Judicial mediation in China represents an extreme case of integration between adjudication and mediation. Based on ethnographic work and extensive interviews, this article studies how judicial mediation actually works in China. It finds that the incorporation of mediation as part of the official trial process creates a set of internal contradictions. In addition to the role conflict inherent in a judge's acting also as a mediator, adjudication and mediation stages are organized by different principles. When the rather rigid format of adjudication is carried over to in‐trial mediation, it curtails the flexible, nonlegalistic approach that mediation is meant to promote. Challenged authority, an uncontrolled process, narrowed issues, and weakened norms all make a settled outcome difficult to achieve. In comparison with judicial mediation in other jurisdictions, this case study from China has important theoretical implications for understanding the limits of informal justice.

This article uses the case of Sudan to show how authoritarian regimes benefit from embracing international arbitration, allowing them to maintain domestic control and attract foreign investment. International arbitration ensures that foreign‐investment disputes are resolved outside of domestic purview, obviating the need for nondemocratic states to create independent courts. Research on judicial politics in authoritarian regimes has largely overlooked those private and extra‐judicial pathways—international arbitration tribunals—that illiberal regimes have been taking. Similarly, research in international commercial law has neglected domestic politics, overlooking arbitration's consequences for domestic stakeholders. Promoting international arbitration without paying heed to its side effects can unwittingly help illiberal regimes, particularly in weak states, to continue to repress their judiciaries and curtail the development of domestic legal institutions and the rule of law.

In recent decades, alternative dispute resolution processes have gained worldwide recognition, a growing role in legal practice, and increasing academic attention. Despite their professed advantages, they have also faced fierce opposition. In a seminal article, Owen Fiss argued that ADR exacerbates imbalances of power between the parties. But while the theoretical argument has been widely developed, empirical evidence has remained scant. This article empirically examines the impact of representation patterns and dispute resolution methods on case outcomes. Arguably, professional representation of weaker parties may reduce the effects of inequality, whereas less formal, transparent, and adjudicatory processes may exacerbate them. The article focuses on small claims settlement conferences, using the Israeli labor courts system as a test case. The main findings are that representation increases the probability of a successful settlement conference, and that the more formal the process, the greater the ratio between the sum obtained by the plaintiff and the sum claimed.

For a long time the Netherlands has been internationally known for its tolerant and humane environment for first‐ and second‐generation migrants. However, as in many European countries, over the past few decades the political debate on immigration has gradually grown more negative. Links between crime, security, migration, and integration have become more established, resulting in a series of policy and legislative reforms targeting migrants in the country. These developments seem to fit into the broader trend for which scholars have coined the term crimmigration, the intersection of crime control and immigration control. In this article, using crimmigration as a sensitizing concept, we seek to gain insight into the governance of migration and crime in Netherlands.

Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers' attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail to include the views of those who once worked in that setting but have now gone elsewhere; and third, that few studies address the problems of bias that may be caused by lower rates of response from the least satisfied persons in the population sampled.

How do youth experience and understand the law? How is law regarded and communicated? Youth's legal subjectivity has received limited attention in the sociological and legal literatures, especially as it relates to crime‐reporting behaviors. Drawing on legal socialization theory and procedural justice, I show how youth, as legal subjects, described the law and how those descriptions differed by social location. Using a diverse sample, I examined narratives produced during forensic interviews following reports of sexual victimization. Rather than passive victims, youth act on, and within, institutions. In their own words, youth describe experiences with state systems that animated their understandings of law and criminal justice processes. They reveal how shared frameworks of understanding affected legal subjectivity, shaped their evaluations of the law, and influenced participation in state systems so that perhaps those most in need of legal remedy are those most unlikely to seek it.

