The last four decades of US housing policy have seen a shift from the federal allocation of affordable housing as a public good to the neoliberal model of private and for‐profit provision of affordable housing. This shift warrants a study of the link between the interests that now shape low‐income housing markets and the stability of the housing they provide. Nowhere are the effects of this shift more evident than in the homes of the 20 million Americans living in manufactured housing, which is installed largely on the private lands of for‐profit developers who can close mobile home parks and force residents to move themselves and their homes with as little as 30 days' notice. This ethnography of mass eviction in a Florida mobile home park examines state regulations intended to protect residents of closing parks and analyzes how private interests shape the implementation of these policies.

What are the effects of wearable police cameras on perceptions of the police? In this study, we report causal estimates from a crossover randomized controlled trial in Uruguay on the effects of use of body-worn cameras by traffic police on the perceptions of legitimacy and satisfaction by drivers ticketed for traffic violations. We pay particular attention to the effects on procedural justice—that is, perceptions of the fairness of the interactions between officers and drivers—without neglecting other features of legitimacy (i.e., effectiveness, distributive justice, and lawfulness). With the exception of lawfulness, wearable surveillance apparatuses showed improvements across all dimensions of legitimacy compared to control conditions, with medium to large effect sizes. The overall satisfaction from the police-public interaction was significantly higher when officers used body-worn cameras. These findings suggest that wearable surveillance technology can lead to enhanced perceptions of legitimacy across multiple dimensions, not just increased efficiency, as well as the perceived overall quality of police-public interaction.

Under what conditions can US courts contribute to policy change? This article shows how a case study can be used to test and develop a theory of judicial policy making answering this question. In The Hollow Hope (1991, 2008), Gerald Rosenberg theorizes that judicial policy making is constrained by the limited nature of constitutional rights, the lack of judicial independence, and the judiciary's inability to implement its rulings. Ninth Circuit injunctions protecting the Northern Spotted Owl and orders to manage ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest invalidate and help reformulate Rosenberg's theory. These rulings show how judicial interpretations of statutes, regulations, precedent, and facts allow judicial policy making if these interpretations are accepted by the legal and political culture when Congress and the presidency are too divided to override them. The owl rulings also show how statutes facilitate the implementation of judicial rulings, a point not developed by Rosenberg, while additionally providing further evidence for Rosenberg's specification of conditions allowing implementation.

This article focuses on the role of intergenerational status attainment for legal careers. By decomposing the earnings gap between elite and nonelite lawyers at two points in their careers, we find that inherited cultural capital produces an earnings advantage as soon as lawyers begin their careers and that this gap persists over time. We further find that the processes underlying this gap change as lawyers make their way through the profession. While in early careers, the elite advantage is due to stronger starting endowments, the advantage for junior lawyers results from a more complex process, which combines starting endowments, professional capital gained during the first years of practice, and the rate at which endowments are differentially rewarded in the profession. Elaborating on work that identifies the importance of maintaining and concentrating diverse forms of capital in the legal profession, we explain the process through which elite lawyers gain and retain their advantage over time.

This article compares U.S. and Kenyan media representations of an incident at a Kenyan boarding school during which many young women were raped and several killed by their male schoolmates. The author's analysis of print media accounts reveals that how the press constructed the identities of “rapists” and “victims” relied on nationally specific stereotypes, myths, and scripts of rape and its relation to differences of culture, race, and rationality. U.S. accounts simultaneously explain the rapes by emphasizing difference and foreground legal constructions of rape identities that meat experiences of rape as essentially similar. The tension over difference and law in the U.S. accounts parallels the highly visible, though largely unproductive, debate among feminists pitting cultural relativism against legal universalism, and such dichotomized approaches preclude the development of politically useful conceptions of rape and rape identities. The analysis suggests that issues raised in the Kenyan press-the relation between sexual practices and rape and the state's role in furthering sexual violence-directed attention to complexities of rape and power elided by the m o w legal models pervasive in U. S . media and scholarly representations of rape. She concludes that fighting rape more effectively entails exposing limited representational practices and also attending to a broader range of understandings of rape and rape identities in various contexts

This article provides a new account of employers' advantages over employees in federal employment discrimination cases. We analyze the effects of judicial deference, in which judges use institutionalized employment structures to infer nondiscrimination without scrutinizing those structures in any meaningful way. Using logistic regression to analyze a representative sample of judicial opinions in federal EEO cases during the first thirty‐five years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we find that when judges uncritically use the presence of organizational structures to reason about whether discrimination occurred, employers are much more likely to prevail. This pattern is especially pronounced in opinions written by liberal judges. In light of these findings, we offer recommendations for judges, lawyers, and policy makers—including legal academics—who seek to improve the accuracy and efficacy of employment discrimination adjudications.

