This ethnographic research addresses the control strategies employed by Norwegian guards in everyday interactions with inmates under institutional conditions in which the use of official negative sanctions is restricted. The article explains how a complicated informal system of favors develops that forms a new basis for punishment through the withdrawal of rewards. By distributing favors liberally, giving an inmate only what he is entitled to serves as a substitute for negative sanctions. Inmates are not opposing the informal system, and its effect on ensuring institutional control does not challenge the intentions of formal prison rules. Still, the informal system must be monitored and protected against overuse by inmates and must also be kept hidden from the officials making up the prison administration who oppose all departures from the official rules.

A reexamination of Federal Housing Administration (FHA) documents reveals that the agency played a more direct role in the ghettoization of African Americans than previous scholarship has established. The FHA went far beyond merely approving of racial discrimination, and exploring the extent to which it did so is crucial to understanding the origins of urban racial inequality in America. Agency publications, many of them largely passed over by historians, called unequivocally for the containment of African Americans in the older residential neighborhoods where they were most likely to settle after migrating to the city. The agency then disguised its leadership in advancing a national segregationist agenda by deflecting blame onto the private market for policies that it had standardized and mandated. For nearly a decade after the Supreme Court invalidated one of its core racial programs, the FHA resisted providing greater opportunities for African Americans in the housing market.

Legal occupations vary dramatically from country to country—in scope of activity, education, organization, and institutional setting. This essay proposes to study legal occupations focusing on their relations to the state rather than on their character as “professions.” It builds on the recent renaissance of state-centered approaches in the social sciences. A review of the diversity of law work and legal occupations in different countries leads to state-centered conceptualizations that identify institutionally comparable features of law work. A sketch of the European historical background of modern legal professions yields theoretical principles that can inform the proposed approach. Variations in the role of the state and in the relation of lawyers to the state apparatus are then shown to be related to differences between national legal professions. Even where the law is primarily seen as a profession, the character of law work is better understood when related to the state.

Between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, American state legislatures enacted a series of new laws that delineated a class of citizens who were deemed ineligible to participate in the institution of marriage. Scholars have characterized this development as evidence that lawmakers had lost faith in a laissez-faire approach to nuptial governance, and thus transformed marriage into an object of public regulation. This essay argues that behind the ostensible nuptial privatism of the mid-nineteenth century lay a self-conscious policy of judicial governance. Judges invoked the language of nuptial privacy and the common law of contract strategically to advance their vision of moral and economic discipline. The new marital prohibitions thus represented, the essay argues, not the expansion of the state's police power into the previously private realm of domestic relations, but rather a critical transformation in how nuptial reformers and lawmakers understood the relationship between marriage and the well-being of the polity.

Fueled by growing concerns about pauperism, the racial character of the urban proletariat, and the collapse of the economically independent single-male-breadwinner household, the changing form of nuptial governance signaled a thoroughgoing intellectual and strategic reorientation from an understanding of marriage as forming economically and morally viable households—the fundamental units of society—to an understanding of marriage as a largely procreative institution, as the literal source of the citizenry. This reconceptualization of marriage underwrote a strategy of nuptial governance that mobilized marriage as a strategy in the state's regulation of social reproduction.

The migration policies of the former Soviet Union (or USSR) included a virtual abolition of emigration and immigration, an effective ban on private travel abroad, and pervasive bureaucratic controls on internal migration. This article outlines this Soviet package of migration controls and assesses its historical and international distinctiveness through comparison with a liberal state, the United States, and an authoritarian capitalist state, Apartheid South Africa. Soviet limitations on external migration were more restrictive than those of contemporary capitalist states, and Soviet regulation of internal migration was unusual in its direct bureaucratic supervision of the individual. However, Soviet policy did not aim at the suppression of internal migration, but at its complete regularization. The ultimate goal was “regime adherence”: the full integration of the citizen into the Soviet political order. In contrast to the USSR, migration in the contemporary world is marked by “irregularization”: policies that lead to the proliferation of insecure and unauthorized migration.

