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.

This article studies law in action as it relates to organized lobster poaching in Canada. It examines the distinct pattern of relationships that constitutes poaching as a business enterprise and analyzes how “living law” operates as an ironic facilitative form for that which it tries to control. We argue that business poachers evade, avoid, and neutralize fishery laws and regulations by creatively using and manipulating the legal boundaries and organizational resources at their disposal. In effect, the law is an enabling structure for blue water illegality. We analyze business poaching activities as a type of workplace crime, and we account for regulatory failure in the lobster fishery.

As I was preparing my remarks for today, I thought about other LSA Presidential Addresses that had resonated with me, from Felice Levine's (1990) description of Lily Tomlin's “Trudy,” and the “goose bumps” that she (Felice) got from sociolegal studies, to Frank Munger's (2001) appeal to law and society scholars to do engaged research.

I realized that two themes I care passionately about were implicit in several of those previous talks, and that's why I had found them so compelling. They are the importance of asking the big questions (those that give us goose bumps), and the urgent need for a commitment to engaged research. I will argue today that there are in fact close links between these two themes. And, I will suggest that making these links explicit may help us address some of the dilemmas attached to the role of the engaged intellectual.

The development of Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime (1990; see also Hirschi & Gottfredson 1987, 2000) has provoked lively debate about the merits of the theory as applied to organizational crime (Steffensmeier 1989; Reed & Yeager 1996; Herbert et al. 1998). While the debate is provocative, the empirical evidence brought to bear is an insufficient test of competing theoretical claims. Using data drawn from a factorial survey administered to a group of corporate managers and managers-in-training, we subject Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory of crime and an integrated organizational theory to a theoretical competition. The results show that corporate offending propensity and behavioral indicators of low self-control are unrelated, a result inconsistent with the general theory. Instead, variables consistent with an integrated materialistic and cultural organizational theory predict managers' offending intentions. For instance, offending is inhibited when a firm has a working compliance program and when managers perceive the illegal act as highly immoral. Conversely, managers are more apt to offend when ordered to do so by a supervisor, or to gain financial or market position vis-à-vis competitors. The implications for general and organizational theories of corporate offending are discussed.

In this article I focus on discourses of freedom and exclusive belonging that structure the conventions of giving in transnational adoption, and I examine state practices for regulating the production and circulation of children in a global market economy. I argue that while the gift child, like the sold child, is a product of commodity thinking, experiences of giving a child, receiving a child, and of being a given child are in tension with market practices, producing the contradictions of adoptive kinship, the ambiguities of adoption law, and the creative potential in the construction of adoptive families.

The teacher-scholar enjoys the opportunity to contribute to the development of public intellectualism and, particularly, to a concern for social justice and the democratic process. As teachers, we have the opportunity to share with students the skills of critical questioning, which is the fundamental grounding for thinking about what a commitment to social justice and democratic processes means. As scholars, even when we conduct policy-driven studies, we have the opportunity to contribute to progressive social change, as long as we remain independent of the client and engaged with basic theoretical and conceptual questions of the social sciences. In response to Calavita's call for a commitment to engaged research, I propose that we begin our work at work.

This article investigates how the consciousness of ordinary citizens enlisted as jurors in death penalty trials is racialized. The study draws on post-trial interviews with some 66 white and black jurors who served on 24 capital trials in which either a white or black defendant received the death sentence. Findings among white jurors reveal a hegemonic tale of racial inferiority. However, other characteristics such as social class or relevant biographical experiences help explain how jurors' stories are racialized. More specifically, racial inferiority is articulated in four congruous narratives: “individual responsibility,” “the tragedy of the ‘black’ group,” “the bad kid and the caring family,” and “the threatening outsider.” Furthermore, black jurors' stories are influenced by their background experiences as well. More-educated black jurors employ a sympathetic discourse toward the “culturally distant whites.” On the other hand, working-class blacks that have had negative experiences with whites in public are found to employ a narrative of “resisting white racism.” Understanding the subtle influences of legal agents' multiple identities in the remaking of racial hegemony has broader implications for a revised constitutive perspective of law—what I call a “theory of legal narrativity.”

This article documents and provides possible explanations for the degree of judicial activism in eight post-communist countries. We examined constitutional court cases for the three years following the initial adoption of a constitution in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and Slovakia. We found that contextual political factors, such as the extent to which the party system is fragmented and the extent to which the court enjoys popular trust and confidence (rather than the formal powers entrusted to the court by the constitution or the structure of the political system), contribute most to the degree of activism by constitutional courts.

Despite the criminalization of abuses inflicted upon women, laws are still considered major sources of women's oppression. This article discusses how Palestinian society and its criminal justice system, during a politically formative period of state building, relates to “femicide.” Femicide in this study pertains to the murder of girls or women for allegedly committing “crimes of family honor.” Official statistics, Cassation Court rulings, and six documented cases were analyzed in depth to determine the role played by the penal code, the legal system, and the external sociocultural context in exonerating the perpetrator of femicide and placing the victim on trial. The data reflect a silent masculine conspiracy that empowers sexist and gender-biased legal policies. The article concludes by challenging Palestinian legislators to fight legal discrimination against women. It argues that state-building periods can be a “window of hope,” offering societies such as Palestine's the unique opportunity to reexamine and reconstruct their laws from a gender-sensitive position.

