Possessing neither purse nor sword, the unelected US Supreme Court relies on sustained public confidence in its institutional credibility to give force to its decisions. Previous research shows that Supreme Court justices are increasingly making public appearances to engage in a course of institutional maintenance to preserve its legitimacy. Amid a potential legitimacy crisis, justices seek to shore up the Court’s public support in these public appearances by emphasizing the apolitical nature of the Court and its decision making. The question for a growing body of literature is whether these attempts at institutional maintenance do, in fact, lead to higher support for the Court. Using an original survey experiment where we manipulate the identity of the justice giving legitimizing rhetoric, we find that respondents’ ideological preferences and female respondents’ level of gender identity do impact the effectiveness of such rhetoric. These results build on previous work by demonstrating the importance of justice identity in conditioning how different ideologues respond to the Court’s elite signals.

The object of criminal punishment (what exactly an offender is punished for) is a central construct of criminal law theory, but it remains hard to identify in many contexts. This is especially relevant in the case of proxy crimes—offenses that criminalize behavior that does not seem wrongful per se but stands in for some other hard-to-prove wrongdoing. What is the object of punishment imposed on a person convicted of a proxy crime? Is it the criminalized conduct itself or the primary wrongdoing (which could not have been proven)? Our experimental study demonstrates that people tend to find a defendant guilty of a proxy crime most frequently when there is an indication of the primary wrongdoing as opposed to being charged with a primary offense in the context of the same evidence and being charged with a proxy in the absence of suspicion of the primary offense. However, we find evidence of discrepancies between laypeople and legal experts: the former seeing the object of punishment in a rather naively legalistic way, and the latter adhering to an instrumental vision. This challenges theories that postulate that the task of criminal law is to send messages that are understandable to both legal officials and citizens.

The US Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder and subsequent legislative failures to restore the Voting Rights Act (VRA) have alerted scholars to the precarity of federal voting rights and the importance of the Supreme Court to its implementation. I argue, however, that the court has exercised outsized influence on the administration and development of the VRA long before Shelby County, consistently advancing the goals of the Act’s opponents. Using statutory interpretation, the court has shifted both administrative and political burdens from VRA skeptics to its supporters, gradually undermining the efficacy of the law. Administratively, the court has made it harder to implement and enforce the VRA by raising evidentiary standards and narrowing the scope of section 2 and section 5. Making the VRA more burdensome to administer also creates new political burdens for the Act’s supporters, who must navigate a veto-riddled legislative process to reverse unfavorable Court decisions. As a result, the Court has made it more difficult to effectively use sections 2 and 5 to combat racial discrimination in territorial annexations, redistricting, and ballot access. These findings demonstrate yet another instance of the Supreme Court wielding its statutory authority to reshape public policies and illustrate the judicialization of the VRA.

US states collect sex and gender data on official government forms to understand, identify, classify, and surveil populations. These forms’ gender boxes—sets of questions about sex, gender, and gender identity paired with a wide variety of answer options—can mean the difference between legibility and erasure or between surveillance and privacy. They also create classic disclosure and legibility dilemmas that disproportionately burden transgender, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex individuals. And yet, the socio-legal forces determining the design of these gender boxes have been insufficiently studied. Documents obtained through public records requests and interviews with civil servants responsible for form design demonstrate that gender box design stems from the competing yet mostly inertial pressures that define the socio-legal contexts of street-level bureaucracy. In other words, gender boxes are products of the institutional, technological, political, and social contexts in which they are designed. Specifically, gender boxes look the way they do because they are subject to the effects of bureaucratic processes, social networks, expertise, intergovernmental dependence, norms, path dependencies, and technologies, with implications for research and advocacy.

Why would one person facilitate a community member’s evasion of the law, even when there is nothing tangible in it for themselves? In this article, I draw on stories in Chinese villages under the one-child policy to suggest that the lack of moral legitimacy in a particular law motivates people to help others overcome legal or policy restrictions, especially when there are existing connections and trust among them. It reveals the influential impact of law’s moral legitimacy on people’s responses to legal evasion and the relational nature of legal consciousness. An individual’s existing connections with and trust in those who evade the law often reinforce the sense of obligation to take matters into one’s own hands to help right the wrong that has been done to them. Nevertheless, the consequences of participating in such collusion may reshape expectations and obligations within the community, pushing law-evading citizens to minimize risks for those who are willing to facilitate their evasion of the law. The fluid nature of interpersonal relationships in Chinese society also means that when things go wrong, supportive members may in turn use their insider information against the law-evading citizen to seek revenge or teach them a lesson.

