Individuals routinely engage in instrumental transactional legal behavior, from generating tax returns to signing leases to negotiating employment terms. While some individuals undertake these activities equipped with the skills, knowledge, and capacity to behave strategically, others do not. In this article, we introduce the concept of legal actuation to describe this legal behavior and theorize its role as a source of inequality under the law. Using estate planning as an empirical example, we consider how variation in legal actuation may serve to reproduce economic inequalities and investigate the role of legal socialization, knowledge, and capability as mechanisms of advantage. In doing so, we draw attention to an understudied dimension of everyday legal behavior that has important implications for equal justice and the relationship between law and inequality.

People simultaneously entangled in multiple state systems are often subject to contradictory legal mandates that can foster distrust and incentivize system avoidance. This study focuses on those indebted to both the child support system and the criminal legal system, a situation we describe as dual debt. We ask whether and how the imposition of legal debts with punitive surveillance and collections mechanisms fosters alienation in the form of legal cynicism and estrangement, which we refer to jointly as legal anomie. Drawing from interview data in Minnesota, we find that legal anomie and system avoidance are mutually reinforcing processes, as debts in these systems triggered consequences that pushed people out of the formal labor market and heightened their distrust of legal institutions. The case of dual debt demonstrates how alienating and contradictory policy systems can foster both legal anomie and system avoidance, particularly in the context of economic and social precarity.

Prior studies in the United States argue that the discretionary decisions of federal prosecutors regarding which issues to prioritize are shaped by the politicians who appoint them, while studies on state prosecutors emphasize the role of press coverage and public opinion. However, these studies leave untheorized whether prosecutors’ discretionary decisions are also affected by how their peers frame issues within and beyond prosecution offices. Building on the scholarship of collective action frames, this study develops a framework to explain how prosecutors’ framing work affects their colleagues’ decisions about which issues to focus on. I draw on the case of Brazil, where federal prosecutors focused on crime-fighting and human rights, but in the mid-2010s switched focus to corruption following a large-scale investigation called Lava Jato. I compare Lava Jato with two similarly large investigations that failed to transform corruption into the dominant issue within the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Drawing on 131 original interviews, I show how federal prosecutors’ framing work can persuade their colleagues to focus on the same issue through two stages: (1) conceptualization of versatile frames that speak to problems a variety of issues prosecutors care about and (2) diffusion of frames through professional meetings – providing roadmaps for how other prosecutors can implement the new frame – and to the press, increasing public attention.

What are the origins and effects of legal ambiguity in authoritarian regimes? Using a detailed case study of nationality rights in Jordan – which draws from interviews with 210 Jordanian political officials, judges, lawyers, activists, and citizens/residents – we develop a framework for understanding how legal ambiguity emerges, and how it matters, under authoritarianism. We first conceptualize four discrete forms in which legal ambiguity manifests: lexical ambiguity (in legal texts); substantive ambiguity (in status as law); conflictual ambiguity (between contradictory legal rules); and operational ambiguity (in enforcement processes). We then scrutinize the emergence and effects of legal ambiguity in Jordanian nationality policy by integrating historical process tracing, detailed interview evidence, and a content analysis of archival documents, laws, and court verdicts pertaining to nationality rights. Our findings contribute to scholarship on legal ambiguity, authoritarian legality, and discretionary state authority by showing that (1) crisis junctures make the emergence of legal ambiguity more likely; (2) legal ambiguity takes a variety of different forms that warrant conceptual disaggregation; and (3) different forms of legal ambiguity often have disparate effects on how authoritarian state power is organized and experienced in public life.

Undocumented status impedes immigrants’ workplace claims to legal rights and better treatment. But what happens when they obtain lawful permanent residency – does the reluctance to make claims in the workplace change? If so, how? Drawing on timeline interviews, I examine changes in the relational legal consciousness and reported workplace claims-making of 98 formerly undocumented Latino immigrants. Most respondents reported increased willingness to engage in, and follow through with, workplace claims. However, gendered differences emerged. Men’s claims largely revolved around wage negotiations, moving to a better paying position, and enforcement of legal rights with an attached monetary value. They were also more likely to frame claims as legal rights. In contrast, women’s claims largely revolved around better work treatment, access to job benefits, and workplace accommodations. They were also more likely to frame claims as moral rights. I explain these outcomes as a function of three relational mechanisms: lawful status being understood relative to experiences being undocumented; gendering in the legalization process; and social ties promoting gendered expectations of lawful permanent residency. My findings highlight the importance of gendered differences in relational legal consciousness and how lived reference points (e.g., prior undocumented experience) inform how legal consciousness changes over time.

