Litigation has not been a significant strategy in Taiwan for challenging injustice due to the use of the Civil Law tradition as a model for the Republic of China legal system and the diminished autonomy of the ROC legal profession and legal system under martial law and authoritarian rule. Individual lawyers, however, were among the leading proponents of reform during Taiwan's recent transition to democratic rule. Furthermore, one of the significant liberalizing reforms ushered in by the democratic transition has been the reform of the ROC legal profession. We examine the contribution of some lawyers to democratization and consider what role the reconstituted ROC legal profession may play in the political economy of Taiwan in the future.

Despite dramatic changes in size and specialization, large law firms have remained remarkably unchanged in other respects. Introducing research on major Chicago law firms, this article examines how large law firms have changed so much by changing so little. It proposes a theory of law firm growth emphasizing the relationship between changes in the market for sophisticated legal services and changes in the approach law firms have taken to organizing their practices. The author discusses the organizational structure of large law firms, giving particular attention to the various roles that lawyers play in such firms. After speculating on trends affecting large law firms, he points to implications of these trends for law and social change.

Why, in comparison with other liberal capitalist democracies, is the social welfare state so poorly anchored in American law and public discourse? Surely American political and social history have contributed much to the weakness of our “social state.” But law, too, has played a significant material, as well as ideological, role and has provided the terrain for much of our social development. This essay explores the particular contribution of the property-liberty nexus to the stunted development of positive liberty and social citizenship in the United States. It traces this connection from the natural rights and bourgeois Founders through several key conjunctures in American history, including Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the civil rights periods and compares some of the results with developments in Germany and the aspirations of American progressives.

The essay contends that left and right alike have operated within a highly resilient and constricting framework that has made progress in the area of social citizenship both awkward and fragile. Although some possibilities for forward movement have always existed and still remain, the prospects for positive-liberty social-state law are not abundant: The master's house is not about to be taken down with his own tools.

This article examines memory laws as a new form of social control, demonstrating the significance of cultural memory to law and society scholarship. It focuses on two Israeli laws that seek to control public debate by giving voice to one marginalized group in order to silence another. The article presents two forms of such utilization of the law: forced forgetting and the balancing of atrocities. Forced forgetting validates the memory of one group of people over another group. Balancing atrocities equates victims, pitting the suffering of one group against that of another for the purpose of dismissing the former’s claims for recognition and redress. The 2011 Nakba Law, an example of forced forgetting, dismisses the Palestinian minority’s experience to amplify the memory of the Jewish majority, while the 2014 Jewish Nakba Law creates an analogy between Palestinian redress claims and those of the Mizrahi Jews in order to balance the atrocities that these groups suffered. We show that both forms of control have limitations that create gaps between legislation and implementation, yet their political-symbolic impact is much greater.

The end of the millennium has witnessed an enormous expansion in discourses, intervention practices, and social movements opposing violence against women. Not only does this development affect familial and gender inequalities, but it also reshapes the relationships among communities, states, and the global order. This symposium examines these changing relationships by considering how new discourses, laws, and practices about gender violence between intimates develop through local, national, and global processes. It explores local situations from a global perspective and global processes from a local perspective. Thus, it examines the local-global interface in the creation and implementation of social reforms concerning violence against women. We use the case of violence against women because it offers an excellent vantage point for analyzing the creation of an emerging global system of law based in human rights and assessing its impact on local and national laws and practices. It also offers a site to examine how local actors reformulate the content and meaning of global reform discourses. The articles track actors from local to international settings and back again as they negotiate the application of law to violence against women.

This article examines the distribution of legal rights in the Israeli occupied West Bank. It argues that legal rights are distributed through a “jurisdictional politics” that tries to stabilize the contingent relationship between political community, territory, and legal subjects. In particular, this jurisdictional politics seeks to delimit the contradictory boundaries of the Israeli state by creating distinct categories of person out of the populations that live and work in the region. These issues are addressed by examining a dispute concerning the jurisdiction of Israeli law over Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The article ends by arguing that in the context of multiple movements of people, capital, and military force, attention must be paid to the often contradictory ways in which jurisdictional regimes seek to produce particular types of citizens and subjects.

