Socio-legal studies has grown rapidly over the last six decades. As the field has expanded, however, it seems the pace of field-defining research (most notably, high-quality theoretical work, especially with aspirations toward grand or general theorizing) has waned, and a regime of normal science currently dominates. For some scholars, this state of affairs gives the impression of treading water, an incoherent field, or even theoretical stagnation. Using the subfield of punishment and society as a case study, we argue that the field suffers from a kind of stalled academic dialecticism. We argue that various factors have worked together to impede a standard dialectical process of theoretical growth by dissuading scholars from moving onto a new stage of innovative research and incentivizing them to continue to pursue smaller-scale, less innovative studies. However, precisely because the field has a rich, diverse array of scholarship available to glean, synthesize, and use to make next-generation insights, the field is poised for breakthrough research—particularly, generalizable theories of legal phenomena—if only scholars are willing to pursue them.

The relationship between law and autocratization is usually discussed with reference to the judiciary and how a powerful executive can encroach on the domain of the judicial branch. In this article, I suggest that the legal profession also needs to be brought into the discussion on autocratic legalism. Taking Turkey as my case, I put forward two main arguments: first, that, in national contexts where the legal profession is perceived to be originally and organically tied to the state—the “ancien regime” that aspiring autocrats try to dismantle—autocratic legalism involves efforts to overtake not only the judiciary but also such legal professional institutions as bar associations and their umbrella organizations and, second, that legal autocratization is made possible not only through such conscious/targeted attacks but also through processes and policies that are intended for other goals. In Turkey, the neoliberalization of legal education through a populist discourse and the consequent massive increase in the lawyer population has created heterogeneity and multiple fault lines within the profession. Such dynamics have created not only apathy, particularly on the part of young(er) lawyers, but also a weakening of the profession as a whole, preparing the groundwork for the more intentional attacks of the autocratic government. The result, I argue, is “professional liquidation.”

This article addresses a critical gap in the study of victimhood in historical grievance cases by examining the transformation from passive and powerless victims to active, empowered victim identities through litigation. Focusing on the aftermath of the 1947-1954 political repression and violence in Jeju Island, South Korea, known as the Jeju April 3 Incident, this study draws on archival research and in-depth interviews with survivors, bereaved family members, activists, and lawyers. It demonstrates how litigation plays a crucial role in empowering victims by allowing survivors and families to actively engage in the legal process, where they publicly perform, socialize, and symbolically mobilize their narratives. The Jeju April 3 trials show how survivors and bereaved families, once stigmatized as “rioters” or “families of rioters,” reclaimed their dignity and transitioned from passive subjects of injustice into active agents of social change. By highlighting how court proceedings serve as crucial spaces for marginalized individuals, this study contributes to the scholarship on legal mobilization and identity transformation, particularly in the contexts of state violence and historical grievances.

In times of political crisis and attacks against the foundations of political liberalism, can we put our trust in lawyers and other legal occupations to fight for our freedoms when they are under attack? The role of the legal profession in the rise, development, and resilience of political liberalism has been at the core of a body of work commonly framed as “the legal complex”: Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik’s Lawyers and the Rise of Western Political Liberalism, Halliday, Malcolm Feeley, and Karpik’s Fighting for Political Freedom, Halliday, Karpik, and Feeley’s Fates of Political Liberalism in the British Post-Colony, and Feeley and Malcolm Langford’s The Limits of the Legal Complex. In view of the precariousness of political liberalism in contemporary global politics, this review essay reflects on the core ideas of the legal complex literature. By identifying connections with other strands of scholarship on legal agents, legal mobilization, and the move to law in transitional politics, I suggest rescaling the study of the legal complex to enable consideration of its relevance for the study of political liberalism at the international level of analysis and, specifically, of its importance to the resilience of the liberal international order currently in rapid decline.

