Though the Colombian Constitutional Court has had a lead role in granting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) rights since 1998, conservatives mobilizing against LGBT rights between 1991 and 2007 were active in Congress and the streets rather than in court. After 2007, however, conservatives have maintained consistent opposition to rights claims made by LGBT people in the Constitutional Court. This article draws from fieldwork examining the significance of the Constitutional Court’s transition from granting rights to LGBT people as individuals to granting rights to LGBT people as couples and potential families to theorize conservative legal mobilization, particularly moral conservatism. To account for the rise of conservative legal mobilization against LGBT rights in Colombia in 2007, this article expands on the legal opportunity structure model. It theorizes that legal threats––that is, changes in legal rules that are perceived to increase the costs of mobilization or the expected costs of not taking action––are among the factors that lead movements to engage in legal mobilization, even if legal opportunities are not expanding.

The growth of judicial power globally has renewed scholarly debates about who benefits from increased judicial authority. Using original data, we examine the full universe of constitutional free expression decisions issued by three apex courts—in Colombia, India, and South Africa—across three categories of disputes that feature a diverse array of rights claimants. By so doing, we shed light on the limits of elite-driven accounts of judicial empowerment. We find that even where constitutional courts are empowered by elites seeking to advance their own interests, activist courts can develop a practice of rights-protection that benefits a diverse range of less powerful actors. Moreover, regardless of whether the speech claimants are elite or non-elite actors, these three apex courts regularly rule in favor of free expression for dissenting or unorthodox speech acts. In sum, where issues are peripheral to the governing regime’s core interests, relatively powerless actors are sometimes able to use legal processes to advance their rights and interests.

Lawyers play an important role in mobilizing rights, yet the lawyer-client relationship can be challenging to navigate. This is especially true for immigrants who face barriers to accessing rights and protections. Undocumented status multiplies existing challenges, enhancing the need for an advocate. Based on sixty-six interviews with low-wage immigrant workers (thirty-one documented, thirty-five undocumented) from 2012 to 2014, I reveal how immigration status impacts why and how clients seek legal counsel, the expectations they have for their lawyers, and their eventual sense of satisfaction—or frustration—with their claim. As victims of an enforcement regime and legal system seemingly rigged against them, undocumented clients often have lower expectations of their lawyers and may doubt the integrity of the legal process itself. As a result, they often seemed resigned to follow their attorneys’ lead, minimizing conflict. However, undocumented status also limits labor mobility and generates uncertainty about the future, making claimants more willing to settle claims in order to move on. While they are often willing to come forward, many undocumented claimants nonetheless reject abstract notions of justice in favor of a more pragmatic attitude toward legal mobilization: a certain legal cynicism masquerading as client satisfaction.

Jury service is one important way that citizens actively involve themselves in the criminal justice system. At a time when criminal justice and legal institutions are suffering from declining levels of public trust, it is crucial to understand the effects of jury service on individuals’ views of the jury system and whether these views vary across different racial groups. This article uses survey data from 248 deliberating and prospective jurors on criminal cases with matched data before and after jury service to examine jurors’ views of jury service. Unlike most research in this area, actual jurors were surveyed both at the beginning and at the end of the jury process to measure changes in attitudes concerning jury participation. Deliberating jurors’ changes in views were compared with a group of prospective jurors not selected for a trial. We found a significant difference between deliberating jurors and prospective jurors concerning their belief that the jury system is the fairest way to decide criminal cases, suggesting that jury service positively affects jurors’ views of the jury system. Racial group membership did not significantly influence change from pretrial to posttrial views, with views of jury service becoming more positive for both white and nonwhite jurors.

Although authoritarian states have expanded their tools to surveil citizens and spread disinformation, we know little about how political lawyers have mobilized to resist such covert strategies. Based on semi-structured interviews with Russian lawyers and open-government consultants, this article examines how political lawyers oppose three emerging authoritarian tactics of the Russian government: running disinformation campaigns by “troll factories,” wiretapping, and hiding information on government activities and public services. I find that, despite the repressive legal environment, lawyers have considerable success in developing legal and nonlegal strategies to hold government to account. As autocrats rely on information control to portray themselves as capable leaders, political lawyers and open-government consultants use audits and rankings to undermine political reputations. These findings from Russia may be broadly applicable to new authoritarian states in general.

