Based on Chinese constitutional analysis, political science, and law and society studies, we argue that work extending the application of popular constitutionalism to authoritarian states applies in Vietnam, as popular constitutionalism targets sites relevant to constitutional reform. We contend that popular constitutionalism located in authoritarian states requires three factors: a tradition of activism, space for reformist and pragmatic dialogue targeting constitutional change, and the political need for legitimacy. This article analyses activism in Vietnam, focusing on the lodging of Petition 72 with the Constitutional Amendment Drafting Commission in 2013, and the resulting responses. We conclude that this activism was pivotal in advocating for new constitutional norms, evidencing popular constitutionalism in Vietnam. The long history of Vietnamese scholar activism, the relative space for governance debates, and the political need for legitimacy made this possible. We also note that popular constitutionalism faces constraints in authoritarian states, which may shape its trajectory.

The need to protect the rights of children and young people in detention is the subject of a recent United Nations study (Nowak 2019) and is highlighted by national and international controversies. This article examines the role of external monitoring in preventing the ill-treatment of children and young people in detention. Australia has until recently shown limited interest in protecting the rights of people in detention, but, in 2017, it finally ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment (OPCAT). This article examines Australia’s steps to ensuring the effective monitoring of the rights of people in detention, specifically the rights of children and young people in criminal justice detention. As a federal state, Australia must establish a comprehensive network of monitoring bodies constituting OPCAT’s National Preventive Mechanism across nine jurisdictions and with a range of existing monitoring bodies. This article highlights the importance of the “monitoring of monitoring” to ensure the fair treatment of children and young people in correctional detention. It identifies factors relevant to the effectiveness and credibility of child-centered monitoring processes and analyzes the opportunities for maximizing both in the Australian context and globally.

The war on sex offenders was an American campaign against sex crime that began in the 1930s and is still ongoing. In this review essay, I argue that the architects and opponents of that war engaged in political struggles that—especially during the pivotal era of the long 1970s—produced, criminalized, and hierarchized multiple new categories of “good” and “bad” LGBTQ legal subjects. In making this argument, my aim is to bring the field of LGBTQ political and legal history—especially the work of George Chauncey ([1994] 2019) and Margot Canaday (2009)—into closer conversation with scholarship by queer theorists who are not historians—especially Gayle Rubin ([1984] 2011a) and Michael Warner (1999)—about the stigmatization of non-normative gender and sexual practices. While historians have examined the policing of multiple queer behaviors in the early twentieth century, their examinations of the post-1945 period have been concerned primarily with the consolidation of a starker social and legal binary between homo- and heterosexuality. As their narratives get closer to the present, the most stigmatized “bad” queers become more and more tangential. At least in part, this has been because historians have been under the same pressure as LGBTQ activists to distance LGBTQ identity from the stigma of sexual “deviance”—especially sex that violated age-of-consent statutes—in order to promote the political project of LGBTQ rights. Placing bad queers at the center of LGBTQ political and legal history diversifies who counts as a subject of this history and reveals an even bigger carceral state that governed them.

This Article treats the Indian National Army Trial of 1945 as a key moment in the elaboration of an anticolonial critique of international law in India. The trial was actually a court-martial of three Indian officers by the British colonial government on charges of high treason for defecting from the British Indian Army, joining up with Indian National Army forces in Singapore, and waging war in alliance with Imperial Japan against the British. In this trial, the defense made the radical claim that anticolonial wars fought in Asia against European powers were legitimate and just and should be recognized as such under international law. The aim of this Article is to draw attention to the understudied role of anticolonial movements in challenging the premises of international law in the aftermath of World War II.

The 1876 British Cruelty to Animals Act introduced an unprecedented administrative system to supervise any experiment “calculated to give pain” to a living animal. The act, which was in force for a hundred years, established a tight system of control over animal experimentation, including a small, but vigorous, inspectorate. This article explores the relations between bureaucracy and the production of knowledge through the correspondences, memos, and notes taken by two principal inspectors under the act. The inspectors belonged to the worlds of both law and science. Coming from within the scientific profession, their close ties to medical social circles not only evoked critique but also helped them fulfill their tasks and gain access to research laboratories. Archival records examined here for the first time show that, although the inspectors downplayed animals’ pain in physiological laboratories, the inspectorate played an important role in shaping the experimental space and practice, thus facilitating the production of “ethical scientific facts.” The inspectors’ work modeled the new legal regime of animal experimentation regulation, making them indispensable agents in the act’s coproduction of knowledge and public order.

Driven by the fear of collusion in the new divorce court, in 1860 Parliament authorized the Queen's Proctor to intervene in divorce suits by rooting out information that the parties left undisclosed. This paper explores the activities of the Queen's Proctor in its first quarter century, revealing both the curious genealogy of community participation in the Queen's Proctor's efforts and the struggle over the definition of collusion. Over time, economic and evidentiary concerns prompted the Queen's Proctor to turn from uncovering collusion to producing evidence of adultery. The Queen's Proctor represents a striking attempt by courts to assess the validity of party-controlled narratives, resulting in surprising practical consequences. Evaluation of narratives quickly devolved into a bright-line test focusing on adultery, with judges following the Queen's Proctor's lead and eschewing discretion.