Analyses of the relationships between law and society often focus exclusively on domestic laws, meaning laws that emanate from domestic sources. This approach is not necessarily appropriate in contexts that involve significant cross-border flows of ideas, information, goods, services, people, or legal authority. In these cases, there are both practical and intellectual reasons to define the set of laws to be analyzed as including all of the laws, both domestic and foreign, that affect a particular aspect of a given society. In other words, the analysis ought to focus upon sets of laws that are defined in terms of their subjects rather than their sources. A case study from Jamaica illustrates this point. The legal determinants of Jamaica’s relatively high homicide rate include many foreign laws and associated enforcement practices—most notably, US laws and practices concerning trafficking in firearms and narcotics, deportation, extradition, and cross-border fraud. Consequently, it will be difficult to understand the relationship between law and society in Jamaica without taking into account all of the laws that affect Jamaicans as opposed to just the laws adopted by Jamaican legal institutions.

When the USA entered World War I, Socialists, German immigrants, and German-Americans in southeastern Wisconsin went from being generally accepted and influential members of their communities to being marginalized and vilified. German immigrants who had been well integrated into conventional society became enemy aliens. Socialists and German-Americans faced new restrictions on their movement and speech. Scholarship on groups faced with this level of repression finds that they often either withdraw from mainstream society and acquiesce to their mistreatment or fight back through violent or other extralegal tactics. Socialists and German-Americans in Milwaukee did neither. Instead, they embraced their marginalized status and continued to use the law to advance their interests. They resisted their vilification by the law by uniting around those very shared identities that the law was used to marginalize them.

The United Nations (UN) has operated a longstanding peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while simultaneously contributing to rule-of-law building and transitional justice processes. Sexual violence is widespread in the DRC including routine allegations against UN peacekeepers. The operation of numerous legal systems and judicial mechanisms in the DRC produces a legally plural environment that is difficult for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence to navigate, and this is especially true for survivors of peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). In this paper, we explore justice-seeking among SEA survivors in the DRC and the challenges imposed by the complicated jurisdictions and layered legalities pertaining to SEA. Moreover, we argue that, beyond barriers to justice, we see a recession of justice for SEA produced by the United Nations and member states positioning SEA as distinct from other forms of gender-based harms and exacerbated through the legal navigational challenges faced by survivors.

There is conflicting evidence as to whether employers prefer immigrants over native-born workers when hiring. Some evidence suggests that employers might penalize immigrants over comparably educated co-ethnic native-born workers. Yet other evidence suggests just the opposite: employers prefer immigrants over native-born workers because of associations with compliance or exploitability. However, many of these studies generate data from workers, not employers, which makes it hard to understand employers’ underlying motivations when hiring. In addition, very few studies consider employers’ occupational roles and variations in organizational contexts. Drawing on original employer-level data—including an original survey experiment of 1,515 employers and interviews with 47 employers and immigration lawyers—I find that there’s tension in the legal awareness and professional interests of employers by their occupational role. Organizational and team leaders are motivated to hire whom they perceive as “exceptional” immigrants to make themselves and their companies look good, while HR staff are motivated to follow legal procedures and avoid regulatory fines. This article has contributions to studies on immigration, the law and society, and organizational sociology. For instance, it finds that in the case of immigration, employers’ occupational roles inside of firms help to mediate the influence of the law on immigrant inequality.

The Turkish state long enforced intellectual property (IP) rights only loosely. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, market liberalization and trade agreements drove an overhaul of the country’s copyright regime that transformed musical ownership and creativity, though music copyright stakeholders view this legal reform as ongoing. This article builds on existing accounts of legal consciousness to ethnographically document how a range of music industry actors—including legal professionals, musicians, music industry executives, and commercial users of copyrighted music—participate in IP reform. I identify a distinct set of cultural schemas that mediate such actors’ legal consciousness in this context. The internationally integrated nature of the copyright system, together with Turkey’s geopolitical positioning on the margins of Europe, has produced a reflexive aspect of legal consciousness in which Turkish citizens exhibit a heightened group status awareness as they compare their experience of domestic IP law to the imagined situation elsewhere. In a novel contribution to the literature, I observe how they often make sense of perceived dissonances between the ideals and practice of the law through culturally intimate narratives, taking the copyright system’s purported failures to typify something essential about what it means to be a citizen of Turkey.

