From parole prediction instruments and violent sexual predator scores to racial profiling on the highways, instruments to predict future dangerousness, drug-courier profiles, and IRS computer algorithms to detect tax evaders, the rise of actuarial methods in the field of crime and punishment presents a number of challenging issues at the intersection of economic theory, sociology, history, race studies, criminology, social theory, and law. The three review articles of Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age by Ariela Gross, Yoram Margalioth, and Yoav Sapir, raise these challenges in their very best light. Ranging from the heights of poststructuralist and critical race theory to the intricate details of mathematical economics and criminological analysis, the articles apply different disciplinary lenses to the analysis of the actuarial turn offered in Against Prediction and set forth both substantive and structural challenges to the book. By means of a detailed reply to the three reviews, this article provides a reader's companion to Against Prediction.

Little research has been conducted on the behaviors of prosecuting attorneys and their interactions with rape survivors between charging and court events. Yet this period, during which prosecutors prepare rape survivors for their witness roles, may be crucial for obtaining successful convictions. Using intensive interviews with 32 rape survivors and background interviews with prosecutors, victim witness advocates, and rape crisis workers, I evaluated the nature of directives and information given to rape survivors and the frequency with which directives were conveyed before preliminary hearings and court events. I concluded that prosecutors employ 20 modes of preparation to construct rape survivors as credible victims for judges and jurors. They orient the rape survivor to the scope of the witness role and her place in the interaction with legal actors, direct her to enhance the credibility of her story, and enhance the credibility of her self'presentation. Research showed that prosecutors prepared respondents more thoroughly for trials than for preliminary hearings, but little overall. A large minority of respondents, consequently, reported dissatisfaction with the preparation they received. On the basis of the findings, I call for an extension of Martin and Powell's “politics of victim's needs,” attention to the importance of maintaining a perception of procedural justice among rape survivors, and further research into pre-court preparation.

This article explores the role of anxiety in neoliberal regimes of self-governance, arguing that anxiety has become a technique of governance. Discourses of anxiety produce anxious subjects who undertake a range of self-governing projects to manage and mitigate the experience. I explore anxiety governance in the environmental context of “eco-anxiety,” motherhood, and the controversy over Bisphenol A in baby bottles. Maternal toxic vigilance, in which individual mothers assume responsibility for the environmental health of their children through better consumer choices, is a classic example of this anxiety governance. The regulatory failure of the neoliberal state reinforces this self-governance; governments cannot be trusted to protect children from the toxins that are poisoning them, so mothers must do it themselves. Finally, notwithstanding the depoliticizing tendency of these self-governing projects, I consider the political potential of this maternal toxic vigilance, exploring whether anxiety governance might more productively engage the political.

This article examines the “dilemma of difference” transgender prisoners pose and face within a sex-segregated prison system organized around the pursuit of safety and security. Our analysis uses data from a study of the culture and experiences of transgender prisoners in four men's prisons. Using qualitative data from interviews with transgender prisoners, focus groups with prisoners, and focus groups with staff, our findings reveal a common contention that transgender prisoners are (according to staff) and should be (according to prisoners) treated like everyone else, despite their unique situations. This further demonstrates the stakes that this dilemma carries for the prison regime and transgender prisoners' roles in challenging it without engaging in overt resistance—which carries high stakes for them. Accordingly, we elucidate how the rigidity of an institutional structure built on inherent contradictions can have the potential to complicate the achievement of institutional goals.

This article examines the process of fragmentation to understand how the process of establishing new school districts results in high metropolitan‐area segregation. Using educational and census data, the article examines how the political process of creating new school districts in Jefferson County, Alabama, changed the nature of segregation. School segregation remained high from 1960 to 2005, but while in the late 1960s segregation of students was predominantly within districts, by 2005 segregation was primarily between districts. Over time, school district boundary lines gained meaning in terms of the characteristics of the district residents. In creating separate districts, local control has the same effect as earlier de jure laws of maintaining racial segregation in the Birmingham area, with few prospects for overcoming boundaries that divide students and opportunities along racial lines. Local control within the current judicial context will define separate populations and maintain or increase metropolitan segregation.

The purpose of this paper is to make a case for a new political criminology—that is, to argue that a meaningful and coherent intellectual enterprise is developing across disciplinary lines. This new political criminology is distinctive in three ways:

• It is criminology in that it is rooted in conceptions of, and concerns about, the ramifications of street crime.

• It is political in that its focus is on the way crime control strategies both reflect and influence the distribution of power within the polity.

• It is new in that it is influenced by postmodern understandings of, and disillusionment with, the liberal state.