The practices through which American society regulates the transfer of human gametes (eggs and sperm) reflects and shapes our understanding of our relationship to our genetic materials. The ways in which we think about and justify these practices engages important themes of liberal political theory and law: the understanding of individuals as autonomous or defined (at least in part) by relationships that entail dependence and care; the meaning of reproductive freedom and procreative collaboration; and the extent to which a free market may protect or undercut individual liberty. Two ethical and policy questions reflect these issues: should persons created with third-party gametes be able to learn the identity of the donor(s), and should the sale of eggs and sperm be prohibited, regulated, or left to the open market? This article contends that society should prohibit both anonymous transfer of and payment for human gametes themselves. Abolition of both anonymity and payment in the practice of gamete transfer is necessary to reflect properly the collaborative nature of assisted procreation. Although political reality may lead society to permit payment of a strictly capped “inconvenience allowance” for undergoing the procedures involved in transferring one's gametes, such payment (while preferable to payment for gametes themselves) inappropriately conceptualizes use of one's body as a commodity.

This article tests the equal status contact hypothesis in the aftermath of desegregation in the Texas prison system. This study uses ten years of inmate-on-inmate assault data and compares the rates of violence among inmates racially integrated in a double cell versus inmates racially segregated in a double cell. The analysis revealed that violence between integrated inmates was not disproportionate to the level of violence between segregated inmates—in fact, it was lower. This article addresses the conditions under which positive racial group contact will likely be found in a prison setting and concludes with a discussion of implications.

The observation that Great Britain and the United States are two countries separated by a common language has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas, and Winston Churchill. The Law and Society Association's (LSA) Presidential Addresses tend to be one of the occasions when this overworked observation clearly rings most true. More precisely, since language is but one dimension of culture, an equally widely credited truism, it is always the point in the Annual Meetings at which an alien tends to feel most alien. For me, the achievement of Kitty Calavita's Address lies in the way that it helps me to define that feeling of strangeness.

This paper examines the role of the audience in the process that transformed executions from public spectacles to hidden rituals, and makes visible the ambiguities and uncertainties that accompanied the transportation of capital punishment from its monarchical origins to a modern democratic setting. From this vantage point, the evolving responses to concerns associated with the execution audience share many characteristics with efforts to control other problematic audiences. And yet, the particular forms that audience manipulation in the context of executions took cannot be fully understood without considering the occasion that brought the audience into being. Viewed as a mirror held up to the execution, the audience, whether conceptualized as a rowdy crowd or a solemn group of witnesses, emerges as a constitutive element of the execution and, in this sense, carries the potential to grant, or deny, legitimacy to the event and, by extension, capital punishment itself.

It is, I suspect, no accident that it was a breakthrough in physics that caused Kitty Calavita (2002) to reflect on the need for law and society scholars to engage in acts of public discourse and aspire to become public intellectuals. Substantively, physics may be an unlikely source of theoretical help to law and society scholarship, but no discipline better epitomizes the role of science as a practical aspect of power and governance since the mid-20th century. I would suggest that we follow Calavita's meditation not to develop our envy of the methods and theories of physics, but to develop our reflexivity concerning the dangerous role of physicists as “enablers” of power. (Think J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, not Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity.)

This is a study of meaning making and identity construction in child custody cases involving gay or lesbian parents. In it, I investigate the language of all such recorded decisions over the past 50 years, focusing on how judges—in interaction with the litigants before them—construct, negotiate, deny, and confirm the sexual and familial identities of the parents and would-be parents involved in these custody contests. Employing a constitutive framework and drawing on the social, scientific, and feminist literatures on sexuality, family, and law, I find that through multiple discursive processes, from self-representation to imposition to negotiation of new spaces of compromise, family law actors bring together sexual and familial statuses often treated as exclusive of each other.

Austin Sarat is widely known for work on cause lawyering, divorce lawyers, and white collar crime, and for influential arguments on behalf of integrating humanities topics and methods into empirical studies of law and society. Sarat is not, however, particularly known as a death penalty scholar, an intensive sub-field of socio-legal studies that has been dominated by scholars wholly captured by the compelling nature of the subject. A reader of Sarat's bibliography would have to go back to 1976 when Sarat, as a young political scientist, published research coauthored with an equally junior psychologist, Neil Vidmar, on how public opinion on the death penalty was affected by targeted education on particular aspects of the death penalty including empirical studies doubting its deterrent effects, and on other information designed to raise concerns about the justice of capital punishment (Sarat & Vidmar 1976). In terms of both its methodology and the logic of its inquiry, When the State Kills could hardly differ more from the Sarat and Vidmar study. Between the two, one can mark significant shifts in both the enterprise of socio-legal studies and the place of capital punishment in American political culture.