Under a California procedure, parties to litigation may agree to have their cases referred to retired judges for private trial. While the procedure affords substantial benefits in some kinds of cases, it does involve problems that will probably limit its more general use.

The substitution of no-fault compensation for recoveries at tort law in cases of work-related injuries would, according to turn-of-the-century reformers, minimize resort to adjudication. Charges of unanticipated controversy and excessive litigation under state compensation statutes, however, have been raised periodically for several decades.

This article presents the findings of current research into the prevalence of disputes, attorney involvement, and court suits under workers' compensation legislation in Illinois, the locale of specific criticism. The author offers an explanation of the obstacles to discovering the incidence of work-related injuries, along with a description of the handling of both undisputed and disputed claims. By following the itinerary of a sample of 6, 652 compensation claims filed during 1978 through several stages of administrative and judicial processing, she then examines the persistence of these primarily disputed claims from initiation to resolution. Her major finding is that under workers' compensation legislation in Illinois, litigation, whether defined as attorney involvement or court action, may not be as excessive as charged. The research uncovers the need for more precise standards for defining a surfeit of controversy and offers suggestions for meeting this need.

Many of the unified bars—public bodies to which all lawyers must belong and pay dues in order to practice—have been embroiled in legal and political disputes recently. Focusing on the history of the unified bar in Wisconsin, this article accounts for these disputes in terms of contradictions inherent in the very concept of a unified bar. Across a wide range of issues, the author argues, decision makers have been unsure whether to treat a unified bar as a public agency, a compulsory membership organization, or a private voluntary association, and thus unable to determine when public accountability, the protection of dissident members, or associational autonomy should be the dominant policy in unified bar affairs. The author concludes that disputes over questions of unified bar governance are unlikely to subside and that the unified bars should therefore be terminated in favor of a combination of private voluntary state bar associations and administrative agencies independent of the organized bar.

This article examines data collected from users of the German Federal Ombudsman Scheme (GFOS). The data was collected as part of a research project to understand how the GFOS operates in practice and how its procedures and outcomes are accepted by its users. We begin from the premise that experience of procedural justice during this alternative dispute resolution (ADR) process will build institutional legitimacy, and the article makes three contributions to the literature on procedural justice. First, we extend evidence of the link between procedural justice and legitimacy to a novel institutional context that is different in many ways to the criminal justice focus of much of the extant literature. Second, we consider the motivations of service users to engage with ADR as potential moderators of that link. Third, we analyze the relationship between procedural justice, subjective outcomes, and the actual outcomes provided to service users. Overall, we conclude that the link between procedural justice and legitimacy can be identified among those with very different motivations for using the GFOS.

This symposium focuses on judicial politics at the micro level. Its aim is to shed light on justice in action, drawing on an ethnographic approach to explore the routine decision-making practices of judges and other legal actors, and to study their interactions with citizens and politicians. Each article is based on close observation of the interactions between legal professionals and administrative actors who are at the frontline in local and lower courts. By examining a variety of jurisdictions around the globe, the articles in this symposium offer fresh insight into “judicial politics on the ground.”

This essay is a response to Mark Massoud's Law's Fragile State, and through comparative inquiry argues that highly contextualized analysis of courts is critical to gaining an understanding of judicial decision making and judicial empowerment. As Massoud demonstrates, focusing on the legal complex is a particularly worthwhile endeavor in fragile states. Although we may understand the sociology of the legal profession, we do not fully understand how professional networks, career paths, and identities truly impact the institutional pathways of the courts and the legal system as a whole.

In my response to reviews by Christopher Agee, Christopher Schmidt, Karen Tani, and Laura Weinrib, I explain some of the challenges of writing Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s. In particular, I explore the challenge of creating narrative coherence without losing the essential multiplicity of the story or compromising my methodological commitment to constitutional history across the many actors involved in the legal change process. I ultimately constructed such coherence on three levels: narrative, thematic, and doctrinal. Narratively, I settled on a larger role for the Supreme Court than initially anticipated, while still de-centering the Court substantively, methodologically, and causally. I located thematic coherence largely in a new vision of the “sixties.” The decade that emerges was marked by a common claim against the idea that everyone had a proscribed place from which they could not escape; an evolving if incomplete effort to disentangle difference from danger; and the crucial role of both sympathy and empathy in the success of the challenge to vagrancy laws. Though numerous legal arguments ran through that challenge, doctrinal multiplicity—the refusal to flatten or narrow the complex set of arguments and harms that vagrancy cases presented—became its own form of coherence.

