This paper examines a particular episode in the history of British imperialism in India: the appointment of the Indian Hemp Drug Commission in 1893. We analyze the way a quasi-judicial investigation into the consumption of drugs was differently conceived and executed as a civilizing mission by, on the one hand, British colonizers, and, on the other hand, an aspiring colonized elite. By bringing together the ideological dimensions of a civilizing mission (e.g., the reliance on scientific knowledge, groper procedures, legal techniques) with its social ones (e.g., collaboration between colonizers and a local elite), we show how the very notion of a civilizing mission became a site of struggle over meaning, identity, and desirable forms of governance. The analysis reveals a local elite struggling to position itself at once on a par with British criteria of scientific competence and yet not as a mere proxy for British interests; at once able to articulate itself in terms of enlightenment concepts such as reason and modernity and yet celebrating its own distinct cultural authenticity.

This article explores the role of formal education and specific legal knowledge in the process of legal mobilization. Using survey data and in-depth case narratives of workplace disputes in China, we highlight three major findings. First, and uncontroversially, higher levels of formal education are associated with greater propensity to use legal institutions and to find them more effective. Second, informally acquired labor law knowledge can substitute for formal education in bringing people to the legal system and improving their legal experiences. The Chinese state's propagation of legal knowledge has had positive effects on citizens' legal mobilization. Finally, while education and legal knowledge are factors that push people toward the legal system, actual dispute experience leads people away from it, especially among disputants without effective legal representation. The article concludes that the Chinese state's encouragement of individualized legal mobilization produces contradictory outcomes—encouraging citizens to use formal legal institutions, imbuing them with new knowledge and rights awareness, but also breeding disdain for the law in practice.

How are international law firms faring in China? Drawing on 2013 data, this article presents the first comprehensive overview of the field, including information about the global mix of players and variation in market niche. Three variables—years present in China, global strategy, and level of localization—help explain why some China practices grow bigger than others. Overall, however, there is a great deal of convergence on one business model: an outpost office with a median size of eleven lawyers responsible for under 5 percent of worldwide revenue. The common experience of stagnation following market entry illustrates the strength of hype, the constraints of partnership, and the persistent power of the Chinese state to shape the legal services market. At the same time, the rarity of market exit reflects perceptions that a China presence is a valuable symbol of global commitment and a worthwhile bet on future growth.

This paper investigates one example of a process with global implications that I describe as the “regendering” of the state. Regendering refers to the process of bringing to public and legal attention categories and activities that were formerly without name but that constituted harm to women, denied them rights, silenced them, or limited their capacity to engage in actions available to men. I examine the regendering of the Trinidadian state by focusing on one of its most salient examples, the Domestic Violence Act. I identify first the coalition of forces and events that brought the subject of violence against women to lawmakers' attention and made possible the first Domestic Violence Act in the English-speaking Caribbean. I then investigate the interplay between the global discourse about domestic violence law—the passage of which has become an important symbol of the “modern” state—and local concerns about justice, gender, and family. Finally, I consider problems in the implementation of domestic violence law.

This study analyzes prison admission and crime data to assess whether the penal system’s response to crime has continued to intensify since mass incarceration’s peak and whether the increasing use of prison in nonurban areas helps explain this trend. The findings show that penal intensity has continued to escalate despite falling crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. Further, the justice system’s response to crime is most vigorous in nonurban, and especially rural, counties, where more felony arrests for all types of offenses result in a prison sentence. Although not new, this geographic difference has grown in recent years. While penal intensity thus varies notably within states, case outcomes also vary markedly across states. Comparative case studies of dynamics in a highly punitive state (Kentucky) and a less punitive state (Washington) show how formal law interacts with local dynamics not only by creating “statutory hammers” that are utilized by zealous prosecutors and judges but also by limiting the impact of aggressive prosecutorial practices on prison sentences.

For more than twenty years, scholars have called for greater attention to the consequences of micro-resistance to legality. Using archival data from Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1875), I examine the consequences of noncompliant prisoner behavior. I find that prisoners' noncompliance often entailed substantial costs to prisoners, particularly in comparison to the substantial benefits of complying with the prison regime. Despite its cost to prisoners, noncompliance did not have a single set of uniformly negative consequences for the prison regime. In fact, some forms of noncompliance may have actually protected the prison's reputation. Prison administrators, external allies, and critics used episodes of noncompliance for their own goals and to reinforce their preexisting claims about the propriety of competing prison designs, yielding this variable significance of noncompliance. As this study illustrates, connecting prisoner misconduct to power dynamics in the broader field produces a fuller understanding of micro-resistance's consequences.