Much of the discussion of the bar's “public interest” effort has centered on the apparent unwillingness of lawyers, including young lawyers, to pursue public interest rather than traditional careers. To the extent that it is agreed that public interest work should be increased, the problem has been viewed as one of supply of lawyers rather than one of demand for their services. In this paper, just the opposite is argued; a variety of evidence is brought forth to suggest that the current public interest effort is limited mainly by the number of jobs available in that sector. In this light, various methods of increasing the funding of the public interest sector, and hence the number of jobs, are reviewed.

This article is the third and last in a series that has focused on the corporate actor elite of Chicago's legal community—those attorneys who practice law with and for the major business, social, civic, cultural, and charitable organizations in the city. In this paper, the focus is on the participation of the members of that elite in a series of issues that have arisen in both the legal community and the larger society in the recent past.

The article first examines the resources for collective decision making which the members of the corporate actor legal elite bring to the process of community issue resolution. It then examines in detail elite issue preferences and the patterns of elite participation in five professional and political issues. From this analysis an interesting “paradox of power” emerges: the elite is most successful on those issues in which it is least interested and active and least successful on those which most heavily attract its participation. The article concludes with a discussion of the reason for this paradox, basing its answer in larger sociological theories of the activation of different types of resources in different types of community conflict.

Determination of the finance charge is central to the Truth in Lending disclosure scheme. The author analyzes difficulties encountered in drafting the finance charge provisions, judicial and administrative interpretations of the statutory provisions, and application of the concept to various types of transactions. He concludes that, despite imperfections in the statute and regulation, the present provisions are about the best that can be expected given the varieties of credit transactions and differences in state law provisions regulating such transactions.

In 1977 the National Labor Relations Board announced that it would no longer probe the truth or falsity of statements made in the course of representation campaigns. This decision, Shopping Kart Ford Market, overruled longstanding Board policy and was itself overruled the following year. Now, in August of 1982, the Board has again made a commitment to nonprobing and has reinstated the Shopping Kart standard (Midland National Life Insurance Co.,___ N.L.R.B.____, 110 L.R.R.M. 1489 (1982)). Such seesawing of Board positions suggests the difficulty of attempting to protect freedom of speech while simultaneously supporting other national labor policy goals, including employee freedom of choice and the integrity of representation elections. Critical to determining the appropriate standard for campaign speech is an understanding of how employees respond to misrepresentations or coercion in an employer's campaign rhetoric. This paper investigates the relationship between employer campaigning and employee response. Both employer and labor organization will have incentives to prevent coercive or misrepresentative speech at certain levels of violation severity. But in an intermediate range of speech in which that is not the case, the Board has a unique role to play in protecting the rights of individual employees and the public interest in the integrity of elections.

This study considers the relationships between first-year law students' admission credentials, the amount of time they spend in study, and the grades they receive on examination. Findings include that there is a significant drop in effort during the first year, that while effort invested in study pays off in improved grades this effort is much less significant in explaining grades than is student ability as measured by LSAT and undergraduate grades, that students in the middle and bottom of the class are helped more by substantial study than are those in the top, that class attendance is much more valuable in raising grades than is equivalent time in other study, and that none of the various study techniques examined could be linked with major differences in results.

During the 1970s, the Florida legislature enacted some of the nation's most innovative and comprehensive state and local land-planning and regulatory programs. The Environmental Land and Water Management Act of 1972 adopted large parts of an early draft of article 7 of the ALI Model Land Development Code, thereby asserting a state regulatory role in areas of critical state concern and for developments of regional impact; Florida's Local Government Comprehensive Planning Act of 1975 introduced planning and regulatory innovations that, if ever fully implemented, could place Florida in the vanguard of land regulatory reform at the local governmental level. This study, which is the concluding part of a study of the evolution of federal, state, and local regulatory roles in the management of coastal land resources, examines the intergovernmental, interagency, and separate-branch tensions that have emerged as Florida moves to implement its new laws. Included, inter alia, is an analysis of the Florida Supreme Court's controversial nondelegation decision in Askew v. Cross Key Waterways. Although Florida can claim some limited successes in program implementation, its land management systems are still not adequately integrated and coordinated, and they have not been implemented as successfully as their proponents thought possible. For example, the state has several alternatives for complying with the federal requirements for an approved management program under the Federal Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972—the comprehensive land management system examined in this study being only one of the available ones. Yet Florida still has been unable to obtain federal approval, and, if it ever does, will be one of the last of the major coastal states to do so. Much of Florida's difficulty in forging a well-integrated coastal land management process is attributable to substantial disagreements on two basic propositions: because of Florida's unique ecological characteristics, coastal land management should not be divorced from comprehensive land management for other purposes; and because of substantial regional diversities within the state, coastal land management in Florida should include a significant planning and regulatory role for local governments as well as for regional and state agencies.

In modern society, poverty has been defined not only by quantitative measures of well-being but as a morally distinct category. In turn, the moral status of poverty has frequently been associated with primordial characteristics of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. In these moral and ascriptive respects, the social structure of poverty has been related systematically to the thrust of civil legal assistance on behalf of the poor.

Cyclically over the past century in the industrialized West, the poor have been organized into a social status with castelike features. In alternating historical periods, not only have the poor been culturally differentiated as an inherently different status group, their qualitative distinction has been institutionally constructed by practices of segregation legally sanctioned by the state. By noting the historically fluctuating phases in the construction of a modern caste of the poor, we may better understand the sociological significance of providing counseling to the poor on their civil legal problems. Modern law quite generally and civil legal assistance to the poor in some narrow but notable ways have significantly promoted the structuring of poverty into caste forms. And the caste status of poverty has shaped the role of lawyers for the poor in several important respects.