The aim of this article is to test a widespread belief among Brazilian legal scholars in the area of social rights, namely, the claim that courts are an alternative institutional voice for the poor, who are usually marginalized from the political process. According to this belief, social rights litigation would be a means (supposedly “a better means”) of realizing rights such as the right to health care, since supposedly both the wealthy and the poor have equal access to the courts. To probe the consistency of this belief, we analyzed the socioeconomic profiles of plaintiffs in the city of Sao Paulo (Brazil) who were granted access to specific medications or medical treatments by judicial decisions. In this study, the justiciability of social rights has not proven to be a means of rendering certain public services more democratic and accessible.

This article offers a theoretical discussion about courts in “hybrid regimes” that evolve from formerly democratic countries. The evolution toward authoritarianism typically allows governments more latitude to reduce judicial independence and judicial power. Yet, several reasons, including legitimacy costs, a tradition of using courts for judicial adjudication and social control, and even the use of courts for quenching dissent may discourage rulers from shutting down the judicial contestation arena and encourage them instead to appeal to less overbearing measures. This usually leads to a decline of the judiciary's proclivity to challenge the government, especially in salient cases. To illustrate these dynamics, I discuss the rise and fall of judicial power in Venezuela under Chávez's rule, focusing on the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court. Formerly the most powerful institution in the country's history, the Chamber briefly emerged as an influential actor at the beginning of the regime, but a comprehensive intervention of the judiciary in 2004 further politicized the court and effectively reduced its policy-making role.

Some research on lawyers active in politics has found that the ties among them create networks in which a center or core of influential actors is surrounded by more peripheral participants. Other studies, however, found more segmented networks, sometimes lacking central players. This research examines the structure and determinants of political ties among forty-seven elite lawyers who served organizations prominent in fourteen national policy issues in 2004–05. The analysis finds a network structure that resembles a rough circle with Republicans on one side and Democrats on the other. Lawyers affiliated with organizations representing a broad constellation of interests are closer to the center of the network, while those working for specialized or narrow causes tend to be located in the periphery. Ties are more dense among conservatives than among liberals. Lawyers who work as organizational leaders or managers are more likely to be near the center than are litigators. Central actors contribute larger amounts to election campaigns. The organized bar, especially the American Bar Association, appears to provide links between liberals and conservatives in one segment of the network.

A partial replication of Jack Katz's (1982) Poor People's Lawyers in Transition, this article explores the manifestations and consequences of professional marginality of legal aid lawyers. Based on thirty-five interviews with poverty attorneys and interns in Chicago, the authors show that scarce material resources and unclear expectations continue to give rise to the marginalization of this segment of the legal profession. The authors analyzed ideological, task, status, and material dimensions of attorneys' professional marginality. With no access to reform litigation, central to the legal aid “culture of significance” in the 1970s, present-day poverty lawyers seek new ways to cope with marginality. The authors argue that these lawyers' coping strategies have many negative consequences. Thus, over time, poverty lawyers' deep engagement with clients, ideals of empowerment, and social justice orientation give way to emotional detachment, complacency, and an emphasis on “making do” within the constraints of the system.

Although authoritarian rule of law may seem an oxymoron, strategic reconfigurations of the “rule of law” can produce acceptance of law that observes procedure while erasing rights. By bringing into conjunction critical discourse theory and scholarship on the legal professions and political liberalism, this article shows how rulers can deploy rhetoric and legislation to produce derogations from the liberal content of rule of law while sustaining a state legitimacy built on claims to state realizations of rule of law. A close analysis of Singapore's Vandalism Act shows that silencing the critique of lawyers and constraining the power of judges has been crucial to a legitimation of the surveillance and criminalization of dissenters. The consolidation of state power effected via law and discourse might be seen as making the nation a notional panopticon—corporal punishment, even if conducted behind prison walls, becomes instructive public spectacle conveying the state's seeming omniscience and monopolistic command of law.

This article focuses on the role of intergenerational status attainment for legal careers. By decomposing the earnings gap between elite and nonelite lawyers at two points in their careers, we find that inherited cultural capital produces an earnings advantage as soon as lawyers begin their careers and that this gap persists over time. We further find that the processes underlying this gap change as lawyers make their way through the profession. While in early careers, the elite advantage is due to stronger starting endowments, the advantage for junior lawyers results from a more complex process, which combines starting endowments, professional capital gained during the first years of practice, and the rate at which endowments are differentially rewarded in the profession. Elaborating on work that identifies the importance of maintaining and concentrating diverse forms of capital in the legal profession, we explain the process through which elite lawyers gain and retain their advantage over time.

How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006–2007, we find that—contrary to standard depictions of corporate client-provider relationships—(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring; and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following “star” lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The combination of long-term relationships and subunit rivalry provides law firms with steady work flows and allows companies to keep cost pressure on firms while preserving relationship-specific capital, quality assurance, and soft forms of legal capacity insurance. Our findings have implications for law firms, corporate departments, and law schools.

It is often said that American capital punishment fulfills no purposes, serves no functions, and possesses no coherent rationale. In Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010), David Garland argues that American capital punishment is functional, meaningful, and effective, especially in the cultural realm of death penalty discourse. He also demonstrates that America's radically local version of democracy helps explain why the death penalty has persisted in the United States long after it disappeared in other Western democracies and that many of the peculiar forms through which American capital punishment is now administered have been designed to deny association with the lynchings that have occurred in American history. Garland arrives at these conclusions by comparing capital punishment in contemporary America with death penalty systems from the American past and from other Western nations. This essay argues that comparison with Asia further illuminates what is peculiar—and ordinary—in American capital punishment.

Sarah Gordon'sThe Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) details the advent, beginning in the 1940s, of a “new constitutional world” pertaining to the religion clauses. By focusing on case studies, Gordon's narrative history shows the emergence, maturation, and waning of a rich historical moment in which religiously motivated popular constitutionalists had a profound impact on how the Constitution was technically interpreted by the courts. Shifting perspectives from history to ethnography, the essay synthesizes Gordon's stories to yield an anatomy of “religious” popular constitutionalism as it appears in Gordon's book and conjectures at what it might look like if we left court records behind.