This article explores how not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiments affect the implementation of new cannabis laws in California cities. Despite increasing legality and growing social tolerance, the actual status of cannabis remains controversial. Large segments of the population and local authorities remain uncomfortable with the use of cannabis and resist allowing cannabis facilities in their communities. I employ statistical analysis to understand why some jurisdictions move toward more permissive cannabis policies and others do not. The results show that, on average, socially and economically prosperous cities express higher support for cannabis legalization, but cannabis businesses are more likely to receive permits in cities that are socially and economically distressed. The disparity between demand (white middle-class communities) and supply (poor Hispanic communities) demonstrates that stereotypes generated by the war on drugs have not disappeared after the passage of new cannabis laws and continue to perpetuate the marginalization of disadvantaged individuals and places.

Among law and society fields, legal anthropology has experienced markedly high highs and low lows. Its parent disciplines, law and anthropology, have fluctuated from intense and productive engagement with one another to mutual disregard for each other’s ways of knowing. Most commentary on the trajectory of this interdisciplinary relationship has bemoaned anthropology’s (ir)relevance to legal scholarship, but this introduction and the symposium essays that follow invert the usual narrative by asking how—and why—formal law might matter to anthropology. The symposium is part of a dual special issue that grows out of a multi-year conversation between legal anthropologists representing varied institutional and intellectual backgrounds. Drawing on that conversation and on the essays it has produced, this introduction argues that anthropologists would do well to abandon their prepositional attitude to formal law and, instead, to build on the strengths of anthropological analysis by “cultivating attentiveness” to things legal.

A 2011 New Jersey anti-bullying law required school personnel to make nuanced determinations about student violations, take on multiple new roles, and assume a high administrative burden. We examine how the state’s middle schools responded to the law during a period when standards for implementation among schools were unclear. We observe substantial variation between schools in their implementation approach and we identify two sources of this variation. First, parents, school district administrators and lawyers, state Department of Education staff, and private companies disseminated multiple, sometimes competing interpretations of the law and of bullying, to which school personnel were differentially exposed. Second, school personnel crafted their own implementation approach out of the varied interpretations from these organization field actors. In periods when legal standards are relatively settled, field actors often encourage conformity among organizations; in this case, by contrast, they contributed to variation in implementation. We argue that examining the on-the-ground interpretation of organization field meanings during unsettled periods may be particularly useful for understanding the trajectory of laws, as early variation provides the context in which organizational practices can become legal requirements.

This article draws on a case study of how Massachusetts treatment courts responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to address two intersecting theoretical and policy questions: (1) How do actors who work within criminal legal organizations use the law to solve complex social and political problems? (2) How do organizations working within multiple, fragmented organizational fields respond to an exogenous shock? The findings draw on interviews with eighty-four treatment court judges and practitioners and build from neo-institutional approaches to the study of courts to show that legal actors and organizations pursue pragmatic approaches, strategically adapting to their external environments through buffering, which is protective, and innovation, which is transformative. Each strategy reflects the courts’ autonomy or dependence on other organizations in the criminal legal and social service fields. The findings also provide insight into the social process of legitimation as personnel aligned beliefs with adaptation strategies, shifting understandings of surveillance practices and the utility of sanctions to meet overall court goals.

