The call for studies of the social impact of particular judicial, legislative, administrative and executive rules, decisions and practices is sounded sporadically and acted upon but rarely. To read the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States overruling established precedents in many areas of our constitutional law is to catalogue a long list of missed opportunities for social scientists. As an example of the cause for this lament, I shall present Keyishian v. Board of Regents which for all practical purposes overruled Adler v. Board of Education.

The Lactation at Work Law amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate employer accommodation of employees' breast milk expression. Interviews with employees, human resource specialists, and supervising managers in nine industries found that some organizations' supervising managers, who initially perceived accommodations only as a legal mandate furthering managerial goals, over time changed to understanding lactation accommodations through a children's-health lens that created morality-driven motivations for legal compliance–a “moralization of the law.” Educational discussions with lactating employees not only provided these supervising managers with insights into lactation at work, but also sensitized them to ethical issues surrounding lactation accommodations.

Whenever I attend a Law and Society Association function, I get the image of a family gathering. Whether it is the annual meeting, or a “birthday” celebration such as this symposium commemorating the 25th anniversary of Marc Galanter's classic work “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead” (Galanter 1974), the occasions always take on an air of kinship, with people engaging their academic forebears, siblings, and progeny in discussions about their latest projects. Although the family embraces many diverse lineages, clearly the black sheep of the family are the economists. The few brave economists who dare to attend can usually be found off in a group, amusing themselves with some recent empirical work or the latest development in game theory. In presenting our work on panels, we are often (but not always) met with polite silence or with questions asking us to defend some part of Richard Posner's work, even if our own work is critical of the traditional economic analysis of law. Occasionally at one of these family gatherings, someone even presents a paper that suggests it might be dangerous to associate with economists (Rostain 1998).

Universities face a dilemma in determining how to create fair, consistent, and reliable processes that respect the rights of both alleged perpetrators and victims and encourage people to bring complaints forward. Using the literature on non-law forms of ordering and neo-institutional theory, this article examines university Ombuds and Title IX Coordinators and their handling of sexual misconduct disputes. Primary data collection included a review of 1200 documents and interviews with 14 Ombuds and 13 Title IX Coordinators from 22 large institutions of higher education between 2011 and 2014. This study concludes that Ombuds and Title IX Coordinators, despite being designed in sharply contrasting ways, converge (but not fully) toward a hybrid of formality and informality. This paper examines Title IX to understand what drives convergence behavior and to analyze how the recent changes in the law may alter the process of convergence. As Title IX law continues to develop, the theory of procedural convergence has important implications for the creation of non-law dispute mechanisms and the balance between individual rights and the organizational development of legal norms.

South African plaintiffs are suing numerous multinational corporations under the American Alien Tort Claims Act for aiding and abetting apartheid's crimes against humanity. This article argues that Re South African Apartheid Litigation should be understood as a cosmopolitan re-membering of the nation. This interpretation runs counter to theoretical and political presumptions of an inherent antagonism between cosmopolitanism and nationhood. The apparent divide between cosmopolitanism and nation-building is bridged by the concept of victimhood. Insofar as nation-building in South Africa depends upon the restoration of victims, so too is cosmopolitanism victim-centered in its commitment to prevent harm and suffering. The apartheid litigants enact the duality of cosmopolitanism: they press for justice on the basis of cosmopolitan right, yet they do so in part because of their continued marginalization in the “new” South Africa with respect to issues of “truth” and reparation. Following on the “unfinished business” of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the apartheid litigation illustrates the intersection of cosmopolitanism with national memory and belonging.

There is growing interest in social movement actors as knowledge producers, but many movements have limited ability to access or produce credible, authoritative information. Building on sociolegal scholarship and social movement studies, we show how movements can overcome knowledge gaps they have via-à-vis state authorities and contribute to public knowledge through institutional tactics. We argue that features of the process of legal mobilization activate mechanisms that bolster movements' credibility, reveal or generate information, and thereby facilitate social movement knowledge production. We theorize these dynamics by analyzing environmental activism against U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea, which allows us to leverage most similar legal contexts and types of claims to identify and illustrate the mechanisms.

The legal profession claims a duty of public service that calls on lawyers to volunteer their time through “pro bono” work (i.e., free legal service). And increasingly law firms strongly endorse pro bono and even remunerate time that is provided to clients without charge. But what happens when pro bono is mandated by the law firm, even compensated? Is altruism undermined? Drawing on a survey of 845 lawyers, we develop an integrated theoretical model to account for how volunteering takes place in the course of legal work. The analysis reveals psychological traits, collective norms, economic exchanges, and organizational dimensions shape lawyers' pro bono work in intriguing ways with marked distinctions emerging when pro bono is remunerated by firms. Collective norms known to foster altruistic behavior appear most relevant to pro bono that is outside the job (i.e., unpaid), while organizational supports and constraints as well as economic exchange factors appear most salient to pro bono that is compensated within firms. We argue that a theory of pro bono work requires a more refined understanding of the forces promoting helping behaviors across several dimensions: whether to help, how much to help, and with or without compensation.