Research on crime victims and their experiences with the criminal justice system suggests that victims’ rights (e.g., victim impact statements) and victims’ services (e.g., crime victims’ compensation, counseling) have not significantly improved victims’ satisfaction with the criminal justice system or their recovery from the crime. Thus, we appear to know little about how to satisfy and assist victims of crime. This study uses the symbolic interactionist perspective to examine victims’ experiences with law enforcement workers (e.g., detectives, counselors) with a focus on people who have lost a loved one to murder (“bereaved victims”). The data come from in-depth interviews with thirty-two bereaved victims, seven law enforcement workers, and three crime victims’ advocates in Union County (pseudonym). Bereaved victims define the victim role differently from law enforcement workers, creating two main points of conflict with workers: (1) a conflict over their deceased loved one's body, and (2) a conflict over the flow of information in the case. Bereaved victims’ frustrations over these conflicts created problems for their recovery. Bereaved victims’ efforts to see their deceased loved one's body, guide detectives’ investigation, and learn information about the murder and the investigation took a back seat to detectives’ interests in protecting the integrity of the investigation and building a strong case for the prosecution. Policy implications are discussed.

Because the holding in Bates v. State Bar of Arizona is narrow and because some lawyers remain opposed to advertising, the dispute over lawyer advertising continues. Many who favor restricting advertising contend that it will not benefit consumers. They argue that prices must either rise to cover the cost of advertising or, if prices do fall, that quality must also drop.

This article addresses itself to both charges. The first section is theoretical, demonstrating how advertising could lower the costs of producing legal services. Advertising increases the volume of services a lawyer can expect to sell. Greater volume, in turn, allows greater specialization in production, more effective use of systems management, and the substitution of paralegals and capital for lawyer inputs. The authors argue that each of these changes will lower costs, thereby lowering prices without necessarily reducing quality. The second section is empirical, comparing the prices and particularly the quality of services produced by a heavy advertiser, the Legal Clinic of Jacoby & Meyers, and the traditional firms in the Los Angeles market with which the clinic competes. Quality is defined both subjectively and objectively, and original data are presented indicating that the quality of service that the clinic supplies is at least equivalent, and on some measures better, than the quality of service that traditional firms provide.

This article examines the domestic impact of supranational human rights litigation on acknowledgment of state violence in the context of macroprocesses of global governance. The article's argument is that the impact of supranational human rights litigation on the process of acknowledgment must be seen through counternarratives on state violence. The article undertakes a detailed textual analysis of the truth claims and denial strategies that emerged from the European Court of Human Rights proceedings on state violence during Turkey's struggle against the armed group the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). It assesses these in the context of the human rights reforms that were created following pressure from European‐level governance processes. The article argues that attention must be paid to agency in acknowledgment and truth‐telling processes, and points to the limits of technical‐bureaucratic forms of human rights reform interventions in the context of state violence.

This is a study of the voir dire proceedings in the trial of the United States v. John Mitchell and Maurice Stans in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in the spring of 1974 (docket no. 73 Cr. 439). The major charge was conspiracy to impede a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Robert L. Vesco, a financier, a fugitive at the time of the trial, in return for a $200,000 cash contribution to President Nixon's reelection campaign.

This article examines the compelling enigma of how the introduction of a new international law, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), helped stimulate labor cooperation and collaboration in the 1990s. It offers a theory of legal transnationalism—defined as processes by which international laws and legal mechanisms facilitate social movement building at the transnational level—that explains how nascent international legal institutions and mechanisms can help develop collective interests, build social movements, and, ultimately, stimulate cross‐border collaboration and cooperation. It identifies three primary dimensions of legal transnationalism that explain how international laws stimulate and constrain movement building through: (1) formation of collective identity and interests (constitutive effects), (2) facilitation of collective action (mobilization effects), and (3) adjudication and enforcement (redress effects).

This is the first in a series of articles that will report the results of a pilot effort to assess how well the system of civil discovery is working and to identify the principal problems which burden that system. The study revolves around interviews with 180 Chicago area litigators. This first essay, which synthesizes observations, insights, and complaints by interviewed attorneys, suggests that the world of civil discovery is not one monolithic whole, but consists of subworlds which exhibit clearly distinguishable features and problems. In addition to describing the principal problems which afflict the discovery system in its two major subworlds, the author reports what the interviewed lawyers suggest are the primary causes of those problems. While the litigators identify many ways in which the character of lawyering encumbers and disrupts the discovery process, they also locate much of the blame for the system's problems in the behavior of judges and the inefficiency of the judicial machinery. The interviews produced a dramatically widespread appeal to the courts to increase use of sanctions as a means of restraining discovery abuse.