Prior scholarship has established that controlling space is central to policing, while highlighting various ways in which this form of social control can be racialized. Extending this work, we advance a theory on the racialized control of space that predicts a higher level of police stops and lower standards of suspicion along neighborhood racial boundaries, the areas where racial composition changes between adjacent neighborhoods. Our theoretical argument sheds light on the selective enforcement of law and order in these transitional spaces, which is a form of racialized spatial social control. Integrating data from New York City’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program from 2008 to 2012 with extensive neighborhood measures, our analyses reveal that White neighborhoods along boundaries experienced substantially elevated levels of police stops even after conditioning on a wide array of potential confounders. This relationship is partially mediated by elevated crime along neighborhood racial boundaries. Still, a sizable direct effect persists, indicative of the racialized social control of spaces. Further, the police tended to require less suspicion before deciding to conduct stops in White neighborhoods along racial boundaries, but only for Black and Hispanic suspects. Implications for the study of race and policing, law and society, and urban and racial inequality are discussed.

Scholars have recognized the role that legal intermediaries can play in shaping the law through their interpretations of legal ambiguity and guidance to rule-takers on legal compliance. Although legal intermediaries thus have the potential to effect social change, most research in the area of employment discrimination has focused on the way they facilitate only symbolic compliance with the law. In this article, we examine how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) took steps that legitimized a new area of claiming, classifying sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”) discrimination as prohibited sex discrimination. Drawing on 2012–2016 confidential charge data, we analyze which alleged issues had a greater likelihood of being identified by EEOC actors as strong cases of discrimination. We use quantitative administrative data and a unique dataset generated from the coding of charge narratives to develop our description of the EEOC’s categorization of SOGI charges. Our findings indicate that first by accepting SOGI charges and then by assigning 34% – much higher than other discrimination charge bases – with the highest processing category, the EEOC made new law, expanding Title VII protection. At the same time, our findings reflect that the EEOC exhibited restraint in this expansion through prioritizing charges that were closely aligned to prior gender stereotyping cases, rather than more directly signaling an SOGI identity-based protection. These findings illustrate the exercise of initiative within prior legal constraint, defining a new area of legal claiming.

Law and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasilegal, and/or extralegal processes. Based on a national random survey of teachers and administrators, and in-depth interviews with educators in California, New York, and North Carolina, we find an integral relationship between gender inequality and experiencing rights violations, choices about rights mobilization, and obstacles to formal mobilization. Compared to complainants, those accused of rights violations – especially male administrators – are more likely to use quasilegal and legal mobilization to defend themselves or to engage in anticipatory mobilization. Actors in less powerful status positions (teachers) most often pursue extralegal mobilization to complain about rights violations during which they engage in rights muting as a means of self-protection; when in more powerful status positions, actors use rights muting as a means of self-protection and to suppress the rights claims of others. This paper concludes with implications for future research on rights mobilization in school workplaces amidst changing political and demographic conditions.

Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police misconduct. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police behaviors. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent interactions with police enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of police misconduct, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with their cellphones – what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police, reflecting the micro-dynamic connections between individuals’ legal consciousness and legal cynicism. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–citizen interactions to challenge police misconduct. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats, and arrests.

Law & Society scholars often dismiss Law & Economics (L&E) as insoluble with our core beliefs about distributive justice, culture, and social solidarity. This reaction has yielded missed opportunities for new theory emergent between the fields. One such opportunity came in 1978, when Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt argued that societies make “tragic choices” about scarce resource allocations so as to reconcile such choices with core culture, ethics, and values. In Calabresi’s later words, their book was a “more or less explicit appeal to anthropology for help.”1 Today, sociolegal studies remain well-poised to answer this appeal. Taking theory about moral costs from Calabresi in L&E and adding anthropological thought on the meaning of “value,” this essay presents situated valuation – a contextualized notion of value that accounts for the moral costs of inequalities while supporting principled scrutiny of redistributive policies meant to reduce inequality but sometimes worsening it. This discussion highlights the importance of interpretive social science in the study of distributive inequality, while showcasing a neglected but generative link between mutually imbricated interdisciplinary communities.

