While research on legal mobilization shows how social movements contribute to the definition and implementation of rights, it remains excessively centered on litigation to the detriment of administrative rights enforcement. This article maps out how street-level bureaucracies impact rights enforcement by distinguishing between allocation, access, and process, and analyzes how social movements intervene in these three aspects. It then focuses on allocation, using the case of French disability policy to analyze the forms of advocacy deployed by movement actors who take part in the rights allocation process at the local level. The article argues that conformity to institutional norms derives not so much from a pressure to conform as from the knowledge and experience of the limited means locally available to make rights effective. Further, it shows how advocacy is reframed from the defense of individual claims to a role of scrutiny and control of the bureaucratic allocation of rights.

Critical migration studies emerged to trace how restrictive immigration contexts contribute to conditions of migrant “illegality” and deportability. More recently, researchers have turned to examine diversity in migrants’ experiences, revealing how migrant “illegality” and deportability can take varied forms based on different social factors, including migrants’ immigration status, developmental stage, ethno-racial background, gender, and nationality. Yet, despite increasingly nuanced and contextualized accounts of migrants’ lived experiences, the psychology of migrant “illegality” remains under-theorized, as we lack general concepts and frameworks to explain how deportability shapes, and is shaped by, migrants’ psychosocial lives. This article introduces such a framework by drawing upon findings from two ethnographic studies with undocumented migrants in Canada and the United States. Observing common psychosocial patterns in both groups, I propose cycles of deportability as a framework to capture how migrant “illegality” develops at the psychosocial level through repeated occurrences of status-related stressors, which produce both acute and chronic fears that further require distinct agencies and coping strategies. Next, I examine differences in migrants’ cycles of deportability based on their national context and immigrant generation. I conclude by discussing how this framework can help consolidate previous research findings and guide future psychological and critical migration studies.

Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler, we develop a detailed ethnography of a social space in a major law school and explore its socialization of the students there. “Coffee House” is a weekly social event sponsored by Canadian law firms and offering free drink and food to the students present. We argue that this event and the actors involved profoundly change student identities and alter educational aspirations. Although the students themselves insist that “nothing is going on,” our ethnography suggests that in “Coffee House” identity is developed through performances, and in the accumulation of symbolic capital, until ultimately students come to feel their future career path is not a matter of choice, but destiny. We explore the important work of Bourdieu through this setting, but ultimately we resist his determinism, and suggest instead that, following the work of Butler, identity is a more complicated and fluid dynamic between space, repetition, and performance. It appears that a personal unconscious transformation among law students attending Coffee House is underway; yet opportunities to change the meaning of this space and these performances remain.

In the face of pressures to expand the rule of law, in 2004, Japan introduced a new law school system in order to produce more and better qualified lawyers. This article explains why the new law school system solution was selected from among other alternatives such as reforming the national bar exam, abolishing mandatory legal training, reforming existing legal education, or redefining the jurisdiction of lawyers. I argue that the law school system was adopted because the legal establishment co‐opted pro‐law school scholars and other reformists. Although American‐style law schools have been introduced in Japan, power has not yet shifted entirely from the legal establishment to the pro‐law school scholars; while the legal establishment may no longer have absolute control of the Japanese judicial arena, it remains powerful because it successfully co‐opted pro‐American elites into judicial reform. By analyzing the case of the Japanese law school system, this article indicates that transplants of global institutions may often be more symbolic than practical due to co‐optation tactics used by powerful local actors.

Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-related court rulings, published during the formative years of AIDS litigation in the United States, supports the notion that courts operate as “double-edged” institutions. To explain the duality of judicial decision making, we concentrate on the powers of social and cultural factors rather than on the doctrinal judgments of the courts. We trace how relational attributes, evident in contestants' characteristics (e.g., plaintiff/defendant, status differentials) and the nature of claims (i.e., restrictive/expansive), combine to account for wins for dominant parties and how other combinations of these attributes define wins for subordinate parties. We also show how judges combine specific interpretational attributes in the text of their rulings (e.g., use of divisive AIDS metaphors, deference to medical authority) to justify wins. We consolidate these findings to discuss how PWAs and their allies might use the courts to their advantage and point out the ways in which the changing epidemiology of AIDS in the United States limits the use of courts.

In this article, we analyze how pluralistic, competitive, and conflictual interest group amicus curiae participation is in the U.S. Supreme Court. Examining participating organizations and briefs during the 1995 term, we address three inquiries. First, we scrutinize the types of organized interests who participate as amici curiae. We find that the Court is open to a wide array of interests and that particular types of groups do not dominate amicus activity. Second, we analyze the frequency with which amici file briefs on opposing sides of dispute. We reveal few strict patterns of competition, suggesting that Supreme Court cases are salient to a diverse spectrum of interest groups, many of which are not usually thought of as being in competition with one another. Third, we investigate how often and which amici directly cite one another for purposes of invalidating each other's argumentation. While amici have a great deal of opportunity for this form of direct conflict, it is surprisingly rare. Nonetheless, when amici engage in this express form of discord, they play a clear role in shaping the flow of information at the Court.

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.

This article investigates how activists involved in both sides of the street politics of abortion simultaneously create, are constrained by, and use law when recounting a period of conflict that resulted in litigation. The activists‐turned‐litigants' construction of legality is explored by identifying and analyzing patterns of inclusion, absence, amendment, and type of law (i.e., state or extrastate) in and across the stories they tell. It is found that even though there are multiple reasons to expect all of these activists to resist or amend the state's conception of law, their narratives ultimately reproduce state law's legitimacy and power. The activists' stories also illustrate that legal consciousness is contextually and experientially based and is therefore subject to change. This finding has implications for legal mobilization as well as for the nature of legal consciousness.