Public participation is widely considered to be an indispensable part of contemporary constitution-making processes, largely because it is thought to create a sense of public ownership of the new constitution. However, as recent research has shown that public participation has little actual impact on the content of the constitution, this supposed link is puzzling. How can ineffective participation contribute to public support for the constitution? We address this puzzle by subjecting it to experimental tests. In two recontact survey experiments conducted across six countries, we empirically tested the effects of various forms of participation at the constitution drafting stage and their concrete impact on public support for the constitution. We found that the act of participating in itself has little effect on support for the constitution but that broader cues that give the impressions of a fair process can have significant positive effects. This indicates that participation in constitution drafting can increase public support for a constitution regardless of the extent to which it has an impact on the constitutional text and that the appearance of a fair process is the link between participation and support.

“Transformative accommodation,” one of the most influential models proposed and debated in multiculturalist literature, is designed to strike a fine-tuned balance between minority community culture and the rights of its most vulnerable constituents. This article seeks to challenge the model’s theoretical premises and predictive normative outputs. Drawing on a novel empirical case study—the adjudication of Palestinian-Muslim wife maintenance suits in both Israel’s sharia courts as well as its civil family courts—we contend that multicultural transformation is a bidirectional process. That is, the complex encounter between liberal normativity and indigenous-religious normativity may bring about transformation not only in the minority community’s nomos, as the model envisions, but also in both normative legal systems. The article concludes with an analytical discussion aiming to transform transformative accommodation such that the model may indeed live up to its ambitious multiculturalist goals.

Police organizations are moral battlefields. Blowing the whistle on misconduct is one domain of moral contestation. Yet whistleblowing by police officers is important to ensure accountability, prevent threats to the rule of law, and avoid police capture by organized crime. In this study, we draw on a survey of 975 police officers in Himachal Pradesh, India, to investigate whistleblowing decisions and to account for these decisions. We found that officers imagined themselves blowing the whistle on the planting of evidence on criminal suspects but less so when colleagues used violence against suspects. Perceptions of organizational justice, the strength of bonds between officers, perceived audience legitimacy, and police effectiveness influenced the whistleblowing decisions of the officers.

A recurring conundrum lies at the heart of current anti-trafficking law and policy. Despite enormous efforts by civil society organizations, corporations, and governments to reduce human trafficking in supply chains, and the introduction of legislation in various countries that requires corporations to take active actions in this field, there is wide agreement that, so far, the desired change has not occurred. This article addresses this puzzle through studying the vibrant anti-trafficking activity in the UK construction sector that emerged following the enactment of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 (MSA). Applying socio-legal methods, the article unpacks the structural dynamics that shape the implementation of the MSA in the construction sector. We find that the Act exacerbates the imbalanced power relations between firms and anti-trafficking initiatives, positioning the latter as suppliers of modern slavery risk solutions that are dependent on corporate will and funding. The article demonstrates that anti-trafficking initiatives in the construction sector largely follow a “supply chain logic” that significantly limits their capacities to transform corporate behavior. We develop the notion of “anti-trafficking chains” to describe the dynamics of anti-trafficking activities in supply chains and to problematize the entanglement of anti-trafficking actors in supply chain power structure and logic.

Drawing on trade publications, contemporaneous newspaper stories, and other historical sources from the early twentieth-century United States, this article explains how installment plans overcame moral and business concerns to become the standard way people bought cars. Prominent figures in the automobile industry and financial institutions initially denounced the idea of selling cars on credit, and many banks declined to extend credit to would-be auto buyers. However, the relevant legal infrastructure heavily favored creditors, allowing them to circumvent usury laws and guaranteeing their right to repossess assets if borrowers missed payments. When the profit-making that these aspects of the law enabled became clear, moral objections to the idea of selling cars on credit yielded to a new moral consensus among powerful actors that valorized buying cars on credit and concentrated disapprobation on just those borrowers who defaulted on their payments. Thus, the characteristics of the legal infrastructure functionally presupposed the resolution of the erstwhile debate about the fundamental morality of selling cars on credit. Ultimately, lending practices building on the legal and moral foundation established in the early twentieth century led to the establishment of subprime auto lenders whose business model revolves around exorbitant interest rates, high fees, and aggressive repossession.

