There is widespread concern among scholars, court actors, and policy makers that the number of pro se litigants is increasing. However, we have little empirical evidence of the scope of pro se litigation, especially in the federal court system. Using data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts on all civil case filings since 1999, we investigate the prevalence and rate of pro se litigation in federal district courts. We find no evidence of a dramatic rise in pro se litigation, but we document substantial variation in rates of pro se litigation by type of case and circuit of filing. The results have implications for our understanding of self-representation and for the development of policies addressing access to civil justice.

This article examines the role of racial identity in the configuration of opinions about the police. We argue that racial identity links social context to individual valuations of law enforcement, moderating the association between specific encounters and general views on police legitimacy and effectiveness. These propositions are assessed using data from a sample of 451 Black and Latino/a youth in New York City. Findings lend partial support for the hypothesis that, for youth with a strong racial/ethnic identity, the detrimental consequences of more “coercive” stops and stops seen as disrespectful are amplified for valuations of legitimacy but not of effectiveness. We discuss these findings in the context of emerging work connecting race, law, and procedural justice at the micro- and macrolevels.

This article examines the challenges that the contemporary political economy of rental housing poses for new efforts to regulate tenant screening using antidiscrimination law. I draw on a case study of landlord practices in Seattle, Washington, where policy makers have been on the forefront of legal efforts to regulate how landlords screen and select rental applicants in the face of an acute housing crisis. The case study investigates tenant screening and selection practices from the divergent perspectives of the targets and intended beneficiaries of new fair housing regulations, using forty-six in-depth interviews with spokespersons or experts from the rental housing industry, independent landlords and property managers, and renters with criminal, eviction, and/or damaged credit histories. I use these data to examine how landlords’ discretionary decision-making and responses to regulation are shaped by the broader legal, institutional, and economic context in which they operate. The findings illuminate how a “landlord’s market” amplifies the power imbalance that is characteristic of landlord-tenant relations, exacerbates the housing access problems posed by the proliferation of background checks, and frustrates new legal efforts to dismantle screening-related barriers to rental housing.

In the landmark case Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a state-level debt relief statute that was quite similar to those it had long deemed to violate the Contracts Clause. The dissent even argued that the Contracts Clause was written precisely to prohibit this type of state legislation. Rather than seeking to understand or characterize this doctrinal shift, as most work on Blaisdell has done, this article argues that Contracts Clause doctrine had never actually eradicated the state practice of intervening in contracts. The article both highlights and explains the long-standing mismatch between Contracts Clause doctrine and state legislative practice that preceded this ruling. Whatever Blaisdell meant as a matter of doctrine, it should also be understood as evidence of a durable state-level commitment to protecting debtors from the potentially ruinous consequences of private economic bargains.

In authoritarian contexts where the state is the primary performer in the public sphere and legal mobilization is constrained and repressed, activists often seek to carve out a public space to confront the frontstage and backstage of the state’s performance in order to pursue collective action. Comparing the online legal mobilization of feminist and lawyer activists in China, this article investigates how performance arts are used by activists to challenge the authoritarian state in the age of social media. Performing “artivism” is to create conspicuous spectacles in the public eye for the purposes of exposing the state’s illegal or repressive backstage actions or promoting alternative values and norms different from the official ideology. By subversively disrupting the evidential boundaries set by the state, Chinese activists have been able to gain momentum and public support for their legal mobilization. However, it was precisely the success of their artivism that contributed to the government crackdowns on both feminists and lawyers in 2015.

As quantification has become socially ubiquitous, the disclosure of numerical data emerges as a key feature of legal reform and global governance. Scholars document how seemingly value-neutral statistical indicators shape, and are shaped by, institutional interests. Although less attention has been paid to cases where states resist numerical disclosure, prohibitions on the disclosure of such indicators also produce social effects. This article extends scholarship on the governance effects of quantification to include secrecy by exploring the case of capital punishment data in China, which is reportedly the world’s leading executioner state. Amid a major death penalty reform effort, China steadfastly refuses international calls to publicly disclose relevant statistics. I analyze capital cases and draw on seventy-three interviews with legal insiders in China’s death penalty system to identify the impact of state efforts to conceal capital punishment indicators while undertaking reforms in three areas: transparency; legal representation; and criminal procedure. I show how tension between the disclosure and nondisclosure of death penalty numbers does not simply suppress data; it also shapes and becomes data, influencing both policy and action in the legal sphere in ways that are seemingly far removed from quantification.

