Scholars pointed out that antidiscrimination laws do not fully undermine workplace discrimination and that affirmative action policies mostly benefit overqualified or advantaged individuals within minorities. To elucidate this paradox, this case study analyzes how some companies adopted specific selection and assessment processes for job seekers after the reinforcement of a quota for workers with disabilities in France. I observed the creation of alternative recruitment channels, the hiring of disability experts for recruitment, the refusal of resume sorting as a prescreening tool, and an emphasis on face-to-face interviews. While these changes circumvented practices that could have excluded people with disabilities (resume screening as a preselection tool, inaccessible venues for recruitment), they changed these practices only in limited spaces within the organizations. Additionally, while they did help more people get hired, they also compelled more personal disclosure that led to a more emotional assessment of job seekers and enabled “refined statistical discrimination” within pools of job seekers with disabilities. This research therefore reveals recruitment practices that may increase the number of individuals with disabilities hired but that, at the same time, may facilitate overselectivity and trigger significant risks associated with emotional recruitment of individuals with disabilities.

Through an examination of legislative debate and court opinions, this article illustrates that the French understanding of public order policing as a bulwark of freedom and national sovereignty deeply informed the development of (and contestation surrounding) the 2010 ban on all facial coverings in public. This ban notably includes the burqa or niqab, garments worn by a small minority of Muslim women in France. This article has two aims. The first is to expand on the sociolegal argument about the contested nature of rights protections and constitutional constraints on legislative authority by highlighting how a nation's legal culture can profoundly shape that contestation. The second aim of this article is to show, through a technique called legal archaeology, how longstanding French views on rights confront current European‐inspired alternative views that would give more weight to individualistic protections against state action than has traditionally been the case in France.

It is frequently suggested that law school debt is preventing new law school graduates from entering public service careers. The basis for this contention is largely anecdotal, however. This study puts the presumption to empirical scrutiny. Aggregate data from law schools and individual-level data from law students both point to the same conclusion: law students may indeed be competing in a money chase, but it is not because of their indebtedness. Private firms with prestige and high salaries are appealing to many students regardless of their debt burden. And government and public interest jobs may be in too short supply to meet the demand of non-elite students who are essentially closed out of the high-paying jobs in larger firms. The biggest barrier between these students and public service jobs may be the lack of supply of these jobs, not the lack of demand for them.

This article analyzes testimony about forced prostitution voiced in New York City's Court of General Sessions from 1908 to 1915. During these years, the problem of coercive prostitution—commonly called “white slavery”—received an unprecedented amount of attention from journalists, politicians, and antivice activists. Drawing from verbatim transcripts of compulsory-prostitution trials, our research examines the relationship between cultural narratives and courtroom storytelling. We show how the white slavery narrative in popular culture oriented prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and jurors in prostitution trials. Extending the account of social control in the sociological literature on antivice activism, our analysis shows that the prosecution of forced prostitution was not simply a top-down exercise of juridical power. Using insights from conversation analysis and cultural history, an examination of compulsory-prostitution cases reveals a quadripartite storytelling process where judges and jurors—with different orientations to the white slavery narrative—played a constitutive role in how the defense and prosecution argued their cases.

Section 106 of the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) requires that federal agencies “must take into account” the impact of their regulatory actions on historical properties, among them the “traditional cultural properties” of American Indian tribes. Conceiving of tribes' own social practices in terms of property creates the possibility for making claims about its loss for tribes, but it also problematizes their cultures' inherent dynamism that implicates its putative authenticity. This article offers commentary on the implications of practicing a form of action anthropology for the concept of culture via discovery and explication of such property under the NHPA. The context is a small American Indian community's effort to resist the development of a copper‐zinc mine adjacent to its reservation, on land that holds significant meaning for the community.