This article focuses on the legal geography of gated communities. Sociolegal research has paid comparatively little attention to how specific material forms fare within legal contexts. Drawing on work in legal geography and in science and technology studies, this article isolates judicial decisions that deal with the borders of gated communities from other cases involving private homeowner associations. By focusing on these boundary disputes in which outsiders are excluded from the area, this article finds that courts are resisting the localism presented by gated communities and are instead articulating a social imaginary in which the landscape flows uninterrupted by the exclusionary presence of gates. In contrast to the privatopia literature, this article finds that courts are not complicit in promoting neoliberal visions of community. The social imaginary being developed by courts resists the spatial differentiation of gated communities, producing in its place a thoroughly modern polity in which legal, economic, and political relations flow easily between those inside and outside the gate.

What role does judicial subject matter expertise play in the review of agency decisions? Using a data set of decisions in which the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) is reviewed by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, we investigate this question and find that greater subject matter expertise does make it more likely that a judge will vote to reverse an agency decision.

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the “war on terror.” What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm’s development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

This essay reviews two recent works in political science on the American conservative legal movement: Steven M. Teles's The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (2008) and Ann Southworth's Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (2008). It examines these books in the context of a larger debate over the variables that best explain constitutional change in general and the recent “conservative counterrevolution” in Supreme Court jurisprudence in particular. It shows how these studies build on the scholarship of Charles Epp, who argued in The Rights Revolution (1998) that serious constitutional change requires not only the right cast of characters on the court, but also a strong “support structure” in the legal profession and civil society. Finally, it draws on the author's own research on the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy to illustrate some important avenues for further inquiry.

Given the often perplexing relationship between mental illness and substance abuse among offenders, this article looks at how a juvenile drug court staff's presumptions of a youth's mental illness affect its decision‐making process. Based on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Southern California juvenile drug court, this article uses Manzo and Travers's “law in action” approach to analyze how the staff readjusts its application of normal remedies (a concept developed by Robert Emerson) designed to respond to a youth's noncompliance when it suspects mental illness may be influencing the youth's actions. In doing so, it highlights how court staff's considerations of youth mental disorders arise out of its everyday work practices. Furthermore, the article discusses how staff negotiations around a youth's mental illness create tensions for the juvenile drug court's accountability‐based model of therapeutic jurisprudence, because assessments of mental illness tend to mitigate responsibility for a youth's behavior.

Lawyers have become concerned about the rising numbers and the rising amounts of professional liability claims, which have in turn driven up liability insurance premiums and temporarily even caused an alarming contraction in the supply of insurance coverage. This article examines the state of factual information that could be used to measure and explain the development. It goes on to discuss the potential role that increased knowledge of the types and causes of professional liability claims could play in efforts to reverse the development, followed by a discussion of the difficulties of obtaining usable data from the two principal potential sources—lawyers and their insurers. The second half of the article describes and evaluates the work of the American Bar Association's Special Committee on Lawyers' Professional Liability in developing, in cooperation with the major insurers, a comprehensive data collection and reporting system for lawyers' professional liability claims.

The transitional justice literature highlights various trade‐offs involved in the choice and implementation of lustration as a transitional justice measure in Central and Eastern Europe. This article examines how international legal body rulings on lustration laws have interpreted rule‐of‐law versus justice concerns. The European Court of Human Rights and the International Labour Organization have explored possible information problems, due process violations, employment discrimination issues, and bureaucratic loyalty concerns within the context of lustration. Three findings emerge from their legal rulings. First, contrary to popular notions, international legal bodies are not antilustration. The institutions are engaging with questions regarding the fair implementation, not the legality, of lustration laws. Second, the prioritizing of justice concerns during the transition efforts is highlighted as a way to lay a strong democratic foundation. Third, the organizations have emphasized the importance of placing rule of law in historical context, thereby situating post‐Communist societies within other posttotalitarian regime‐building narratives.