Deliberative democracy has grown into an influential normative paradigm for political theory and reform programs alike, but doubts persist about its desirability in a world where strategic action and inequality are prevalent. This problem has spurred efforts to understand the empirical dynamics of power relations in institutionalized participation. This article argues that sociolegal scholarship has yet to join this turn to power but that doing so can help it to specify law’s causal and normative relevance in deliberative governance. This is because the legal environment within which actors interact affects causal mechanisms by distributing opportunities for the exercise of power between potential participants, actual participants, and participants and government. The utility of a power-distributional perspective is illustrated through a study of São Paulo’s health councils, one of the world’s largest experiments in deliberative governance. The study demonstrates that the councils’ trajectory and current functioning—including some of their normatively problematic aspects—cannot be understood without reference to legal arrangements. This article is meant as a building block for sociolegal scholarship to continue investigating deliberation.

Since the 1970s, police departments have subjected the use of force by their officers to increasingly stringent oversight, but those efforts have struggled against the difficulty of codifying the complex and idiosyncratic judgments that police work requires. In response, some departments have developed new models of oversight that use routine incident reviews partly as a tool for learning in order to document the continually surprising circumstances that officers encounter in the field, to scrutinize existing responses, and to articulate alternatives. This article analyzes the logic of this emerging model through a case study of use-of-force reviews in the Portland Police Bureau. I argue that this emerging model relies on an approach to practical inquiry that has not been adequately understood in criminal justice scholarship and practice—one that uses the routine review of organizational experience to pursue normative progress as well as technical understanding and that makes it possible to adapt complex policing practices to the local environment in which they operate.

Shari‘a (commonly translated as Islamic law) is at the epicenter of anti-Muslim discourses in the United States. How do Muslims in the United States understand and experience shari‘a in the context of virulent attacks on it and on Islam and Muslims more generally? This article explores the meanings Californian Muslims give to and the intentions they derive from shari‘a when dominant discourses represent shari‘a as a cause for concern in American life. Drawing from fieldwork and interviews with Muslims across California, as well as scholarship on legal consciousness and lived religion, we document three interrelated stages of shari‘a consciousness: perceiving shari‘a and discriminatory depictions of it; educating oneself about shari‘a’s social and political relevance; and forming an intention for social action. Documenting these interrelated stages and theorizing the relationship between legal consciousness, religion, and inequality, this article reveals how religious identity formation is a significant precursor of legal mobilization and how nonstate normative orders provide interpretive frames for understanding human rights and social justice. Ultimately, legal consciousness may stem from sacred sensibilities and the desire to be a more ethical servant of God and not merely to be a more ethical subject of the state.

This article examines the legal constructs governing the use of violent interrogation methods in Israel since 1987. It explores the shift from a sweeping suspension of the prohibition on torture to a fractured legal regime in which the different elements of interrogation—the perpetrator, the victim, the time of the interrogation, and the space in which it takes place—are effectively excluded from the prohibition on torture by means of separate legal constructs. I show how each of these constructs creates a narrow, seemingly proportional exception to ordinary law. Together, the four types of exception facilitate the sanctioning of state violence. I use this case to analyze the available configurations of the state of exception, distinguishing them from each other by what they exclude from ordinary law. By showing how the proliferation of legal constructs produces an entire ecosystem of different exceptions, I point to the inherent link between the suspension of the law and its proliferation: both create legal categories that rationalize and legitimize state violence.

From the medical field to the housing market to the criminal justice system, poor people must navigate labyrinthian organizations that often perpetuate social and economic inequality. Arguably it is through these social institutions, and through multiple processes embedded within each of these institutions, that the governance of urban poverty is effectively maintained. This essay revolves around one such process, examining how Matthew Desmondʼs Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) points to the eviction process as an important producer of urban poverty in and of itself. After delving into housing law and Desmondʼs ethnographic and quantitative research methodologies, the essay examines four sites where the law is at work in eviction: the eviction court; the “law-on-the-books” versus the “law-in-action”; practices in the shadow of the law; and the relationship between the criminal justice system and the housing market. One goal of the essay is to place eviction within the law, punishment, and social inequality literatures.