A partial replication of Jack Katz's (1982) Poor People's Lawyers in Transition, this article explores the manifestations and consequences of professional marginality of legal aid lawyers. Based on thirty-five interviews with poverty attorneys and interns in Chicago, the authors show that scarce material resources and unclear expectations continue to give rise to the marginalization of this segment of the legal profession. The authors analyzed ideological, task, status, and material dimensions of attorneys' professional marginality. With no access to reform litigation, central to the legal aid “culture of significance” in the 1970s, present-day poverty lawyers seek new ways to cope with marginality. The authors argue that these lawyers' coping strategies have many negative consequences. Thus, over time, poverty lawyers' deep engagement with clients, ideals of empowerment, and social justice orientation give way to emotional detachment, complacency, and an emphasis on “making do” within the constraints of the system.

This study demonstrates the effects of frontloading rehabilitative services to parolees through third-party residential and community-based programs. Although outsourcing treatment responsibilities to contracted reentry facilities is an increasingly common feature of postrelease supervision, the role these facilities play in reentry management and recidivism outcomes remains largely unexplored. Here, several common recidivism outcomes for parolees who attended private treatment facilities upon release are compared to those of parolees who did not. We conducted Correctional Programs Checklist assessments on each treatment site to investigate whether recidivism outcomes vary by level of programmatic quality. Our findings indicate that parolees who receive frontloaded services are significantly less likely to be rearrested or reconvicted for new crimes within eighteen months of release. These findings held across levels of programmatic quality, with larger reductions observed for programs of higher quality, and align with broader emphases in community corrections on risk assessment and organizational demands for efficiency.

How do authoritarian states define and communicate notions of appropriate work conduct and professional excellence? This article examines three channels of communication used by the Chinese state to signal professional expectations to the bar: the bar exam, the administrative rules governing lawyers, and the state-sanctioned National Outstanding Lawyer Award. We find that China’s state narrative about “the good lawyer” celebrates lawyers willing to work closely with the authorities and asks more stringent critics to separate private beliefs from public behavior. In contrast to assumptions often made in research on authoritarian law, this article highlights how lawyers can participate in politics without opposing the regime and how much work goes into curating an appealing state strand of legal professionalism rather than relying on coercion alone. We end with a call for future work on “varieties of legal professionalism” to better understand which state signals are most visible and persuasive to different segments of the Chinese bar, as well as the conditions under which alternate ideas about professionalism gain traction.

Grievances and restlessness among convicted prisoners led to legislation–in 1943 in Massachusetts, in 1957 in Connecticut–establishing sentence review boards composed of three judges of the trial courts of first instance. The authors explore in these two jurisdictions how often and under what circumstances sentences are appealed and modified and what effect, if any, these modifications have on the sentencing practice in the trial courts. They also appraise the value of the Connecticut requirement that the review board state the reasons for its decisions. The authors explore the function of the review boards in the broader context of the need for reducing sentence disparity.

In this article we rethink the connection between prosecutorial experience and conviction psychology that undergirds much of the academic literature about wrongful convictions. The conviction psychology account of prosecutorial behavior asserts that prosecutorial susceptibility to cognitive biases deepens over time, thereby increasing the risk that prosecutors will become involved in wrongful convictions the longer they stay in the profession. Our interviews with more than 200 state prosecutors call into question the basis for this asserted correlation between prosecutorial experience and risk of misconduct. The prosecutors we met consistently reported that, all else equal, prosecutors tend to become more balanced, rather than more adversarial, over time. Hence, the prosecutors who present the greatest risk of producing a wrongful conviction are those who are either inexperienced or resistant to the normal maturation process. For this reason, we suggest that wrongful conviction researchers and database designers pay closer attention to the variables associated with prosecutorial experience and resistance that might affect the development of prosecutorial maturity and the consequent risk of wrongful convictions.

Using condominium owner and landowner narratives about their property, I consider how people answer the question, What does it mean to own something? These property narratives are framed around three sets of social practices, myths, and beliefs which I call rites of identity, rites of settlement, and rites of struggle—the rites of ownership. According to these narratives, ownership requires that the person possessing the property carry out these rites. Their sense of entitlement—ownership rights—is framed by these rites. Following the rites makes one a deserving property owner. Property rights are seen as protectors against arbitrary, unpredictable changes in status that violate these owners, sense that they are entitled to keep what they had worked so hard for and planned for so long. I conclude with a discussion of the value of property narratives for understanding the link between law and culture.