Public support for the US Supreme Court has been trending downward for more than a decade. High-profile decisions and hotly contested nominations have drawn the Court into our polarized politics. Recently, some justices have spent considerable time and energy giving interviews, speeches, and the like, assuring the public that the Court is an apolitical, neutral arbiter of disputes, distinct from the “political” branches. In this context, we turn to an understudied potential source of judicial legitimacy: the off-bench public rhetoric of Supreme Court justices. In this article, we present evidence from three original survey experiments to argue that Supreme Court justices’ off-bench rhetoric can powerfully influence public perceptions of the Court’s institutional legitimacy. Furthermore, these studies show that performance approval is key to changes in legitimacy: respondents who disapprove of a Court decision were immune to the effects of justices’ rhetoric.

The design of empirical research and theory-building projects in the sociolegal literature on criminalization is often premised on a presumed dichotomy between domestic and international planes of criminal lawmaking. However, in a global era in which domestic processes of criminalization are increasingly shaped by norms, institutions, and actors developed and operating outside national borders, criminalization research should develop a new theoretical frame for studying how international and domestic practices of criminal lawmaking interact with one another. This article builds from the theory of transnational legal orders and the recursivity of law to propose a transnational processual theoretical framework for the study of criminalization. This framework provides tools for investigating how criminal prohibitions are constituted through recursive interactions between actors operating in international, national, and local sites of legal practice. It draws on empirical studies to show how the processes of constructing, applying, and contesting definitions of international and transnational crimes are embedded in broader structures of power. The article demonstrates how a processual theory of transnational criminalization sheds light on important sociolegal questions about the driving forces and consequences of current efforts to harmonize the definitions of criminal activities across national jurisdictions.

The “in-house counsel movement” of the past few decades, with its far-reaching implications for the legal profession, the legal service market, and corporate governance, has attracted a great deal of academic attention. Few scholars, however, have examined the global expansion of emerging market companies and their in-house legal capacity. To narrow the gap, this article investigates the in-house legal capacity of Chinese firms in the United States. In doing so, it focuses on two important yet underexplored questions: (1) whether and how institutions in China influence the capacity building; and (2) whether the Chinese investors’ ownership structure makes a difference in that regard. By analyzing a unique set of survey data and 122 interviews with lawyers, in-house counsel, and business executives, this article uncovers evidence of both multi-institutional influence and state-ownership effects. The findings contribute to theoretical and policy debates about the legal profession, the legal service market, and the ramifications of expanding Chinese multinational companies.

What happens to gains in human rights protections if states learn how to use international human rights courts to evade future scrutiny? This article centers on Hirsi Jamaa v. Italy, a landmark 2012 migration case at the European Court of Human Rights. Rights advocates characterized the case as a legal victory for migrants. Subsequent shifts in Italian bordering and policing on the high seas demonstrate unintended consequences of this litigation. While Italy implemented the judgment, compliance went hand in hand with state efforts to undermine rights protections in practice. Italy carved out new areas of discretion among maritime police, human rights advocates, and migrants on the high seas. Ultimately, assessing the impact of case law requires looking not only at judgments and at execution. It requires attention to subsequent policy environments and policing efforts that may violate the spirit, if not the letter, of human rights obligations.

Nominations to the US Supreme Court have become increasingly important and contentious in America politics in recent decades. Reasons include the growing significance of constitutional law to the prospects of political power, accompanied by historical developments in the relative power of the competing party coalitions that have placed even more focus on the composition of the Court. Meanwhile, partisan conflict and stalemate have grown in the party systems and among We the People. In The Long Reach of the Sixties, Laura Kalman explores how the nomination struggles of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon set the stage for the contemporary conflict besetting nominations and American politics more generally. Building on Kalman’s book, this review essay discusses the political and jurisprudential causes and implications of this conflict, with an eye toward what might lie ahead.

The Cambridge Handbook of US Labor Law for the Twenty-First Century decries federal labor law for forsaking American workers and undermining American unions. Its contributors seek a reformed labor law for the current century. In this review essay, I examine the handbook’s contention that federal labor law has failed. To assess the merits of the claim, we must test the foundations of its contributors’ assumptions—about the labor movement, about the place of the labor movement in the political economy of American capitalism envisaged by labor law, and, indeed, about law itself. To do so, I turn to earlier, critical research on the character of American labor laws, notably Joel Rogers’s seminal 1990 essay “Divide and Conquer,” and also to work of my own. To put it crudely, I ask how much labor law reform actually matters.