This study transgresses the received distinction between two genres: the scholarly essay and the grant proposal. An extended reflection on a research endeavor still in progress, it interrogates the methodological and conceptual questions raised, ab initio, by the effort to explore and explain an unusually perplexing phenomenon: the dramatic rise, in postapartheid South Africa, of witchcraft killings–and of their policing, both formal and informal, which has produced distinctly hybrid styles of cultural justice. Our objective is to address a number of interrelated questions concerning the description, interpretation, and analysis of (I) occult-related violence, itself legitimized locally by populist appeals to “culture” and (2) its regulation by a secular modernist state committed to, yet challenged by, the constitutional recognition of cultural difference. It is our thesis that this “epidemic” of occult-related violence, and the kinds of cultural policing that accompany it, are stark expressions of a structural contradiction within the “new” South Africa, a contradiction evinced in all postcolonies–and, increasingly, in other nation-states as well

This article proposes a processual theory of the legal profession. In contrast to the structural, interactional, and collective action approaches, this processual theory conceptualizes the legal profession as a social process that changes over space and time. The social process of the legal profession includes four components: (1) diagnostic struggles over professional expertise; (2) boundary work over professional jurisdictions; (3) migration across geographical areas and status hierarchies; and (4) exchange between professions and the state. Building on the processual theory and using China as a primary example, the author proposes a research agenda for studying lawyers and globalization that seeks to shift the focus of research from the legal elite to ordinary law practitioners, from global law firms to local law firms, and from advanced economies to emerging economies.

This paper examines prospects for transnational advocacy and regimes as a way to buttress national labor laws and institutions in an interlocking mosaic and thus ensure the continuation of strong systems of industrial relations under conditions of increasing economic integration. We argue that there is a role for transnational solutions as a supplement to national systems, and we assess the conditions necessary to make this approach effective. We look at a variety of possible actors and arenas that could foster transnationalism and provide illustrations of transnational advocacy and regime building. We conclude that elements of a multilevel, public-private transnational regime are present in some parts of the world and that these elements can occasionally be knit together. We find that prospects for an effective and sustainable system of transnational multi-level regulation are greater when regional integration pacts such as the EU and NAFTA create transnational norms or forums. But, based on preliminary analysis of transnational advocacy and regulation in these two areas, we also conclude that no fully effective system has yet emerged.

Less than two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa is witnessing a range of policy interventions that almost iconoclastically challenge the premises of democratic governance. Police military ranks have been reintroduced and an exemplary postapartheid law governing the use of lethal force has also been amended in favor of police discretion. Simultaneously, however, community policing, a benchmark for democratic policing, is being rolled out on unprecedented scale. This article argues that the seemingly contradictory mobilization of militarized policing and popular civilian institutional forms has a definite logic and captures the postcolonial condition of policing in South Africa: a populist-oriented ANC administration has allowed practices of popular policing underwritten by a desire for a forceful state to capture the law that had previously restrained this kind of policing. The result is a violent but intimate relationship between police and people, a situation in which the law is estranged from itself and normalized into the informal realm of private policing.

This paper provides a critical perspective on the use of U. S. alternative dispute resolution (ADR) approaches for managing conflict in African and other communities. It argues that imposition of American ADR as a condition for foreign aid or capital investment is deeply problematic, and urges a more sophisticated analysis of the power dimensions and ideological basis of ADR. When viewed as an ideologically laden paradigm for how conflict should be resolved (i. e., a conflict paradigm), ADR can be seen as carrying troubling baggage. For example, ADR approaches imported from the United States deal with dispute resolution simply in terms of mechanisms or techniques, ignoring substantive issues central to conflict management in African and other communities. The entire discourse surrounding ADR pays insuficient attention to problems with terms such as modern or traditional, and encourages an ingenuous denial of the effects of inequality in power and money on conflict resolution. This ideological baggage renders unreflective imposition of ADR incompatible with the best interests of African communities. The authors urge a more complete and objective analysis of the global ADR revolution—one that takes a broader perspective.

It is a truism that police in India generally lack legitimate authority and public trust. This lack is widely understood by scholars, policy analysts, and police practitioners as being rooted in the institution's colonial development as a means of oppression, and its alleged corruption and criminalization in the postcolonial period. The social facts of situational hyper-empowerment and the widespread decadence of police do much to explain their poor image and performance, but these explanations do not account for the fact that police in India are also structurally disempowered by cultural-political and legal-institutional claims to multiple and conflicting forms of authority that challenge and often overwhelm the authority of police. This structural disempowerment and its performances in everyday interactions between the police and the public constitute an ongoing social process of delegitimation of police authority in contemporary India. Following ethnographic analysis of this process of delegitimation, I explore the implications of focusing on police disempowerment for theorizations of the sources and capabilities of state legal authority more generally.

By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims'accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S. asylum law. In the United States, asylum is available to aliens whose gooernments fail to protect them from persecution on the basis of their race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group membership. Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants have challenged this definition of persecution with their two-decade-long struggle for asylum in the United States. During the 1980s, U.S. religious advocates and solidarity workers took legal action on behalf of what they characterized as victims of oppression in Central America. The asylum claims narrated by the beneficiaries of these legal efforts suggest that repessiwe pactices rendered entire populations politically suspect. To prevail in immigration court, however, victims had to prove that they were individually targeted because of being somehow “different” from the population at large. In other words, to obtain asylum, persecution victims had to explain how and why their actions had placed them at risk, even though persecution obscured the reasons that particular individuals were targeted and thus rendered all politically suspect.