Though formal life sentences have been abolished in Norway, forvaring (post-conviction indefinite preventive detention) – a type of informal life sentence – can be imposed on individuals convicted of certain offenses who are considered to be at high risk of future offending. While great attention has been paid to Norway as an “exceptional” penal outlier globally, there is a notable lack of comprehensive knowledge about its indefinite penal sanction. Drawing on extensive historical research and legal and policy documentary analysis as well as leveraging a unique national dataset on the total forvaring population, this article provides the first international in-depth assessment of the evolution and implementation of Norway’s ultimate penalty. In so doing, it highlights significant disparities between policy ambitions and current practice and questions the extent to which the sanction of forvaring can be considered an “exceptional” approach to life imprisonment. It is argued that the development and growth of this type of informal life sentence can be seen as the epicenter of the impact of a more punitive ideology in Norway, emphasizing the need to move away from the concept of penal exceptionalism to better understand the full spectrum and practice of Norwegian and Nordic penality.

This article examines the idea of introducing a comprehensive reward program for whistleblowing on violations of environmental laws. The common criticism that rewards for external reporting considerably discourage employees from internal reporting is unjustified. This argument overlooks both legal practices of whistleblowing and prior research on social preferences. We argue that prosocial motivations are a crucial determinant of both internal and external reporting. Prosocial individuals are predominant in society. They respond to monetary incentives for external reporting while maintaining their commitment to internal reporting driven by prosocial motives. By combining a vignette-based survey and a measurement of social value orientation, we find that the effect size of prosociality on the likelihood of whistleblowing is comparable to, or greater than, the effect sizes of established predictors like demographic and contextual variables. We also find that the discouragement effect is less pronounced for prosocial individuals than for proself individuals. Based on these findings, we discuss how to design legal frameworks that balance the discouragement effect and the incentive effect of whistleblower rewards.

This article uses the theoretical framework of “performative sovereignty” to analyze the role of sovereignty in the Palestinian Authority’s interactions with human rights treaty bodies and to the judicial decisions of the Palestine Supreme Constitutional Court. We argue that, in contrast to dominant views of sovereignty as a threshold, sovereignty is performed through a series of discrete (yet related) interactions and practices that—when accepted by their designated audience—result in rights and privileges being granted, accompanied by sovereign status. Analyzing both Palestinian communications with human rights treaty bodies and cases brought before the Palestinian Supreme Constitutional Court, we argue that the drive to perform sovereignty helps explain states’ actions in joining and reporting to human rights treaty bodies and the responses those actions have elicited. We also find that sovereignty operates as an iron cage—an almost ubiquitous framework—that structures (both constrains and enables) the possible actions of different actors in the field of human rights. The inquiry deepens our understanding of the development and operation of human rights and the role of statehood in shaping the global legal order.

This article examines what happens when plural normative ideas and arrangements to address an issue reach local settings through transnational networks. Using anti-corruption reforms in East Timor as the lens, I show the diverse normative aspirations of international and local actors involved in transferring and receiving new regulatory arrangements. By proposing compromise as another possible outcome of transnational legal transfers, the study examines how compromises shape the scope and limits of adopted regulations. The anti-corruption reforms case study from East Timor allows us to identify when and how translocal compromises occur, who is part of such compromises, and how they influence the legal transfer and adoption process. Drawing on insights from comparative law, law and society, and regulation studies scholarship, the article provides a bottom-up perspective of transnational legal reforms, illustrating the entanglements of these initiatives with the local politics, conflicts, and power struggles. The findings underscore the need for more qualitative studies on legal transfers where multiple international and local actors are involved, capturing how their power struggles shape the scope and limits of regulatory arrangements that are ultimately adopted. By illustrating the interactions between local, national, and international actors, the article contributes to understanding the complexities, possibilities, and limits of transnational legal reform initiatives in specific contexts.