When in East Germany communist rule broke down, West Germans stood ready to take over. The end of communism also meant the end of the German Democratic Republic state; unification came as unconditional surrender to the western Federal Republic of Germany. The purge of the former regime's leaders therefore became intertwined with the West German takeover. With the takeover came Western politicians, managers, and professionals, forcing East Germans to compete fur jobs and influence. Opportunistic strategies with regard to the future buildup thus mixed with the desires for revenge and justice toward those responsible for the communist past. In this article I focus especially on the screening of the East German legal profession for reemployment in the unified Germany. In the West German tradition the legal profession forms the core of the civil services. In communist states lawyers had remained relatively marginal to the center of political power. Thus Western perceptions of the role of law account for the demise of the East German legal profession. That demise is taking place at a time when the Western regime is in need of many more legally trained people than ever worked in East Germany.

Despite longstanding concern that the commercialization of legal practice is antithetical to professionalism, corporate law firms have dramatically increased their pro bono participation over the past few decades. What explains this paradox? This article examines the organizational and institutional determinants of pro bono participation across an elite field of large law firms. I find that pro bono work is only partly rooted in internal organizational dynamics and that the institutional environment appears more important for explaining variation in pro bono participation. These findings indicate that large firms may be more drawn to pro bono work as a social process tied to professional status and legitimacy than to concrete, rational organizational goals. Moreover, these findings point to the importance of the interstitial space that these firms inhabit between the legal profession and corporate market as an especially important factor in facilitating, rather than dampening, pro bono participation.

Emotions situate actors in relationships and shape their social interactions. Culture defines both the qualities of individual identity and the constitution of social groups with distinctive values and practices. Emotions, then, are necessarily experienced and acted upon in culturally inflected forms that define not only the conventions of their articulation through individual and collective action, but also the very words that name them. This article develops theoretical arguments to support these claims and illustrates their application in a description of differing emotional repertoires, and their consequences, in Aotearoa New Zealand. The effects of resentment and shame in an ethnic politics of rights and antidiscrimination law demonstrate that context is central to a nuanced understanding of how law and emotions connect in the practicalities of enforcing the protections of anti-discrimination law.

In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Celebrated as a victory for global lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, Taiwan’s 2019 law privileges marriage and biological parent-child ties as the foundation for LGBT family rights and (co-)parental recognition. This article contributes to sociolegal debates about the benefits and limitations of marriage equality by asking how restrictive legal approaches to legitimating LGBT parenthood may harm LGBT families, with consequences both for families ostensibly protected under the new laws and for those denied newly bestowed rights and protections. Drawing from legal and ethnographic research on Taiwan’s same-sex marriage law and the family formation strategies of Taiwanese LGBT parents, we interrogate how marriage equality interacts with related legal domains and prevailing stigmas of illegitimacy, adoption, and homosexuality in Taiwan. Encoded in, and reproduced through, the substance and implementation of law, these stigmas narrow the scope of legal rights and foster potentially discriminatory forms of recognition. The article shows how progressive laws may reduce LGBT family stigma for some, while also creating new stigma interactions that devalue diverse forms of LGBT parenthood.

Since the 1970s, police departments have subjected the use of force by their officers to increasingly stringent oversight, but those efforts have struggled against the difficulty of codifying the complex and idiosyncratic judgments that police work requires. In response, some departments have developed new models of oversight that use routine incident reviews partly as a tool for learning in order to document the continually surprising circumstances that officers encounter in the field, to scrutinize existing responses, and to articulate alternatives. This article analyzes the logic of this emerging model through a case study of use-of-force reviews in the Portland Police Bureau. I argue that this emerging model relies on an approach to practical inquiry that has not been adequately understood in criminal justice scholarship and practice—one that uses the routine review of organizational experience to pursue normative progress as well as technical understanding and that makes it possible to adapt complex policing practices to the local environment in which they operate.