One hallmark of Herb Jacob's analyses of criminal courts—extensive consideration of the interaction among actors—was less pronounced in his work on civil justice, which was more focused on institutions and the politics behind the laws that those institutions administered. In the research I report here, my emphasis is squarely on the actors in the civil justice process: the relationship between contingency-fee lawyers and clients, and how that relationship plays out in the settlement process. In Felony Justice, Herb, and his coauthor James Eisenstein, focus on the courtroom workgroup as a case-processing (and, largely, case-settling) machine; clients are relatively peripheral. In my account, clients, both current and future, are extremely important in how the lawyer works to settle cases. In the criminal court workgroup, lawyers do not worry about where future clients will come from because police secure them. In contrast, the contingency-fee lawyer has constant concerns about future clients, and I argue, this concern provides a control over lawyers that prior analyses of the contingency fee have largely missed. This dynamic also may explain why the courtroom workgroups, or court communities, found in the criminal courts do not appear to exist in the civil justice system.

Trust is essential to successful business relations, particularly to the efficient operation of law firms. Trust fosters productive working relationships, favorable reputations, and a lucrative clientele. This paper contributes to research on law firm development through a consideration of social dynamics within law firms beyond traditional emphases on trading relationships and community solidarity. We introduce a social capital perspective on the evolution of trust and its consequences for commitment to the law firm. We argue that trust, specifically in the form of perceived distributive justice, is created and nurtured through social integration among law firm members. Yet, for women, who continue to be denied full access to these social networks and professional rewards, trust is undermined. Exclusion and emerging distrust prompt women to contemplate leaving their respective firms. This paper examines the bases of differential levels of trust and their impact on lawyers' intentions to leave practice.

The bifurcation of capital trials into determinations of guilt and sentencing presents defense advocates with what seem to be two distinct domains of knowledge—one apparently “legal” in character, the other “human.” But this epistemological division is actually not so clear in practice. This article dissects the procedural and strategic mechanisms through which these two domains unsettle and reconstitute the other. I provide a historical, empirically grounded account that explicitly articulates the connections between developments in legal procedure, prevailing standards of care concerning the need to conduct humanistic investigations of mitigating factors, and the on‐the‐ground trial practice of “frontloading” as a defense strategy. Drawing from documentary research, interview data with leading capital defense practitioners, and analytical observations based on my own experience as a mitigation specialist, this article presents itself as a case study of the processes of mutually constitutive rupturing that reconfigure the categories of the legal and the human.

Nonconsensual pornography, commonly known as “revenge porn,” is the dissemination of another’s sexually explicit images or videos without their consent. This article explores this phenomenon in gay and bisexual male online communities. The first part reviews the current sociological and legal literature on online dating, gay culture on the Internet, and revenge porn. Then, based on a survey of gay and bisexual male dating app users, ethnographic interviews, and an analysis of platform content moderation policies, the next part makes three related points. First, it shows that gay and bisexual men who use geosocial dating apps are more frequently victims of revenge porn than both the general population and the broader lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. Second, it shows that geosocial dating apps create powerful norms of disclosure that make sharing personal information all but required. And third, it describes how gay and bisexual male users engage in privacy navigation techniques with the goal of building trust and enhancing safety. The final substantive section then shows how inadequate protections for online privacy and inadequate legal incentives for safe platform design contribute to the problem of revenge porn. The article concludes with a summary and avenues for future research.

This paper sketches a new theoretical approach to the study of professions and uses that approach to analyze differences that have emerged between the American and English legal professions since the late nineteenth century. Earlier studies have generally emphasized professional structure and organization while ignoring work and its control. I argue that control of work is central to professional development. Since work is central and since professions compete for it, interprofessional competition is the determining fact in the history of professions. This paper analyzes the work available to the legal profession, the numbers and types of legal personnel available to do that work, and the various competitors contesting it. Studying in detail complaints of unqualified practice in England (1870–1940) and two American states (1910–50), I locate the types of contested work and the competitors involved, using these to explain important aspects of the two legal prof essions today. Throughout, a variety of theoretical concepts are developed and applied to the particular case. One striking discovery is the contrast in competitors; American lawyers' chief competitors were corporations, while British lawyers' chief competitor was the state. I close by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the particular methodology here used—the study of conflicts—and suggest alternative methods using the same theoretical framework.

This study of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from the late 1970s reports on the differing ways that women and men have responded to the conflicting claims of work and family. It finds that women with children who have entered the profession have indeed continued to bear the principal responsibilities for the care of children, but it also finds that these women, with all their burdens, are more satisfied with their careers and with the balance of their family and professional lives than other women and than men.

How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006–2007, we find that—contrary to standard depictions of corporate client-provider relationships—(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring; and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following “star” lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The combination of long-term relationships and subunit rivalry provides law firms with steady work flows and allows companies to keep cost pressure on firms while preserving relationship-specific capital, quality assurance, and soft forms of legal capacity insurance. Our findings have implications for law firms, corporate departments, and law schools.