In the course of urbanization in the People's Republic of China, tens of millions of citizens have experienced expropriations of collectively owned land, expropriations of privately owned buildings, and evictions from urban land in state ownership. Summarily characterizing these measures as takings, I argue, first, that some takings observed have denied evictees dignity, understood as respect for their intrinsic moral worth and moral autonomy, in addition to dispossessing them of their land and homes. Second, in dignity takings, monetary compensation and resettlement schemes may fail to reflect the harm done to evictees by framing disputes over takings as (forced) economic bargains. Third, some victims unable to seek redress through judicial avenues have been driven into extrajudicial protest and resistance. In some cases, resistance can be restorative of dignity, but where repressive state responses to resistance prevent this potential from being realized, the injustice of dignity takings can be further aggravated.

Recent literature on comparative judicial politics reveals a variety of roles that courts adopt in the process of democratization. These include, very rarely, serving as a trigger for democratization and, more commonly, serving as downstream guarantor for departing autocrats or as downstream consolidator of democracy. In light of these roles, this article reviews six relatively recent books: Courts in Latin America, edited by Helmke and Rios-Figueroa (2011); Judges Beyond Politics in Democracy and Dictatorship: Lessons from Chile, by Hilbink (2007); Cultures of Legality: Judicialization and Political Activism in Latin America, edited by Couso, Huneeus, and Sieder (2011); The Legacies of Law: Long-Run Consequences of Legal Development in South Africa, 1652–2000, by Meierhenrich (2008); Judging Russia: Constitutional Court in Russian Politics 1990–2006, by Trochev (2008); and New Courts in Asia, edited by Harding and Nicholson (2010).

Debates over whether transnational and international legal institutions are fair, effective, or legitimate responses to corruption of local public officials have an important empirical dimension. We use case studies to examine whether foreign legal institutions serve as fair, effective, and legitimate complements to local anticorruption institutions. We refer to this set of claims as the “institutional complementarity theory.” The first case study centers on proceedings concerning bribes paid by subsidiaries of Siemens AG, a German company, to obtain and retain a contract to provide national identity cards for the Argentine government. The second case study examines events stemming from overbilling in the construction of a courthouse in Brazil. Analysis of these cases suggests that the institutional complementary theory is credible. At the same time, the findings suggest that local institutions have greater potential, and foreign institutions have more limited potential, than the theory assumes.

This essay reviews the recent volume edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, The Supreme Court and American Political Development (2006), as well as the broader literature by law scholars interested in American Political Development (APD). The Law and APD literature has advanced our knowledge about courts by placing attention on the importance of executive and legislative actors, and by providing political context to our understanding of judicial decision making. But this knowledge would be more powerful if it would embrace the broader APD field's orientation toward the importance of state and institutional autonomy for understanding politics and political change. Law and APD scholars could go further in examining the ways in which courts and judges act institutionally, and how the legal branch as an institution impacts American politics and state-building. In doing so, Law and APD scholars would contribute not only to our understanding of judicial decision making but also to our understanding of the place and importance of courts in American politics.

Character plays a crucial role in US law. This article explores flaws in how moral character requirements determine who can work in licensed occupations, who can practice law, and who can immigrate to the United States or become a citizen. Section I summarizes psychological research on character, which raises questions about a central legal premise that individuals have a settled disposition capable of accurately predicting their behavior independent of situational influences. Section II examines the role of moral character as an employment credential. Almost a third of the workforce is covered by licensing laws that typically require proof of good character and often unjustly penalize the seventy million Americans with criminal records. Section III examines the idiosyncratic and inconsistent application of moral character requirements for lawyers. Section IV focuses on similar flaws in immigration contexts. Section V identifies reform strategies to improve the fairness of character-related decisions in the law.