Under what conditions will people be inclined to seek remedy when facing rights violations? While some socio-legal scholars have found structural position and/or the ideological macro-context to be the key factors shaping individuals’ legal consciousness, often inhibiting their pursuit of remedies, others contend that social experiences and political interventions, including participation in social movements, affect people’s willingness to demand redress. What happens, then, when a diffuse popular mobilization challenges a state’s fundamental normative framework and demands justice and rights for long-excluded sectors of the population? This article offers empirical and theoretical insights to these debates based on results from a nationally representative survey conducted in Chile at the height of such a mass political mobilization. In this context of widespread citizen engagement and collective claim-making, we find that participation in the protests and self-perceived knowledge of where to turn are statistically related to individuals’ professed willingness to pursue a formal remedy across two hypothetical rights violation scenarios. These findings suggest that participation in protests might have an empowerment effect on those who take part, even among disadvantaged groups, opening new avenues for research at the intersection of socio-legal and political participation studies.

Sociolegal scholarship has long noted the many ways in which the law is interpreted and selectively applied by human decision-makers. Yet, the processes underlying one of the most significant discretionary waypoints in the criminal legal process – prosecutorial charging decisions – remain opaque. Using data from interviews and focus groups with prosecutors in three midsized jurisdictions, we propose a model of charging that integrates legal considerations, social identity, and organizational constraints. We find that felony prosecutors weave together legal and extralegal factors, often relying heavily on criminal history, to evaluate defendants’ moral character. Based on their evaluation of a defendant’s character, prosecutors charge strategically to secure a final disposition and sentence they view as appropriate for the defendant. Prosecutors’ identities and experiences act as lenses through which they interpret case facts in their evaluation of defendants’ character. However, the level of discretion provided by their chief prosecutor and the culture of the court community in which they work condition the process by which prosecutors achieve their desired outcomes for cases.

In a context promoting partners’ active participation in their divorce or dissolution, family lawyers often put their clients to work – from stating goals and supplying information for the written file, to embodying the case at the hearing. This article focuses on the coproduction of legal work between family lawyers and their clients, based on long-term collective research on family law in mainland France: interviews with attorneys, observations of encounters between lawyers and clients in lawyer offices and in courts, as well as a “3,000 family cases” database. Using a relational, materialist, structural, and intersectional theoretical approach, we show that coproduction of legal work and its meaning varies greatly depending on the power dynamics between lawyers and clients, – on a spectrum that goes from exploitation to empowerment of the client. Coproduced legal work varies according to configurations of class, race, gender, and age on both side of the desk, as well as according to the structure of the legal market. Interactions between lawyers and their clients thus contribute to shape inequality before the law.

Public interest lawyers seek to empower clients through collaborative approaches to direct representation that redistribute legal knowledge and affirm clients’ agency; however, the legal settings in which attorneys operate shape their capacity to subvert dynamics they consider oppressive. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork at a legal nonprofit serving asylum seekers in Los Angeles, this study explores how the broader environment of a restrictive immigration system transforms the aspirations, possibilities, and strategies of public interest lawyering. Drawing from sociolegal literature on cause lawyers, access to justice, and the U.S. immigration system, the article argues that the politicization of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy destabilizes foundational legal norms, hindering the agenda of public interest attorneys. Procedural formalism constitutes one of the only resources at attorneys’ disposal, yet here it often impedes lawyers’ ability to disrupt perceived power hierarchies. Specifically, the prevalence of complex legal procedures that obstruct access to asylum reconfigures opportunities to uplift clients. These findings illuminate how hostile legal settings strain lawyers. They also contribute to timely debates around how attorneys protect access to justice and advance meaningful social transformation.

This article investigates the career trajectories of Hong Kong solicitors during two historical turning points, specifically 1994–1997 and 2018–2021, when hundreds of lawyers left private practice to pursue alternative career options such as business and finance, government and politics, or relocation to other countries. Data are sourced from the career mobility records of law firm partners reported in 336 monthly issues of the Hong Kong Lawyer journal between 1994 and 2021, as well as other relevant archival sources. The research examines the underlying forces that led these law firm partners to abandon their high-status positions and pursue alternative career paths during these pivotal moments in Hong Kong’s history. The findings suggest that the career trajectories of these elite professionals are not solely based on individual choices but are also shaped by their social origins and the physical and social spaces that influence their careers over time. This study contributes original insights into the complex interplay between individual, spatial and temporal factors that drive career mobility among legal professionals.