This article examines the different legal articulations between indigenous typologies and topologies, that is, the relationship between someone classified as an indigenous subject, a grantee of minority rights, and the spatial arrangements such as reservations or ancestral territories considered necessary for indigenous “cultural survival.” I analyze how the jurisprudence of the Colombian Constitutional Court manifests and rests on the diverse combinations of these two factors. The typology/topology binary characterizes the manner in which these legal discourses portray indigeneity and culture. This binary also offers insight into a broad range of issues, including the access that indigenous peoples have to minority rights, the use of customary law, and the spatial delimitations that frame indigenous legal jurisdictions. Some of the complexities that arise from this binary are: the conceptualization of indigenous places as habitats, the idea of culture as a list of traits, and the concept of “degrees” of indigeneity that determine these peoples' access to minority rights.

In the summer of 2006, Hazleton, Pennsylvania passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA). In this article, the politics that emerged in that law's wake are used as a case study to identify the rhetorical tools that justify and help achieve White dominance in local struggles over immigration in the United States. In tracing three successive waves of post‐IIRA activism, what legal scholar Thomas Ross has termed White innocence/Black abstraction—a racial narrative that absolves Whites of wrongdoing and obfuscates minority suffering—is shown to be a central theme in the discourse of Hazleton's White majority. This colorblind rhetoric is used to make exclusionary legislation appear justifiable and to curtail the efforts of immigrant rights activists. By bringing Ross's insights into a new substantive context (i.e., immigration) and outside the confines of formal law (i.e., legal mobilizations rather than judicial opinions), this article demonstrates the centrality of innocence/abstraction in on‐the‐ground efforts to defend existing social arrangements.

Most of the work of public interest law organizations does not make money. How do these organizations survive, given the economic realities of law practice? Drawing on survey data from a national random sample of public interest law firms, we investigate how funding models vary across public interest organizations and how funding sources affect these organizations’ activities. We find funding structures have, over time, shifted away from foundation support toward government grants. Compared to other organizations, however, conservative organizations draw significantly less of their budget from federal and state grants, and significantly more of their budget from private contributions. Conservative organizations are significantly less likely than other organizations to rely on funding that prohibits engaging in class actions, receiving attorney's fees, or lobbying. Respondents reported that funding restrictions hamper their ability to negotiate favorable settlements, bring about systemic change, and represent vulnerable client communities. We close with a comparative institutional analysis of different funding models.

The competition between the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, a cosmopolitan common law supreme court, and the Chinese National People's Congress Standing Committee, a Leninist parliamentary body, over the “proper meaning” of the Hong Kong Basic Law constituted a very important facet of the territory's constitutional history since the end of British rule in 1997. This article applies the insights of game theory to explain why constitutional stability, in the sense that the two players have never entered into an open collision with each other despite the ambiguity of the Basic Law and the “One Country, Two Systems” formula, endured until the present day. It is argued that successful coordination between the two resulted from the strong aversion of the Court and the Standing Committee to constitutional crises, as well as from the fact that neither entity was capable of credibly signaling its commitment to an aggressive strategy all the time.

Housing demolition has been one of the major sources of social conflict in contemporary China. Drawing on evidence collected in fieldwork investigations, this article examines the pressure of protest‐supported housing demolition litigation and its impacts. It finds that under the pressure of litigation, the courts have devised coping mechanisms to constrain the housing demolition authorities, and that social change angling toward more transparency and accountability has occurred. The article argues that this change is made possible as the maintenance of social stability has become not only the paramount concern of the regime, but also the performance assessment criterion for local officials and judges. The findings deepen our understanding of the causes and consequences of judicial empowerment in China and shed light on the dynamics of judicial politics in other regimes.

National immigration policy meets the realities of unauthorized immigration at the local level, often in ways undesired by residents, as exemplified by the dramatic rise of local anti‐immigrant legislation in US states and municipalities. Scholars have studied why some states and municipalities, but not others, engage in immigration policy making. Such research is not designed, however, to evaluate how the basic structure of US government facilitates and shapes local protest. To probe that issue, we compare Chiapas, Mexico and Arizona, USA, both peripheral areas significantly affected by unauthorized immigration and national policies designed to control it. We find that the open texture of US federalism facilitates local activism, while Mexico's more centralized government does not. Activists within both states are similar, however, in deploying law creatively to critique national policy, a reminder of the growing worldwide significance of legal pluralism and legal consciousness in the politics of protest.