The call for studies of the social impact of particular judicial, legislative, administrative and executive rules, decisions and practices is sounded sporadically and acted upon but rarely. To read the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States overruling established precedents in many areas of our constitutional law is to catalogue a long list of missed opportunities for social scientists. As an example of the cause for this lament, I shall present Keyishian v. Board of Regents which for all practical purposes overruled Adler v. Board of Education.

In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in “Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience.” He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is “impoverished theoretically” and “often not worth reading” (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the policy audience. He contrasts current scholarship with a golden age of police inquiry, the 1960s, in which theoretical breakthroughs were common, and scholars were driven by their critical instincts rather than by material interests. His review of current works is narrower than most published in the Review, covering only two monographs published in the 1990s, and holding out but one (Bayley 1994) as evidence of all that is wrong with contemporary, sociolegal inquiry of policing.

When Kermit requested that I write an essay for this Review, an ambiguity in his letter led me to inquire whether he wanted me to write about legal history written in the twentieth century or legal history written of the twentieth century. Unraveling that ambiguity had the queer effect of deflecting my attention from the fact that I was in the process of agreeing to write about a subject that seemed to me to be close to nonexistent. To check out that perception, I sent my super-diligent research assistant out to search the relevant periodical literature published during the last fifteen years. A bit to my surprise he came back with a longer bibliography than I had expected and the observation, “I had a difficult time deciding where to draw the line between history and casenote.” It seems to me that this observation just about sums up the problem and perhaps it is important to discuss that problem as we look at this largely nonexistent field in the hope that by the time there is a field there may no longer be a problem.

At the very least, Wilson and Boland and we agree on the complexity of the relationship between governmental actions and social effects. Thus we believe as they do that it is not an easy task to disentangle the effects of policing on crime. We do differ on analytic strategy. We believe that time-series analyses tell us more than cross-sectional analyses do about causal patterns.

This book by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, both a major empirical and theoretical contribution, has arrived at a propitious time for law and society scholars. If our discipline is not in crisis, it is certainly in a period of transition. As “globalization” has monopolized the attention of policymakers, journalists, futurists, politicians, and the business elite, scholars in law and society have not been far behind. Meetings of the Law and Society Association have become notably more international in their objects, if to a lesser extent in membership and attendance. As our scholarship ventures with more regularity over, under, and beyond the boundaries of nation-states, we encounter new conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges, as well as the exacerbation of some more familiar difficulties. The work of Dezalay and Garth represents one of the most advanced and concerted efforts in our discipline to rise to this array of new (and old) challenges. The book's scope and ambitions are such that a reviewer is compelled to ask whether the authors have presented us with a new paradigm for research in sociology of law in the context of globalization. As I am only presumptuous enough to pose but not to answer that question, this review essay will document both the considerable promise and some possible limitations of the approach developed by Dezalay and Garth, in the hopes of using their work to spark a wider debate on the future of law and society scholarship in conditions of globalization.

The members of the U.S. Supreme Court have different ideas about what constitutes good judicial policy as well as how best to achieve that policy. From where do these ideas originate? Evolutionary psychology suggests that an answer may lie in early life experiences in which siblings assume roles that affect an adult's likely acceptance of changes in the established order. According to this view, older siblings take on responsibilities that make them more conservative and rule-bound, while younger ones adopt roles that promote liberalism and greater rebelliousness. Applying this theory to the Court, I show that these childhood roles manifest themselves in later life in the decisions of the justices. Birth order explains not only the justices’ policy preferences but also their acceptance of one important norm of judicial decisionmaking, specifically their willingness to exercise judicial review.

Existing scholarship finds that having an attorney in immigration legal proceedings increases the chances of a favorable outcome. This work, however, often acknowledges that the representation effect is underexplained: selection may explain outcomes, and variation among attorneys is difficult to assess. Through 103 interviews with attorneys who practice immigration law in three organizational environments (nonprofit legal services, private firms, and corporate law firm pro bono programs) in two East Coast areas, this paper argues that attorneys' sorting of clients between different types of legal organizations helps explain the representation effect. Attorneys define what type of case is a “good fit” for their representation, selecting cases they think they can help increase the probability of a favorable outcome. However, what they define as a “good fit” varies by attorneys' practice environments, and centers not only on the facts or characteristics of a client and their case, but also attorneys' organizational constraints. By documenting the central role of practice environment variation and its organizational constraints on attorneys' case selection, this paper helps explain the representation effect and its implications for increasing vulnerable immigrants' access to legal representation in the United States.