The 2007 debate over the retention of Singapore's male sodomy law provision set off a vigorous and passionate public debate reminiscent of the US culture war. However, the Singapore government's final decision reflects an interesting compromise. The law was retained, but its moral content was severely curtailed. This article critically examines this episode and explores the political dynamics driving the compromise. Enriching public choice theory on interest group capture, this article argues that the ruling party's political dominance coupled with limited but real political competition is surprisingly effective in aligning the government's position with the preference of the majority despite concerted pressure from well-mobilized minority interest groups. Current legal scholarly work on this debate has focused on the “vigorous debate” in the English-language forums. In this article, the examination of the contemporaneous discourse in Chinese and Malay newspapers enables a more accurate and comprehensive appreciation of this culture war episode.

This article is about legal mobilization by claimant groups seeking left-liberal reform in the United States. Drawing on a growing body of work in political science and legal studies, it takes an interpretive, legal-mobilization approach to one litigation-based reform effort: school finance litigation and education reform in Kentucky. In turn, this case study provides leverage for theorizing about legal mobilization and the role of law and courts in social reform. The article argues that current theoretical approaches either overlook or neglect the implications of important dimensions of legal mobilization by would-be reformers. Specifically, it highlights and explicates the meaning of two related themes: (1) legal translation, taken up here as legal framing and legal construction, and (2) the degree of coherence or fit between the legal and political components of reform projects that include both legal mobilization and extrajudicial strategies and tactics. This article suggests that the “degree of coherence” may have an important but underappreciated relationship to the overall success or failure of such reform projects.

The literature on the role of law in countries with so‐called hybrid regimes that are stuck somewhere between democracy and authoritarianism tends to dwell on the politicization of law and the courts. This has the effect of discounting the importance of the vast majority of cases that are decided in accord with the law. Taking Russia as a case study, this essay reviews a cross‐section of the literature on its courts in order to document this tendency and explore why alternative narratives of law have failed to gain traction: Burbank's Russian Peasants Go to Court (2004); Feifer's Justice in Moscow (1964); Kaminskaya's Final Judgment (1982); Ledeneva's Can Russia Modernise? (2013); McDonald's Face to the Village (2011); Politkovskaya's Putin's Russia (2004); Popova's Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies (2012); and Romanova's Butyrka (2010).

This article attempts to gain a better understanding of the sociology(ies) of law in a comparative perspective through a structural and comparative explanation of the American and the French legal fields. It is argued that comparative sociology of law will not be able to explain the difference among countries, scholars, movements, and schools of thought in short, it will not be able to compare—as long as it avoids the analysis of some social and cultural presuppositions related to the context in which these differences take place. It focuses mainly on two of these presuppositions. First, legal fields, with their history, their internal structure, and their power relations, and second the type of relation between the legal field and the state. The empirical examination provided in this article explicitly seeks to offer insights for the reconstruction of Bourdieu's structural theory of the legal field.

The increase in data from police-worn body cameras can illuminate formerly opaque practices. This article discusses using audiovisual big data from police-worn body cameras, citizen recordings, and other sources to address blind spots in police oversight. Based on body camera policies in America's largest cities, it discusses two possible roadblocks: (1) data retention and deletion, and (2) limits on use for evaluation and discipline. Although recordings are retained for criminal prosecutions, retention for oversight and accountability is overlooked or is contentious. Some departments have no policy on videos concerning civil suits against the police. The retention time for non-evidentiary recordings is also much shorter. Some policies limit their use for evaluation and discipline. Transactional myopia—seeing at the case rather than the systemic level—leads to a focus on specific footage for particular cases, rather than the potential of aggregated body camera big data to reveal important systemic information and to prevent the escalation of problems.

In this essay, I situate Kunal Parker's Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900, within a broader set of intellectual currents engaged with questions of time and temporality. Although Parker's book centers on the common law and history and develops specific conceptions of time, in so doing, he invites legal historians and legal scholars to ruminate on the times of law, particularly the temporal relations that law has with itself. Placing Parker in conversation with Henri Bergson and the recent Bergsonian revival in critical theory, I suggest that law has a duration, a formulation that opens other itineraries to consider the dynamic times of law.

We claim that the “constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof… shall be the supreme law of the land.” But we also claim to recognize the sovereignty of Native American nations, the original occupants of the land. These claims—one to jurisdictional monopoly, the other to jurisdictional multiplicity— are irreconcilable. Two hundred years have produced no resolution of the contradiction except at the expense of the tribes and the loss to non-Indians of the Indians' gift of their diflerence. This article explores the bearing of American constitutional law upon Native American tribes.

