particularly responsive to the demands of new groups with interests in the law.