In addition to providing an arena for dispute resolution, the courtroom serves lawyers and judges as an important site for the construction and maintenance of their Professional identity. It is mainly through the strategic use of language within the constraints on courtroom discourse that this process takes place. Within the framework of feminist theories of language as constituent of social identity, this paper analyzes courtroom interaction to determine how gender affects the construction of the Professional identity of lawyers and judges in Israeli district courts. Quantitative analyses of terms of address, intrusions, judges’ takeover of examinations, challenging comments, and the forms and use of directives indicated that women judges and women lawyers were accorded less deference than men, and that the Professional competence of women lawyers was challenged and undermined. The qualitative analysis of the off-the-record comments by judges, lawyers, and witnesses to lawyers revealed that all participants questioned the professional performance of women lawyers in gender-stereotypic ways. The devaluation of women professionals and the gendered interpretations of their behavior enacted through the discourse in the courtroom may have implications for the outcomes of trials.

In 1996 a provincial court was established at Eskasoni Mi'kmaq Community in Nova Scotia, Canada, in response to overwhelming evidence confirming the failures of the Canadian legal system to provide justice for Indigenous peoples, and as a specific recommendation of the Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecution. Marshall, a Mi'kmaq wrongfully convicted of murder, served eleven years of a life sentence before proving his innocence. The importation of provincial legal culture into an Indigenous community creates tensions and contradictions surrounding the legitimacy, authenticity, and efficacy of Indigenous laws. The ontological conflicts that arise from the imposition of a justice system integrally linked with colonization, criminalization, and assimilation cannot be resolved through indigenization of court staff and administrative conveniences. The Mi'kmaq continue to assert their laws and articulate their legal consciousness against the co‐optation of dominant system, with mixed results.

Work requirements backed by threats of incarceration offer a fertile but neglected site for sociolegal inquiry. These “carceral work mandates” confound familiar accounts of both the neoliberal state’s production of precarious work through deregulation and the penal state’s production of racialized exclusion from labor markets. In two illustrative contexts—child support enforcement and criminal legal debt—demands for work emerge as efforts to increase and then seize earnings from indigent debtors; an ability to pay is defined to include an ability to work. In a third, demands for work are imposed directly through probation, parole, and other community supervision. In each context, the carceral state regulates work outside of prison. It defines appropriate labor conditions through concepts of voluntary unemployment, and it enables employers to discipline or retaliate against workers by triggering state violence. Additionally, mandated work may be removed from employment law protections when the carceral context dominates its sociolegal meaning. Finally, the resulting vulnerable workforces can be used to displace or discipline other workers not personally subject to carceral work mandates. Analogies to welfare work requirements, workplace immigration enforcement, and prison labor illustrate these points. Implications are considered for theorizing contemporary racial political economy.

This article analyzes why Chinese lawyers report a high level of perceived deterrence in relation to tax evasion even though enforcement is weak. It finds that deterrence here originates from multiple sources, most directly through clients and more distantly through the firm and the state. Lawyers have highly contextual notions of detection probability and a vague understanding of sanction severity unfitting of the high deterrence found here. In the cases studied, deterrence arises out of a general fear lawyers have of state authorities and clients, as well as through personal morals and social norms in their firms. This shows a broader and deeper approach to deterrence, beyond certainty and severity of punishment for the violation studied, one in which the general perceived risk of such violation is central, whatever its source.

This article analyzes the regulatory reform and implementation process in Australia following three event clusters: an industrial explosion, recent terrorist attacks, and a corporate collapse. The research employed a characteristic analysis where the compliance challenge on the ground is understood as affected not only by the enforcement efforts of the regulator, but also the reform process and the structure of the industry concerned. In each of the cases studied, preferred reforms could be understood as “metaregulatory” and framed around outcomes, principles, and processes rather than a preoccupation with adherence to prescriptive rules. Metaregulation was seen as the most appropriate regulatory framework to maintain the integrity between regulatory goal, regulatory regime, and compliance behavior. Yet, reform pressures that shaped the causal narrative associated with the particular risk, the emotional work involved in compliance, and success strategies of sites all affected what risks were actually reduced and hence the likelihood of a repeat disaster.

