Over the past several years, socio-legal researchers have focused attention on the phenomenon of eviction, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color. One major aspect of the eviction phenomenon has been largely overlooked: how and why certain eviction filings result in forced, legally compelled tenant moves and others do not. Through coding of the legal documents associated with eviction filings and multi-level regression analysis, this article advances the analysis of evictions in two crucial ways. First, it identifies and describes the frequency of the distinct legal procedural pathways that result in forced tenant moves once an eviction case has been filed. Second, it identifies the case, tenancy, neighborhood, and property correlates of forced tenant moves and of distinct procedural pathways to forced tenant moves. The article demonstrates that move-out agreements are the primary procedural pathway by which tenants are forcibly moved, yet they have been largely overlooked in previous eviction research because they are not easily analyzable in administrative datasets. The regression analyses advance the growing work examining the role of landlord characteristics in shaping tenants’ housing stability and break new ground in identifying the characteristics of the different pathways through which tenants are forced out of their homes following eviction filing.

I provide a new analytical framework to understand the effectiveness of corruption prosecutions in the so-called Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) operation by showing how this operation was rooted in a populist interpretation of criminal rules and criminal procedure. The Clean Hands operation represented a successful breakthrough against the vast and complex corruption system that had sustained Italian politics for decades. I show that prosecutors in the Clean Hands operation interpreted legal rules through the lens of a deep-seated hostility between a vague conglomerate of “corrupt elites” and “virtuous citizens.” This populist interpretation of criminal and procedural rules introduced significant legal innovations that empowered judicial actors against systemic corruption by creating unprecedented incentives for defendants to cooperate with legal authorities. Consequently, the judicial professionals leading the Clean Hands operation also felt the need to shield themselves against retaliation for the use of these novel approaches to corruption prosecution by bringing their fight before the court of public opinion. To this end, the Clean Hands prosecutors made use of targeted media interventions to rally public support around their investigation and protect their work from political interference.

With the upsurge of anti-globalizing ideologies and politics, the increasing institutionalization of xenophobia within the legal system has emerged as a pressing concern. Existing law and social science research has underexplored xenophobic bias in the US legal system. This article conceptualizes xenophobic bias as consisting of racism and nationalism. It investigates whether mock jurors reach different verdicts on defendant companies from foreign countries of origin (Japan, France, and China) compared to domestic (US) companies. Using a test simulating a patent lawsuit, the research finds no evidence of general xenophobic bias in juror liability verdict decisions, yet there is a specific bias against the Chinese company when granting damage awards. The similarity-leniency effect that has been established in the previous literature is corroborated in this article. Additionally, political views moderate the effects of the company’s country of origin on juror decisions. This research offers a more nuanced conceptual framework of xenophobic bias in juror decision-making for future law and social science research and informs judicial policies seeking to improve jury instructions and jury selection to reduce xenophobic bias.

Law school students are encouraged frequently to “network.” However, depending on demographic categories, they may have access to differently resourced social networks in law school. In this article, we draw from our mixed-methods research to explore this diversity of experience, its limitations of access, and the possible network inequalities that may limit the value of legal education to diverse students across different institutional contexts. Using survey and network data (N = 744), collected during the fall of 2019 from three law schools, as well as supplementary interview data (N = 55), we examined students’ social networks, the structures of these relationships, and their associations with law school satisfaction. We find that, while students tended to cluster based on shared characteristics (that is, race, gender, sexual identity, political orientation, religion, and age) and contexts (that is, type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homophilous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black and White students, but the same embeddedness was associated with lower satisfaction with law school for Asian and Latinx students. These results provide grounds for rethinking how diversity matters in law school and its implications for marginalized students’ experience and success.

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) migrants’ disclosure of their identity or “coming out” has significant stakes. It can facilitate access to resources (institutional disclosure), cultivate intimacy and belonging (social disclosure), or support claims for legal protections (legal disclosure). This article analyzes SGM unaccompanied minors’ disclosures as shaped by the evolution of their legal consciousness in pursuing legal relief and incorporation in the United States. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews from 2014–2019 with 11 SGM unaccompanied minors reveal a striking pattern in their disclosure practices. During apprehension and detention, minors engaged in social, institutional, and legal disclosure of their SGM status. However, their interactions with agents from the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services led them to believe that SGM rights, support, and acceptance were contingent on legal status. Later, upon release from state custody, minors withheld legal disclosure from their deportation proceedings and immigration cases, even against the advisement of their attorneys. They also became more strategic in their social and institutional disclosure across other contexts. Post-legalization, however, minors broadened their disclosure practices and embarked on claims related to their SGM status. This study raises implications for research and policy. By analyzing shifts in legal consciousness over time, how certain experiences become reference points for how immigrants understand the law with respect to their identity and related behaviors are illustrated. It also extends the discussion of the far-reaching implications of SGM punishment and the disadvantages of immigration detention for children and youth.