This article is a story about tetherings, a concept that illuminates the power of law in the relational dynamics of individual-family-state. The concept emerges from my qualitative study of parental maintenance litigation in Taiwan over the provision of financial support to troublous parents, who mistreated their children when they were young. Troubled parental maintenance litigation arises when nobody wants to look after these elderly people, and the state restricts their access to social welfare by holding their estranged children financially responsible. Such litigation leads to empowerments and disempowerments for litigants, as well as legal reform and detriments for the state. Bridging sociolegal scholarship on continuing relations with feminist vulnerability theory, “tetherings” is both an empirical and a normative concept concerned with the relational nature of power, and the openness of humans and institutions to harms and other changes. The concept is empirical, being the paradigm through which I trace disputes and other relational processes of individual-family-state; it is normative because my empirical analysis aims to expose the state’s workings and detail how people respond to law and power that binds them to one another and the state. “Tetherings” advances feminist vulnerability theory and offers a circumspectly optimistic view on the potential of law.

The probability that an event will avalanche into an impairment of essential services constitutes a “systemic risk.” Owing to the inherent complexities of modern societies, the outbreak of a novel disease or the failure of a financial institution can rapidly escalate into an impact significantly larger than the initial event. Through the lens of complex system theory, this article draws a parallel between financial crises and disasters to contend that the regulatory framework for financial systemic risk is unequipped to address its fundamental dynamics. Epitomized by the market failure rationale, financial regulation is premised on a reductionist view that purports both systemic risk and law as external to the actions of market participants. Conversely, this article advances a twofold conceptual framework. First, it shows that systemic risk emerges from the same complex dynamics that generate the financial system. Second, it understands law as an agent of complexity, thus contributing to the emergence of finance and its inherent instability. Normatively, this conceptual framework reveals the limits of current regulatory approaches and constructs a holistic risk governance framework that is akin to the one adopted to govern disaster risks.

Why is the police role so broad in the United States today? Carceral state scholars have investigated how and why policymakers have treated so many social problems as policing problems, but they have not yet recognized the degree to which the call-for-service system has marginalized political control over police strategy. This Article traces the historical sources of this arrangement through extensive archival research into its evolution. We find that over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of new communications technologies gradually shifted the power to decide which problems are proper subjects of police attention to private individuals, eventually channeling their demands through centralized call centers that had been stripped of the authority and contextual knowledge needed to govern them in a meaningful way. That process fundamentally altered the character of public oversight over policing, elevating a distinctive set of individual interests as largely unchallenged determinants of the kinds of situations that are policeable. By illustrating how sociotechnical change unintentionally reallocated the authority to define the scope of an important institution’s mandate, this case sheds new light on the factors that shape the police role and the role the public plays in defining it.

This article reexamines the notion of voice in law and society scholarship, which has focused on journeys to complaints and claims. Using the English and Welsh National Health Service as a case study, it argues that looking at the articulation of grievances through a large number of channels across a large service sector offers new opportunities to examine a range of different political logics underpinning voicing mechanisms. Two key arguments emerge. First, it becomes clear that expressions of dissatisfaction can be collected for a variety of purposes other than dispute resolution or conflict management. Formal grievance procedures, rendered legitimate by concepts of rights and due process, not only interact with but compete with other ways of serving the collective good. The second key finding is that when looked at in isolation, the concept of voice can usefully be studied as a discrete concept rather than just a vital component of claiming.

Alongside the well-known jurisprudential ideas associated with legal realism, some scholars have highlighted the realists’ political-economic ideas. Best known among them has been Morton Horwitz, who has argued that the realists launched an “attack on the legitimacy of the market.” Other scholars challenged this view and argued that there was no significant connection between legal realism and political economic ideas. I offer a corrective to both views. I first consider the work of five legal realists (Karl Llewellyn, Adolf Berle, William O. Douglas, Jerome Frank, and Thurman Arnold) and show that all held views that were well within the political-economic mainstream of their era, which did not challenge the legitimacy of market capitalism but wanted to see markets better regulated. I also show that for many of these realists, there were important connections between their jurisprudential and political-economic ideas. I then turn to some neglected writings of Felix Cohen to show that he too saw a direct link between his legal and economic ideas. However, unlike the other legal realists discussed here, he was a radical critic of market capitalism. I use his political-economic writings for a reconsideration of his better-known jurisprudential works.