Ghana has inherited colonial legislation that recognizes and regulates the consequences of Muslim family law (MFL). However, in practice, courts almost never recognize the normative existence of MFL and systematically dismiss the cases on procedural grounds without discussing their merits. What explains the judiciary’s attitudes toward Islamic law? Why do Ghanaian courts refuse to engage with MFL in substantive terms? How does this judicial policy affect Ghana’s pluri-legal system and its multireligious democracy? Drawing on Robert Cover’s insights and concepts from “Nomos and Narrative,” the present article suggests that Ghanaian courts engage in “undignified” jurispathy against Islamic law. Having inherited the colonial narrative that Islamic law is not a native law of the land, the judiciary destroys the legal meanings built around Islamic law without discussing what is at stake. This perpetuates normative tensions between the state and Muslim groups, undermines the rule of law, and erodes public trust in democratic institutions. Utilizing the theoretical and empirical insights drawn from the Ghanaian case, the article urges scholars to expand the scope of their inquiries to include instances of undignified jurispathy to better understand state-religion relations and constitutional debates in pluri-legal societies.

Scholars studying wrongful convictions have long examined their causes and the ways in which to prevent them and are increasingly interested in exonerees’ post-prison reentry processes. However, research on the experience of incarceration as a result of wrongful conviction is scarce. This article draws on in-depth interviews with eleven exonerees across three states (Illinois, Texas, and New York) to theorize how multiple facets of innocence (personal, relational, and institutional) shape the ways in which former prisoners have navigated their wrongful incarceration: learning to prove their innocence. For many wrongfully convicted inmates, acquiring legal knowledge and mobilizing post-conviction law—specifically, actual innocence jurisprudence—plays a central role in their daily lives given the onerous legal work it takes to prove their factual innocence. I advance what Kathryne M. Young has termed second-order legal consciousness, which prioritizes the social processes that create legal consciousness, as a framework to illuminate how wrongfully convicted inmates constructed legality when pursuing legal exoneration in prison. This article offers new insights into the relational nature of law to show how marginalized groups like prisoners mobilize law when pursuing their rights and allows us to theorize innocence in contexts where the state and society writ large have ascribed a person’s legal guilt.

This article examines how social capital affects the resolution of disputes by focusing on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, sometimes described as “Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.” Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the article contends that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially considers the position of each disputant within the community of editors in its decision-making process. In doing so, the Arbitration Committee does not simply decide or arbitrate disputes but seeks to attenuate their impact on Wikipedia’s social fabric. This data allows us to revisit sociological debates on the role of social capital, by revealing the ways in which well-connected individuals employ it strategically in order to obfuscate their noncompliance with norms, thus leading to what I call “dispute cancellation.”

This article develops a new conceptual framework designed to critically study how locality and transversal power relations structure activity and developments in the global field of international criminal justice. The framework is built around the concept of “justice sites,” defined as localities in which organized and social labor—in this case, working with international criminal justice—takes place. The potential effects of social labor performed in specific sites of justice are structured partly by their locality and the resources to which it gives access and partly by their structural position in wider transversal chains of cooperation and competition that cut across different globalized and national fields. In addition to structuring the connections between justice sites, transversal power relations link sites of justice to “practice sites” embedded in other fields in which localized, social labor is not routinely engaged with international criminal justice. Such linkages demonstrate how the framework, developed to study how locality and transversal relations shape the fight against atrocity crimes, can also be used to investigate sites engaged in and across other globalized and national fields of justice, law, governance, and security.

Over the past decade, reform efforts in the area of collateral consequences of conviction have succeeded in emancipating themselves from standard discourses and dynamics in the US criminal legal reform space. This article draws on concepts and insights from the literature on penal transformation to explore the unique interplay of goals and values that have led to recent collateral consequences reforms. It identifies three major drivers of change that have had a significant impact, particularly, on softening occupational licensing restrictions for individuals with a criminal history and passing criminal record clearance legislation. First, advocates of the economic libertarian agenda joined forces with civil libertarian groups to reduce occupational licensing hurdles for criminal record holders. Second, an attitude promoting redemption and second chances through criminal record clearance reform has been championed, in particular, by the Christian right. Third, economic concerns by employers seeking to hire individuals with a criminal record have become more pronounced in tight labor markets, both pre- and post-pandemic. The analysis concludes that, although much remains to be done, ongoing reforms represent a significant reshaping of the collateral consequences landscape. A logic of unworthiness toward individuals with criminal records, however, remains hard to eradicate and can easily resurface in the current unstable phase of penal transition.