Drawing on forty‐one interviews with both documented and undocumented Latino restaurant workers in San Jose, California, and Houston, Texas, this article examines how documentation status shapes the legal consciousness of immigrant workers. I identify three common narratives that undocumented workers provide to justify not making claims on workplace protection. First, I highlight that an ever‐present fear of deportation inhibits any formal confrontation. Second, I demonstrate how undocumented status leaves undocumented immigrants with a particularly pragmatic and short‐term understanding of their working life in the United States, rendering their working conditions temporary and endurable to them. Third, I expand Gordon and Lenhardt's (2008) discussion of the centrality of work to the American conception of citizenship. I reiterate that this particular sense of belonging is situated vis‐à‐vis other low‐wage workers. These findings provide sociolegal scholars important theoretical contributions for crafting a research agenda on the role of undocumented status and legal mobilization.

Thanks to the civil rights movement, women and racial and ethnic minorities increasingly hold positions of public authority—but they experience and exercise this authority differently from white men. Based on 162 narratives collected from 49 US local government officials (city administrators and police), I find that women, minorities, and younger officials in positions of authority face a paradox of rules. Because they have lower social status with the public and within their organizations, they must rely on formal and explicit rules as a key basis for their authority, but such reliance causes their very authority to be questioned. Social status based on implicit assumptions about social identities, including race or ethnicity, sex, and age, originates outside of organizations and has effects society wide. This study shows that social status continues to permeate US local government organizations in both subtle and explicit ways, even in bureaucratic settings that are formally committed to merit and professional norms.

This mixed‐method analysis examines the effects of repeat participation on disputing at the World Trade Organization (WTO). Differences between disputants in terms of their experience with WTO disputing processes affect the likelihood of a dispute transitioning to a panel review in distinct ways, depending upon the configuration of the parties. More experienced complainants tend to achieve settlements, while more experienced respondents tend to refuse conciliation. Strategies of experienced respondents are derived from the expertise generated from repeated direct participation and the normalcy of disputing for repeat players as well as the benefits accruing from a reputation for being unlikely to settle. Repeat players also seek to avoid disputes expected to produce unfavorable jurisprudence but do not actively try to create new case law through the selection of disputes. This research demonstrates a dynamic learning process in how parties use international legal forums and thus extends sociolegal scholarship beyond the nation‐state.

This article examines how cause lawyering can flourish under authoritarianism. Using the case of Hong Kong, it argues that the process of the sovereignty transition between the 1980s and 1997 contributed to the emergence of cause lawyering by establishing a favorable legal opportunity structure, by creating a political structure that provides incentive for lawyers‐cum‐politicians to engage in cause lawyering, and by prompting a few dedicated foreign human rights lawyers to move their practices to Hong Kong. Apart from the factors related to the sovereignty transition, other factors also facilitated the rise of cause lawyering in Hong Kong, including a rights‐receptive judiciary, an autonomous legal profession, and a government‐funded legal aid system.

In the “self‐governance era” of indigenous‐state relations, there is a growing interest in the first‐order question of tribal governance: who are the members of recognized tribes, and how are they chosen? Tribal constitutions contain formal tribal membership criteria but are not ordinarily in the public domain. This article presents findings from a study of the membership rules used in more than seven hundred current and historical tribal constitutions and codes. It offers a comparative analysis to explain significant differences between North American and Australasian tribal constitutionalism, particularly in the administration of descent, multiple membership, and disenrollment. It advances the argument that tribes self‐constitute in ways that are more relational and less ascriptive than is suggested in current political theory and policy; that existing representations of tribes obscure nontribal expressions of indigeneity, on which tribes depend; and that these expressions should be officially supported in public law and policy.

This essay reexamines realist jurisprudence through a review of two biographies of leading realists: Dalia Tsuk Mitchell'sArchitect of Justice: Felix Cohen and the Founding of American Legal Pluralism (2007), and Spencer Waller'sThurman Arnold: A Biography (2005). The essay argues that when biographies of legal realists are considered alongside their academic writing, a more robust jurisprudence emerges. Realist lives crystallize the intuition that the major innovation of legal realism was not, as generally assumed, its attitude toward judges and adjudication. Instead, realist jurisprudence is an institutionalist view of law with a focus on groups rather than individuals. Realist jurisprudence understands courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and nongovernmental groups as important loci of law, lawmaking, and legal reasoning.

This essay argues that the treatment of boilerplate as a distinct phenomenon in some contract scholarship sheds light on the way we imagine our social relations. In Omri Ben‐Shahar's 2007 compilation, Boilerplate: The Foundation of Market Contracts, aspects of the traditional meeting‐of‐the‐minds model persist, notwithstanding the move away from this framework indicated by the differentiation of boilerplate from traditional contract. Much boilerplate scholarship is informed by a narrative of agreement as an ideal involving agency, autonomy, and meaningful choice. Thus, in an age in which form language pervades American life, a narrative of genuine agreement continues to frame a conception of contractual relations.