How may professionals be made to contribute to legislative processes so that their expertise redounds to the public interest, despite the legislative product being likely to have a negative impact on their clients' wealth? Drawing on a case study of the legislative process that gave birth to Israel's recent (2002–2008) trusts taxation regime, based on five years of participant observation among the trust professional community, I find that to obtain the benefit of private‐sector professionals' expertise under such circumstances, government should have legislation drafted in a dispassionate, exclusive environment of experts rather than in the political arena; it should build professionals' trust in government by adopting an explicitly collegial approach; it should focus reform efforts on elements of the existing law so clearly inequitable as to make a refusal to contribute difficult to justify; and take care that the new regime creates a compliance practice lucrative enough to compensate for any loss to professionals consequent on its enactment. Once professionals' interests are suitably safeguarded, their loyalty to clients appears surprisingly brittle and government can successfully combine with them in the public interest.

The European Court of Justice, and courts in general, were key actors in the creation of the European Union (EU). However, they cannot change major policy without political supporters to lobby and litigate for implementation. We argue that part of the resolution of this apparent paradox comes from complementing existing work on the activities of EU courts and litigants with a focus on a third actor: implementing bureaucracies, whose effect on law and politics has not been a focus of studies of EU legal development. Their calculations about whether to pay attention, lobby, and comply shape the impact of the law. Those calculations are variable and patterned; when and how bureaucracies listen to courts varies in predictable ways. We find evidence for this proposition in the case of EU health care services law, both in the secondary literature and in empirical studies of France and Spain.

The article aims at advancing our understanding of critical junctures in the evolution of religious/secular regulations, referring to those moments in history when one particular arrangement is adopted among several alternatives, establishing an institutional trajectory that is resistant to change in the following years. It traces the regulation of personal status laws in Israel and India, which, despite attempts by political leaders at time of independence to defer clear choices regarding the role of religious law, became generally entrenched in later decades. Based on the Israeli and Indian cases, and in contrast with common approaches, the article demonstrates how decisions made by influential political actors during the foundational stage of the state appear difficult to reform, regardless of the content of these decisions—whether they introduce a radical change or maintain existing practices—or the level of decision making—whether constitutional or ordinary parliamentary legislation.

This article explores two propositions in the literature on rules of possession. The first is that rules of first possession may form the basis for “spontaneous order.” The article argues that this Hayekian proposition must take into account the relationship between property and authority, including the potential for social disorder when competition for possession combines with competition for public authority. The second is that simple rules of possession provide a baseline response to the problem of social order because of the information costs of property in a large audience context. The article argues that this proposition must take into account correlations between interpretive complexity in rules of possession and the reproduction of authority and social order in circumstances of threatened social disorder. The analysis highlights the significance of authority and enforcement for the design of rules of possession and their relationship with social order.

In the construction of immigration status categories in law and social practice, the power of the nation‐state to define migrants’ status is pervasive but far from absolute. In this article, I examine the conditioned legality known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in US immigration law through a discussion of legal structures, historical frames, local discourses, and Salvadoran migrants’ lived experiences with liminal legality in rural Arkansas in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. I argue that migration policy, though fraught with ambiguity and contradiction (see Coutin 2007; Coutin and Yngvesson 2008), functions both to reproduce and to mask the benefits to the nation‐state from the ambiguous inclusion and simultaneous exclusion of migrant workers. In spite of the efficacious ways immigration policies discipline and constrain, within these limits migrants, legal practitioners, and others respond as critical agents to the policy structures shaping their lives.

The question whether unjust dispossessions of land perpetrated on whole peoples in the past should be corrected by restitution in kind, that is, granting reparations in the form of returning land to the dispossessed former owners or their present‐day successors, is substantially more complex than the questions posed by other forms of reparations. I argue that the complexities involved in all the situations where claims for land reparations are made to correct historic injustices give us good reasons to be hesitant about granting such claims. At the same time, we should not dismiss such claims out of hand. Reparations that take a form other than restitution of dispossessed land may be both necessary and sufficient to establish a public marker of acknowledgment.