At precisely the same time that gay and lesbian activists were securing marriage rights for same-sex couples nationwide, courts and “tough on crime” state legislatures were devising new ways to regulate sex. Despite recent estimates that over 750,000 Americans are registered sex offenders, few sexuality scholars have examined the growth of punitive policies regulating sex offenders. In this article, I draw on a unique set of data on the population of sex offenders in the United States to analyze: (1) whether recent trends in sex offender registration mirror those of corrections more generally, and (2) whether these policies disproportionally impact racial minorities. Findings reveal that sex offender registries grew dramatically between 2005 and 2013; that this growth is out of step with concurrent trends in corrections; and that black communities are disproportionately impacted. I conclude by considering whether these data reveal a new mode of “governing through crime” specifically targeting sex.

This essay reviews five books as they relate to the causes and political consequences of mass imprisonment in the United States and the comparative politics of penal policy: Ruth Wilson Gilmore'sGolden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (2007); Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen'sLocked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (2006); Jonathan Simon'sGoverning Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear (2007); Michael Tonry, ed., Crime, Punishment, and Politics in a Comparative Perspective (2007); and Bruce Western'sPunishment and Inequality in America (2006).

The essay first examines the enormous and growing political repercussions of having a vast penal system embedded in a democratic polity, including the political and electoral consequences of felon disenfranchisement; increasing political, social, and economic inequality for people marked by the penal system; and the phenomenon of “governing through crime.” It also analyzes emerging strategies of resistance to US penal policies and mass incarceration, why some countries are more vulnerable to hard‐line penal policies than others, and what it will take to reverse the US prison boom.

We use interviews with corporate lawyers and a data set of contracts to explore an elite area of legal practice: sovereign bond lending. Sovereign debt lawyers work at prestigious global law firms, yet the contracts they produce include some terms that defy explanation. Lawyers often account for the existence of these terms through origin myths. Focusing on one contract term, the pari passu clause, we explore two puzzling aspects of these myths. First, we demonstrate that the myths are inaccurate as to both the clause's origin and the role of lawyers in contract drafting. Second, the myths often are unflattering, inaccurately portraying lawyers as engaged in little more than rote copying. We probe this disjuncture between the myths and lawyers' actual practices and explore why contracts origin myths might hold such appeal for this elite segment of the bar.

The controversy over a “good faith mistake” exception to the exclusionary rule and the 1982 National Institute of Justice study of the effects of the rule in California have focused attention on the “costs” of the rule. This article reviews the NIJ study and seven other relevant studies and concludes that the NIJ study's claim that the rule has a “major impact” on the disposition of felony arrests is misleading and exaggerated. California data show that prosecutors reject only 0.8% (8 in 1,000) of felony arrests because of illegal searches. The effect of the rule is concentrated in drug cases in which the rejection rate by prosecutors is 2.4% (not 30%, as suggested by the NIJ study), but the rejection rate for non-drug arrests is less than 0.3%, and the rate is even lower for violent crimes. Even if one looks at the cumulative effect of the rule through all stages of the felony process in California, only about 2.35% of felony arrests are lost because of illegal searches, and this is a high-side estimate based on potentially atypical samples. Moreover, studies of “lost arrests” have not differentiated between arrests resulting from bona fide crime investigations and arrests that resulted from arbitrary searches or arrests that were made to seize contraband, for harassment, or for purposes other than obtaining a conviction. The author concludes that available data show the cost of the rule is marginal, especially in view of the ambiguous nature of the lost arrests. Moreover, it is doubtful that a good faith mistake exception would save any substantial proportion of the arrests lost following illegal searches. In particular, an exception for searches conducted under an improper warrant would save only a negligible proportion of lost arrests.

For more than twenty-five years, Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” has been savored by legal historians as one of the most incisive explanations available of what legal history can and should be. Gordon's essay, however, is of significance to the course of sociolegal studies in general. This commentary offers an appreciation, and a critique, of “Critical Legal Histories.” It explores Gordon's articulation of the central themes of critical legal studies, in particular his corrosion of functionalism and embrace of the indeterminacy thesis, and assesses the consequences for sociolegal and legal-historical analysis of the resultant stress on the contingency and complexity of social life.

To apply for U Visa status, a temporary legal standing available to undocumented crime victims who assist law enforcement in investigations, immigrants must obtain validation of their experiences from police via a signed “certification” paper. This article investigates the challenges lawyers and immigrant crime victims face in translating and documenting victims' experiences into legal form. By analyzing interactions between Los Angeles attorneys and female undocumented immigrants, I explore how immigrant victims of violence prepare to approach police certifiers. Attorneys arbitrate between accounts of violence and immigrant‐police encounters and the legal cases they can develop, offering retrospective and prospective advice to immigrants about how to make effective pleas to police. Drawing attention to the devolutionary dynamics of an inclusive immigration policy, I show how nonfederal bureaucrats shape immigrants' eligibility for legalization remedies. In turn, I expose detrimental consequences of mixing street‐level administrative discretion with federal visa eligibility determinations.