Every year, the US government detains thousands of noncitizens in removal proceedings on the basis that they might pose a threat to public safety if released during the pendency of their removal proceedings. Using original audio recording data on immigration bond hearings, this study examines immigration judges’ determinations regarding which noncitizens pose a danger to the community. My multivariate analysis that controls for a variety of detainee background characteristics and criminal-conviction-related measures produced three main findings. First, I find that Central Americans are more likely to be deemed dangerous than non-Central Americans. Second, I find that detainees with attorneys are less likely to be deemed dangerous than pro se detainees. Finally, my analysis shows that whereas felony and violent convictions are associated with higher odds of being deemed dangerous, the recency of criminal convictions and the total number of convictions are not predictive of danger determinations. Together, these findings provide new insights into the socio-legal construction of immigrant criminality.

In many states, young people today can receive a “blended” combination of both a juvenile sanction and an adult criminal sentence. We ask what accounts for the rise of blended sentencing in juvenile justice and whether this trend parallels crime control developments in the adult criminal justice system. We use event history analysis to model state adoption of blended sentencing laws from 1985 to 2008, examining the relative influence of social, political, administrative, and economic factors. We find that states with high unemployment, greater prosecutorial discretion, and disproportionate rates of African American incarceration are most likely to pass blended sentencing provisions. This suggests that the turn toward blended sentencing largely parallels the punitive turn in adult sentencing and corrections—and that theory and research on adult punishment productively extends to developments in juvenile justice.

Lawyers for conservative and libertarian causes are active in organizing and mobilizing interest groups within the conservative coalition, and networks of relationships among those lawyers help to maintain and shape the coalition. Using data gathered in interviews with seventy-two such lawyers, this article analyzes characteristics of the lawyers and the structure of their networks. The findings suggest that the networks are divided into segments or blocks that are identified with particular constituencies, but that a distinct set of actors with extensive relationships serves to bridge the constituencies. Measures of centrality and brokerage confirm the structural importance of these actors in the network, and a search of references in news media confirms their prominence or prestige. This “core” set of actors occupies the “structural hole” in the network that separates the business constituency from religious conservatives. Libertarians, located near the core of the network, also occupy an intermediate position. Regression analysis of ties within the network suggests that the Federalist Society plays an important role in bringing the lawyers together.

Citizen video and other publicly available footage can provide evidence of human rights violations and war crimes. The ubiquity of visual data, however, may overwhelm those faced with preserving and analyzing it. This article examines how machine learning and computer vision can be used to make sense of large volumes of video in advocacy and accountability contexts. These technologies can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of human rights advocacy and accountability efforts, but only if human rights organizations can access the technologies themselves and learn how to use them to promote human rights. As such, computer scientists and software developers working with the human rights community must understand the context in which their products are used and act in solidarity with practitioners. By working together, practitioners and scientists can level the playing field between the human rights community and the entities that perpetrate, tolerate, or seek to cover up violations.

We examine whether the level of deference shown by the Israeli Supreme Court to military decisions has changed over time by empirically analyzing the entire body of Supreme Court decisions in petitions against the military commander between 1990 and 2005. Setting forth a number of different factors that might generally affect the degree of deference to state agencies, we hypothesized that there would be a decrease in deference in the relationship between the Court and the military commander during the examined period. Our findings show that deference to the military commander has indeed diminished significantly. We argue that this is best explained by the continuation of the armed conflict (and its aftermath, namely, the routinization and increase in the number of petitions by the civilian population) and also—to some extent—by the rise of a substantive rule‐of‐law legal consciousness, central to which is the importance of human rights.

Israel has since 1967 administered the West Bank and Gaza Strip through highly legalistic and strongly repressive military governments. Has advocacy in Israeli courts on behalf of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Ship has legitimated, and thus helped to perpetuate, ongoing Israeli military occupation of those regions? By examining legitimation in lawyering under lsraeli occupation, insight can be gained into the factors and their relative weights that lawyers facing harsh or repressive regimes must consider in balancing the costs and benefits of litigation to serve a social or political opposition movement. The author concludes that the benefits outweigh the legitimating effects of lawyers' work and that, on balance, Palestinians' election to seek representation in Israeli courts, and lawyers' choice to assist them, has been justified.

In this article I offer a principled strategy for the courts to identify and to handle the uses of culture as a defense in a criminal proceeding. I begin by discussing the relationship between culture and behavior illuminated by sociologists of culture. I then explain the three categories into which cultural defenses fall–cultural reason, cultural requirement, and cultural tolerance–and the response of criminal courts in the United States to each. I argue that where culture offers an alternative explanation of the defendant's intent, it is highly relevant to determinations of criminal liability. However, where a defendant uses culture only to explain why he wanted to harm the victim and asks that the court be tolerant of such behavior, considerations of culture should not be allowed. In reaching this conclusion, I draw on theories of multiculturalism to consider the benefits and burdens of maintaining the facade of a “cultureless” criminal law in an increasingly heterogeneous society.

Despite the historical transformation of executions in the United States into cloistered, bureaucratic affairs, two past practices have persisted in modern executions: the opportunities for the condemned to request a special last meal and to make a speech to those assembled to witness the execution. The retention of these practices and the communication of their contents by the state and the media to the public reinforce a conception of those executed as autonomous actors, endowed with agency and individuality. Through these practices, the state and the media reflect and strengthen the oxymoronic construction of offenders in contemporary discourses as self-made monsters who are intrinsically different by choice. Presenting offenders in this way may ultimately maintain the emotional satisfaction needed to sustain the death penalty. Arguments are supported by published last meal requests and final statements in the state of Texas.

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.