We examine sources of variation in possession and use of the death penalty using data drawn from 193 nations in order to test theories of punishment. We find the death penalty to be rooted in a country's legal and political systems, and to be influenced by its religious traditions. A country's level of economic development, its educational attainment, and its religious composition shape its political institutions and practices, indirectly affecting its use of the death penalty. The article concludes by discussing likely future trends.

It has become commonplace among historically inclined legal scholars to look to the history of the United States’ elimination of bans on mixed-race sexual relationships for guidance about the recent controversy over same-sex marriage. This article argues that, while the analogy is helpful, it is not perfect because of the particular historical circumstances of the battle over antimiscegenation laws. Because regulations against interracial marriage were at the heart of defining and perpetuating the political and institutional system of white supremacy, they served a different purpose than the bans on same-sex marriage. The analogy can be pursued, however, to promote a critical consideration of the history of marriage as a heteronormative institution, generating a broader agenda for empowering change. Such a use of history takes the experience of the struggle against the antimiscegenation regime as a cautionary tale rather than a guidepost.

Today it is widely recognized in both academic literature and the mainstream media that prosecutors have substantial discretion. Yet prosecutorial decisions involve, in our view, something more than a straightforward exercise of discretion. In this article we move from the language of discretion to that of sovereignty to describe prosecutorial power. In so doing we want to move from the language of administration to the language of power. Focusing on the decision not to prosecute, we argue that prosecutorial decisions participate in, and exemplify, the logic of sovereignty and its complex relationship to legality.

By drawing on Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, we seek to recast prosecutorial decision making as something that allows prosecutors to grant exemptions from the reach of valid law. The sovereign power of prosecutors is most vividly on display when they decline to bring charges where there is a legally sufficient basis for doing so. By exercising what is, in most jurisdictions, an all but unreviewable power, they can and do exempt individuals from the reach of valid law.

Using data from a nationwide study of sexual harassment in the United States’ federal workplace, this article investigates how legal understanding, opinions about the regulation of sexual harassment, and social status affect whether people define uninvited sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. The results indicate that how people define sexual harassment is directly related to the extent to which they view sexual harassment rules as ambiguous and threatening to workplace norms. Moreover, results show that while women generally define sexual harassment more broadly than men, they actually resist defining sexual jokes or remarks as harassment. Finally, knowledge of the workplace sexual harassment policy moderates the effect of beliefs on definitions of sexual harassment. These findings suggest a complexity in the way people reconcile their knowledge of the law with their personal views about power and social interaction in the workplace.

Sociologists of law have long been concerned with the effectiveness of rights; the emergence of diversity training in the 1990s spurred renewed attention to questions of how laws are enacted in daily life. Much scholarship has constructed the managerialization of civil rights law and popularization of diversity concepts as diluting efforts to redress structural discrimination. In studying diversity and antiharassment trainings in practice, I argue that these are sites where civil rights find expression of their obligations, and I find that much of the “dilution” of content stems from diversity trainers’ efforts to negotiate with the resistance of trainees to their new obligations under civil rights law. The trainees evince a variable legal consciousness in relationship to this legality of rights-promotion, to which they are being exposed in these trainings; the findings suggest further research is needed into the legal consciousness of the privileged.

Two correlational studies test the hypothesis that procedural justice, or fairness of process, plays a role in acceptance of agreements reached through bilateral negotiation. Both studies test the relationship between the fairness of the process used to resolve a dispute, objective monetary outcomes, subjective assessments of outcome favorability, and subjective assessments of outcome fairness. Additionally, the second study tests the hypothesis that negotiations characterized by greater procedural justice result in more potential for integrative bargaining. The results suggest that procedural justice encourages the acceptance of negotiated agreements, as well as leading to the opportunity for increased integrative bargaining.

In this article, I critically examine two bodies of scholarship: negotiation literature and new governance literature. To that end, I consider The Negotiator's Fieldbook (2006), an ambitious survey of negotiation theory and practice edited by Andrea Kupfer Schneider and Christopher Honeyman, and key works by U.S. new governance architects, Michael Dorf, Charles Sabel, and William Simon. This comparison may surprise readers since negotiation literature largely focuses on interpersonal dynamics, and new governance literature aims at institutional change. I argue that these two literatures share similar assumptions about subjectivity that drive their sense of political hopefulness. In short, both envision a flexible problem-solving subject—shaped in negotiation by a discourse of skills and in new governance by a discourse of institutional design. Based on this descriptive claim, I illustrate how reading these literatures together suggests alternative perspectives from which to consider questions of power, inequality, and distribution relevant to both fields.