This article analyzes how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) handles evidence of pushback, where states violently force asylum seekers away from borders. An examination of how the experiences of pushback survivors get translated (or not) into judgments contributes to theoretical discussions about truth, epistemic practices, and law. The article asks why so little of what researchers, journalists, civil society actors, and international organizations have documented about European border violence is visible in the court’s judgments. Based on a mix of legal and anthropological research methods, the article traces how states and the ECtHR erase pushback evidence at borders and during litigation. Taking seriously on equal grounds the construction of facts outside and inside a court room, the article connects external perspectives on the production of evidence with an internal analysis of evidence in judgments. In doing so, the article highlights the political dimensions of seemingly merely technical and legal procedures. We argue for a clearer separation of courts’ and states’ versions of facts, contending that the presumption of the states’ good faith should no longer apply when there is evidence, including in case law, of misrecordings and false statements by respondent states.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has come under challenge in recent years as some countries have decided, or considered, to withdraw from it. Against this backdrop, an emerging literature has begun to examine attitudes toward the court among the general public as a key court constituency. However, little is known about how domestic elites perceive the court. This research gap is particularly surprising given that domestic elites have a considerable impact on both public and state support of the court. This article explains why political and societal elites across world regions have confidence or lack confidence in the ICC. We present the results from a unique survey of 722 elite respondents conducted from 2017 to 2019 across six countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. We furthermore enrich our analysis by using public opinion data to draw comparisons between elites and the general public. The analyses reveal that the views of elites are most consistently related to their perceptions of other, more well-known international organizations and their country’s relationship with the ICC. Our findings indicate both similarities and differences between how elite and public opinion about the ICC are formed, demonstrating the value of further research on elite opinion on international courts.

In recent years US prisons have failed to meet legally required minimum standards of care and protection of incarcerated people. Explanations for the failure to protect prisoners in the United States focus on the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and lack of adequate external oversight. However, very little scholarship empirically examines how different systems of accountability for prisoners’ rights work (or do not work) together. In this article, we introduce an accountability framework that helps us examine the prisoners’ rights “accountability environment” in the United States. We then compare two post-PLRA case studies of failure to protect incarcerated women from sexual assault in two different states. We find that the prisoners’ rights accountability environment is a patchwork of legal, bureaucratic, professional, and political systems. The patchwork accountability environment consists of a web of hierarchical and interdependent relationships that constrain or enable accountability. We argue that ultimately the effectiveness of prisoners’ rights accountability environments depends on whether protecting prisoners’ rights aligns with the priorities of dominant political officials. Our argument has implications for efforts to improve prison conditions and incarcerated people’s well-being.

While scholars have pointed out the factors determining the impediments to and efficacy of international human rights rules, poor attention has been paid to human rights violations relating to transfers between prison and psychiatric detention. There is a lack of intersection of policy spheres in this regard that should be remedied. Our contribution aims to challenge traditional sociolegal boundaries by integrating the intersection of policy and subdisciplines that cover penal justice (prison and police stations), psychiatric institutions, and human rights.

Raising the question of human rights’ ability to limit the state’s power to punish in Europe compels us to explore different forms of “transinstitutionalization,” especially between prisons and psychiatric institutions and between prisons and immigration detention centers that present as “total institutions” (hosting populations perceived to be “deviant”), and share many similarities, including the risk of human rights violations. We forge the concept of “transpolicies” to take into account the mutual influence and the domino effects of such detention policies that are acknowledged, and both promoted and fought, by the European human rights institutions. In the empirical part, we focus on the increasing interactions between prison and mental health policies, taking Belgium as an example as it is known to raise specific human rights challenges.

The need to protect the rights of children and young people in detention is the subject of a recent United Nations study (Nowak 2019) and is highlighted by national and international controversies. This article examines the role of external monitoring in preventing the ill-treatment of children and young people in detention. Australia has until recently shown limited interest in protecting the rights of people in detention, but, in 2017, it finally ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment (OPCAT). This article examines Australia’s steps to ensuring the effective monitoring of the rights of people in detention, specifically the rights of children and young people in criminal justice detention. As a federal state, Australia must establish a comprehensive network of monitoring bodies constituting OPCAT’s National Preventive Mechanism across nine jurisdictions and with a range of existing monitoring bodies. This article highlights the importance of the “monitoring of monitoring” to ensure the fair treatment of children and young people in correctional detention. It identifies factors relevant to the effectiveness and credibility of child-centered monitoring processes and analyzes the opportunities for maximizing both in the Australian context and globally.

Mexico’s 1917 Constitution has gone through 737 reforms; no other codified constitution has been subjected to such a constant pattern of renewal through amendment. We argue that the study of Mexican patterns offers important theoretical insights for the study of constitutional change by calling into question the generalizability of the thesis—articulated by Donald Lutz and currently endorsed by most specialists in the field—according to which amendment and interpretation are substitute means of constitutional updating. Based on two original data sets containing all constitutional amendments and all Supreme Court precedents on constitutional matters from 1917 to 2020, we find that in Mexico hyper-reformism is correlated to a steep increase in the number and diversity of binding constitutional precedents. Quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that these precedents not only apply the Constitution, but substantively revise it, suggesting that, in Mexico, amendment and interpretation are not alternative but complementary channels of constitutional change. Our account suggests that, in Mexico, hyper-reformism has actually led to innovative constitutional interpretation as a mechanism to cope with its effects. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and comparative insights this case offers for better understanding the nature, causes, and effects of the different modalities of constitutional change.