What counts as evidence? What is accepted as true in court given the evidence admitted? How are subordinated peoples further oppressed in courts because they cannot demonstrate that their experience is fact? Drawing on the confirmation brings for Clarence Thomas as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and the testimony of Anita Hill in those hearings, the author explores the ways in which representations of sexual violence against women can be seen as not “real.”

Between May and July 2003, a shift in how the US public viewed the legality of consensual homosexual sex occurred. While in May the largest percentage of respondents to date supported decriminalizing such activity, that percentage dropped eleven points two months later. Similar declines in support were evident in the same period over a range of gay and lesbian rights claims. The ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decriminalizing homosexual sex is the obvious intervening event. To explain this pattern, coding of print and televised news coverage of the ruling throughout 2003 was undertaken. Coverage was not overtly negative in terms of antigay rhetoric or hostility toward the judiciary; rather, the dominant media frame focused on the implications of Lawrence for an entirely separate rights issue: marriage equality. This article examines the dynamic of frame “spillover,” or the idea that media focus on a distinct and not widely supported rights claim in a multifaceted rights agenda might depress support across the entire rights agenda. The findings call for further research, and they have implications for scholarship on public opinion, social movement framing, and ideational development and policy debate as studied within the broader field of American political development.

Do the attempts of modern states to foster tax compliance reflect wider attributes of modernity? This article analyzes the history of the creation of a tax compliance culture in Israel of the 1950s and the various practices, techniques, and discourses that were deployed by the state to create model taxpaying citizens. It shows how the specific history of tax compliance can be understood as part of a wider phenomenon: the desire of modern states to create self-policing, normalized subjects. By interpreting the history of tax compliance critically, as part of the attempt of the state to control its citizens, the article suggests a new way of understanding the history of twentieth-century tax compliance generally and more specifically the history of judicial attempts to tackle tax evasion and tax avoidance.

This article explores the role of a local trial court in terms of the plurality of legal systems—both formal and informal—found in the community in which the court operates. The concept of legal pluralism in American society is examined, and a comparison is made between the study of plural normative systems and the study of disputes and dispute processing. Two examples of legal pluralism drawn from an empirical study of a midwestern community are presented: the first exploring oral contractual agreements among farmers and the second examining formal and informal norms concerning divorce. The application of this form of analysis is found to reveal important distinctions between the manifest and latent functions that the trial court performs in its community setting.

Using a mixture of court docket data and case files, we construct a data set of business litigation in Rhode Island Superior Court during 1987 and 1988. Business litigation is defined as a suit involving an economic firm as both a plaintiff and a defendant. The empirical analysis complements recent scholarship providing answers to descriptive questions about the frequency, nature of, parties to, and intensity of the business litigation docket. Using Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, indicators of industry participation in litigation are developed, and positive analysis undertaken to explain variation across industries. Several hypothesis are developed and tested using quantitative analysis. We conclude that contextual economic conditions favoring the creation of long-term business relationships help prevent litigation between firms.

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.

Employment has been cited as one of the most effective protections against recidivism for formerly incarcerated people; however, job seekers with criminal records face barriers to employment after prison. They find themselves in a legal double bind where they are simultaneously compelled to obey the law (by finding “legit” work) but also legally barred from doing so. To navigate this conflictual legal positioning, job seekers with felony records develop strategies of working around the law to find employment. Through thirty qualitative interviews with people with felony records, I examine this alternative form of legal consciousness and detail the ways in which individuals navigate the legal barriers to acquiring “good” work. Ultimately, job seekers’ often extralegal strategies of law abidance blur the line between compliance with and defiance of the law.