We have lost a great one. Laurie Edelman was a gentle, generous, ingenious, and generative giant in socio-legal studies. Her passing is devastating for me, for many others, and generally for our field of intellectual inquiry.

I was not a close personal friend with Laurie in the way that many were, especially those who worked and lived in close geographic proximity to her. But I interacted and collaborated often with Laurie for most of the last 30 years, especially since she took a faculty position at Berkeley in 1996. We were roughly the same age and our treks through academic life were parallel in many ways. From our earliest encounters, she was for me a constant source of inspiration, a role model, a catalyst, a teacher, and more. These engagements were more than enough for me to witness her ironic sense of humor, her gracious support of others, her love of intellectual exchange, and her profound commitments as a scholar, teacher, public intellectual, and professional colleague. I will not try here to summarize her many, many activities and accomplishments, although I urge people to spend some time reading her lengthy CV, various profiles, and testaments from others to appreciate all that she did and how she mattered. Instead, I will focus my reflections on the various points of direct interaction with Laurie that mattered most to me and qualify me for commentary.

Much of school bullying involves students policing the gender roles and sexuality of other students. The proliferation of antibullying laws presents an opportunity to formally punish and mark gendered harassment as unacceptable. However, when this form of peer policing involves girls, administrators often consider it to fall outside the purview of the law. We use bracketing theory to understand how middle school administrators in New Jersey assess whether student behavior violates a statewide harassment, intimidation, and bullying law. We find that, according to administrators, violations require relational asymmetry between an aggressor and victim: an imbalance of power and disproportionate participation. Administrators rarely see gendered harassment as bullying because of the relational stereotypes they attach to girl students, which often preclude interpretations of relational asymmetry. We discuss how gender beliefs among administrators and “bracketing failures” explain the ways antibullying laws allow hegemonic beliefs about gender and sexuality to remain untroubled.

Based on ethnographic research, this article shows how legal orders are being established in spaces where the state law is absent. The case of refugee camps—often discussed as sites of legal limbo and state of exception—seems to be a space of legal pluralism. However, when observing local legal practices, this pluralism is dissolved into a powerful local camp law. This characteristic type of legal order is produced by social camp-specific mechanisms, camp materiality as well as the remaking of pre-camp structures. Therefore, refugee camps should be viewed as extraterritorial spaces with a high degree of legal autonomy that enables and forces residents to create a local camp law. The findings of this study add to the literature of law and order in camps and to the debates on plural configurations in extraterritorial spaces.

US immigration law increasingly excludes many immigrants materially and symbolically from vital safety-net resources. Existing scholarship has emphasized the public charge rule as a key mechanism for enacting these exclusionary trends, but less is known about how recent public charge uncertainty has shaped how noncitizens and healthcare workers negotiate safety-net resources. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 80 safety-net workers and patients in three US states from 2015 to 2020, I argue that intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding public charge has extended a sense of surveillance into clinical spaces in previously unexamined ways. Drawing on theories of medical legal violence, system avoidance, and legal estrangement, I demonstrate how these dynamics undermined immigrants' health chances and compromised clinic workers' efforts to facilitate care. I also reveal how participants responded to this insinuation of legal violence in healthcare spaces by promoting situational trust in specific procedures and institutions.

For 30 years, U.S. immigration policy has increasingly focused on enforcement. This article goes beyond cataloging the harms of such policies to document the processes by which they become more or less salient in the lives of children of immigrants over time. In-depth interviews with 86 young adults raised in New York show that enforcement policies shape children's lives either through lived experiences of enforcement episodes or through diffuse fears arising from indirect threats. Qualitative analysis of narratives of (a) deportations post-incarceration, (b) removals, (c) arrests and detentions (d) direct threats, and (e) diffuse fears identifies characteristics related to each that may affect children even after they age into adulthood.

This article examines the performative aspect of face-to-face interactions among various legal actors and defendants in routine criminal trials in China. Using 105 trial videos as empirical data, the author develops a face-work framework to understand how an individual judge's “face”—signifying judges' legal and political roles, and their professional status—is established, protected, and enhanced during courtroom interactions. The study shows that the legal face of judges can be established by some characterizations of the nature of criminal trials such as the demarcation of legal space, the speed of the trial, and the apprising of rights to the defendants. Nevertheless, the legal face can also be disrupted by trial interactions due to judges' lack of judicial authority. Hence, Chinese judges maintain their authority through the establishment of their political face. They also use both their political face and legal face to establish their situational professional status. These interactions often lead to punitive and coercive measures against defendants in trials. While the article focuses on routine criminal trials in China, the face-work framework has the potential to explain courtroom interactions in other types of social contexts and legal proceedings.

As someone who was privileged to call Laurie B. Edelman a mentor and also a friend, I write this short essay to highlight the international diffusion of her research and in particular, the important legacy she has left to French scholarship on law and society. Laurie certainly preferred Italy, Bellagio, and Lake Como notably, but she did not hate Paris either, and she traveled here several times for academic events. Beyond this, however, her work has been very influential for many young French researchers in recent years. As an actor facilitating the diffusion and discussion of Laurie's work in France, I want to pay tribute to her by describing how the legal endogeneity theory that she gradually forged based mostly on her work in employment discrimination law has been understood by French sociologists, institutionalist economists and political scientists over the last 20 years. In the remainder of this essay, I first point to some milestones in the attention to and diffusion of her work in France. These include theses, invitations to colloquia, and the publication of books and special issues of journals. Second, I evoke various publications and how they have been further mobilized in French law and society scholarship. Third, I point to two main avenues of thought that have been opened up so far.

To help prevent discrimination, particularly against women and ethnic minorities, policymakers in the United States (US) have written and passed civil rights laws that require employers to address hate or harassment at workplaces. Sometimes, however, the programs that corporate managers create do not actually give workers a full opportunity to resolve their complaints; the programs are, instead, symbolic attempts to comply with federal and state civil rights legislation. Moreover, judges have come to see the mere existence of these programs, inadequate as they are, as evidence that corporations protect workers' rights.

There are multiple ways that I can describe the impact of Laurie Edelman on my life. I think the first one, and the one that most of you are familiar with, would be intellectual. The second, her mentorship, was far less public. In both ways—as an advisor and as a mentor—Laurie was extraordinary.

I came to the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program (JSP) at Berkeley Law with very little understanding of socio-legal studies, or academia as a profession. Having volunteered with refugees in the US and in countries still struggling from the ravages of conflict, I was simply dedicated to understanding how to help people rebuild their lives after war. I used to say I was a do-gooder wanting to learn how to do good better.

My last email to Laurie Edelman, sent in September 2022, forwarded a Tenth Circuit Judicial Council Order discussing allegations against a District of New Mexico magistrate judge related to a special committee's finding that it “had reason to believe that she had engaged in sanctionable misconduct.” In letting Laurie know that this was “piece of evidence 1,000,001” that she had long “been so very correct” in her scholarship, I noted that the Order had found that many of the magistrate judge's employees chose not to report the conduct “because they feared retaliation” and still others “did not know if her behavior would constitute abusive conduct or a hostile work environment.” This was exactly what her scholarship has always described as two significant weak points in the enforcement of employment discrimination law and the realization of a fair and equitable workplace (Edelman 2016). In my mind, this September 2022 email epitomized what I had come to know—first as Laurie's former graduate student and research assistant, and now as a practicing lawyer—that Laurie was right. Her theories about endogeneity, symbolic structures, and the challenges of enforcing regulatory laws had broad applicability and this was just another instance of how, in practice, her theories and predictions proved to correctly identify real-world problems.