In this examination of domestic violence protection orders in two lower-level Chinese courts, the interpretation of gender violence with respect to political concerns for social stability plays an essential role in the law’s effectiveness. In an urbanized coastal area court, judges see gender violence as a direct threat to social stability. To maintain stability, they facilitate claims against gender violence. Conversely, in a rural court, judges view gender violence as a direct threat to family stability. To maintain family stability, which is closely linked to social stability, they suppress claims against gender violence. This study proposes that, when global discourses are reformulated, new forms of cultural and political appropriation emerge. It highlights the complexities that arise when law, culture, and politics intermingle in the process of law and globalization. Understanding these complexities is crucial for addressing challenges in implementing global legal reforms at the local level and ensuring protection against gender violence.

The law is commonly described as one of the major forces shaping contemporary correctional institutions. However, we still lack a satisfactory understanding of how it has affected power relations behind bars. Drawing from two ethnographies of French correctional facilities, this article finds that changes to the material environment where incarcerated people and correctional staff interact have altered the relational economy of prisons and jails more than legal actions have. To avoid litigation, prison administrators design and use countless graphic artifacts, which has further reshaped the adversarial nature of social relations in prisons and jails. This bureaucratic approach has introduced the form of the law into the most banal of everyday communications between prisoners and authorities, replacing the informal asymmetrical interpersonal negotiations that have traditionally maintained order. Building on Robert Kagan’s typology of modes of policy making and dispute resolution, I re-examine power relations in contemporary French prisons and jails as a tension between formal and informal framings as well as hierarchical and participatory organizations of authority. I call this hybrid relational economy, where the force of the law lies mostly in its formal shadow, adversarial formalism.

A decade ago, it seemed that America’s punitive system of mass incarceration was on the precipice of a transformation, stimulated by a legitimacy crisis as great as any in a century. A decade later, far more modest steps toward reform have been accomplished, and mass incarceration in the United States has proven stubbornly resilient. While overall imprisonment rates are modestly lower, there is little evidence of improving prison conditions or a fundamental reorientation of the use of prolonged incarceration. This prompts a deeply historical question, to which answers, of necessity, must be speculative. What makes the carceral state so resilient, not just in recent decades but also across centuries? Following recent law and society scholars, who have brought together the literature on the historical political-economy of punishment with new institutionalist accounts of the role of myth and ceremony in formal organizations and the bureaucratization of modern societies, this article identifies five “legal-rational myths” about crime and punishment that have perennially delayed a reckoning with its lack of alignment with central public values like respect for human dignity and racial justice. The article turns to California as the epicenter of this most recent legitimacy crisis to chart how myths work to bolster the carceral state against efforts to shrink or abolish it.

A growing number of analysts use the term “judicial populism” to refer to judicial behavior that they find problematic, but they apply it to divergent phenomena and find it objectionable for different reasons. What, then, is judicial populism, and when and why should it be of concern? Taking a deductive approach, I argue that judicial populism is best understood as a performance/discursive style, analytically distinct from judicial activism. Like judicial activism, it is a gradational concept, and both populism and activism may present in judicial behavior to different degrees and in different combinations. To illustrate, I develop a grid matrix with an X-axis that runs from maximal restraint/deference to maximal creativity/dominance in the content of judicial rulings (the “what”) and a Y-axis that runs from maximally removed and technocratic to maximally proximate and publicly oriented in the performance or communication of the judicial role (the “how”). This two-dimensional framework enables nuanced comparison of judicial behavior in disparate times, places, and issue areas, illuminating relative variations and trends therein. It also helps to illustrate that, from a pluralist and deliberative democratic perspective, it is not judicial populism per se that should trouble democrats but, rather, populist behavior taken to extremes.