Federal law prohibits deceiving the public by falsely marking an item as patented. The “false marking” prohibition has been enforced primarily by private lawsuits on behalf of the United States, with the party plaintiff and the government splitting the penalty. When a court decision dramatically increased the potential recovery for false marking claims, lawyers pounced immediately, filing more cases per week than had previously been filed in years. Indeed, many lawyers who did not previously work on patent cases joined the fray. Within two years, Congress eliminated this type of false marking suit and terminated all pending cases. Using empirical data, interviews with lawyers, legislative history, litigation documents, and news sources, this article tells the instructive history of false marking litigation. This history shows that the supply of private enforcement—lawsuits by private parties to enforce laws in the public interest—is sensitive to market forces. It also shows that, even when concentrated interests encourage Congress to cut back on private enforcement, Congress does not move as quickly as the bar. This matters because once Congress authorizes private enforcement, the maintenance of that system depends on judges and lawyers interpreting private enforcement statutes.

Postcolonial governments often restrict the market alienability of land rights for various policy reasons. One policy aims to treat all citizens equivalently and safeguard vulnerable social communities equally, as an unrestrained land market could allow one affluent social group to buy out one that is less affluent. Another policy is to set a standard that is easy to apply in the same way in every case, as a bright-line rule banning land alienation is simpler to administer than a standard that requires case-by-case considerations. Today, in Ethiopia, such laws face opposition from proponents of a free market economy and private property rights. Thus, international development institutions and influential Ethiopians are spearheading an ambitious reform to Ethiopia’s post-socialist law that bans land alienability, arguing that the law has impeded social and economic progress. This article shows, however, that the legal ban has never prevented land transfers. Many people have utilized legal constructs such as gifts, bequests, loans, and leases to sell their land. Such transfers have circumvented the ban amidst aggressive land expropriation by the state and other agents. These intricate local and national dynamics undercut the misleading sense of regularity created by the inalienability law, raising serious questions about the persistent demand by international development institutions to privatize land rights and create land markets through law reform without paying close attention to the lived experiences at the local level.

Trials involving police as defendants are rare but are significant events that give insight into police violence and its adjudication. This article explores the reasoning practices through which court actors navigate the disjunctive accounts created by competing claims of “what happened” in a police shooting. The data is drawn from trial testimony of officers and “use of force experts” in police deadly force cases in the United States. We focus on use of force experts who use a veneer of science and police logic to assert particular visions of officer “reasonableness.” We suggest that the systems of reasoning that lawyers and witnesses use in these cases create accounts of police violence that conflict with mundane reasoning and challenge credibility. We show that the proliferation of different reasoning practices and the elaboration of a “police logic” serve to insulate officers from criticism and accountability—albeit, not always successfully.

Sanctuary cities define themselves as metropoles that refuse to share information, personnel, and facilities with federal immigration authorities to police immigrants. While research suggests that sanctuary cities contest the criminalization of migration, a growing literature depicts how these urban sanctuaries could, in practice, perpetuate hierarchies and exclusionary politics against noncitizens. Yet, most of these studies conceive of urban sanctuary as local policies designed to challenge federal power and, thus, fail to fully capture how sanctuary policies could actually rely on the criminalization of migration to govern cities’ political problems. Drawing upon 1,900 pages of archival materials and 100 newspaper articles, this article takes the case of Chicago to study how and why the urban sanctuary expands immigrants’ rights while reinforcing policing with punitive implications for Latino “undeserving” noncitizens. As a form of racialized governance, I argue that Chicago’s sanctuary policies activate a set of punitive exceptions that—in response to distinct political urgencies—allow law and immigration enforcement to converge and control Latino undocumented workers, “criminals,” and “gangs.” This study not only challenges the premise that sanctuary cities necessarily resist federal power but also illustrates how they could strengthen the legitimacy of the state and racialized police power.

In 2016, Colombia’s Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as the first water body in Latin America to have its own rights. This article interrogates the historical roots of the judicial decision declaring the river a rights holder. Drawing on my long-term engagement with social organizations as an activist, lawyer, and then researcher, I illuminate the influence of Black people from the Atrato River in the transformation of law in at least three areas: ethnic territorial rights, transitional justice, and river rights. To do so, I combine interdisciplinary theoretical critique with socio-legal research using community-based and autoethnographic approaches to trace the community methods and historical practices of political contestation deployed along the rivers. Thus, I conceptualize how an organic and distinctive style of claiming and creating rights has been constructed in the basin. Moreover, by listening to the voices of the riverine representatives, I argue that the river is a nonhuman existence that has participated in the processes of rights-making in conjunction with local communities and a broader mosaic of allied actors. However, I also outline how legal systems still function to overlook crucial socio-legal claims of marginalized and resistant communities.