The transition from state socialism toward market capitalism has led to an almost endless supply of new laws and legal institutions. Industrial enterprises need to adapt to this new institutional regime. In-house lawyers are well placed to be agents of change in facilitating this adjustment. Using survey data from 328 Russian enterprises, the article examines the role of company lawyers, asking whether they have fulfilled this potential. Legal expertise is not in short supply, but lawyers are marginalized within the enterprise. They focus on established, routine tasks, such as handling labor relations or drafting form contracts, rather than on shaping enterprise strategies in the newer areas created by the transition, such as corporate governance or securities law. The failure of in-house lawyers to emerge as agents of change in Russia reflects a continuation of their low status during the Soviet era and the lack of professional identity among these company lawyers.

This article investigates the involvement of the penal state in the lives of criminalized people as a controlling force that takes multiple forms. We offer the concept of modalities of penal control and identify three such modalities in addition to expressive punishment: interventionist penal control is accomplished in extralegal ways; covert penal control is hidden from public view; and negligent penal control is characterized by the absence of action by state actors. This article illustrates empirical cases of each modality, using data from three distinct projects based in Chicago, southern Wisconsin, and nationwide. The data include observations of post-prison groups and homes, interviews with criminalized people and nongovernmental organizational (NGO) staff, statutes, and regulations. This expanded understanding of penal state involvement extends beyond the understanding that characterizes discussions of mass incarceration and highlights the need for comprehensive reform.

Ban the Box (BTB) laws are an anti-discrimination policy intended to promote employment for persons with criminal records. However, research on law and organizations shows that firms often fail to comply with legal directives or engage in symbolic compliance that fails to alter day-to-day business practices. We consider whether BTB contributed to attitudinal or behavioral shifts among hiring managers and changes in job applications. We analyze a unique set of in-depth interviews (N = 30) and entry-level job applications (N = 305) collected from the same workplaces in 2008 and 2016, assessing the impact of state BTB legislation. We find: (1) that one in five organizations were noncompliant, with noncompliance twice as likely among employers who discriminated against applicants with criminal records pre-BTB and that widespread lack of knowledge and lack of enforcement of BTB appears to affect noncompliance; (2) organizations maintained considerable continuity in hiring practices and attitudes between 2008 and 2016, regardless of personnel changes and statewide implementation of BTB; and (3) post-BTB, strong warnings about criminal background checks at later stages of the hiring process emerged as an alternative source of gatekeeping. These findings contribute to the law and organizations literature by highlighting the importance of enforcement and limits of law for combating discrimination.

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche presents a history of metaphysics that can also be read as a history of jurisprudence. Nietzsche shows how—via Platonism, Christendom, Kantianism, and utilitarianism—the “real” or “true” world of ideals gives way to an “apparent” phenomenal world that is itself ultimately brought into question. This article shows how 20th-century legal thought, broadly construed, also moves away from “ideals” of law toward an understanding of law as observable social phenomena. It suggests that the move to the “apparent” world in legal thought raises questions similar to those raised by Nietzsche's work: Does sociological law point to a nihilistic destruction of the legal tradition or to a joyous possibility of overcoming that tradition?

A dominant characterization celebrates property as a means to attain privacy and autonomy. Drawing on recent scholarship, I compare this idea with a proprietarian perspective, which emphasizes the ways in which private ownership comes freighted with public responsibilities. The garden, I shall argue, reveals both dimensions to property. Drawing from gardening debates over the past century and an empirical survey of gardening in Vancouver, Canada, I conclude by arguing, first, that the ends of property are more diverse than we suppose, and second, that these two conceptions should in fact be thought of not as incompatible and opposed, but as entangled and interrelated. While judicial and academic evaluations tend to rely on a binary view of property, so that privacy and propriety seem to live in different spaces, my findings suggest a more fluid cohabitation.

The short history of environmental institutions and policies in Europe is marked by their radical reorientation. While environmental protection devices were initially conceived in the 1970s by using the classical model of the “watchdog state,” they underwent a shift during the 1990s: the ineffectiveness produced by bureaucratic constraints served as a pretext to hasten the disengagement of the state to the benefit of a regulation negotiated on the basis of financial incentives. The management of environmental issues now relies on the construction of an international market of sustainable development (or of a “rights to pollute” market, similar to that which has been established by the Kyoto protocol). The emergence and reconstruction of this field of expertise can be seen as a kind of microcosm of the perpetually unfinished Tower of Babel that is the European construction. One of the merits of this subject matter is to highlight the internal and external dynamics that have favored the success of a neoliberal counterattack.