A growing empirical literature examines the role of incarceration in labor market outcomes and economic inequality more broadly. Devah Pager's book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (2007), offers compelling evidence that employment opportunities for former prisoners—especially black former prisoners—are bleak. I review Pager's methods and findings, place them in the context of previous work, and discuss the relation of race to a criminal record. I then explore several lines of related research that investigate the increasing reach of criminal punishment into various social realms. One goal of this essay is to draw research on economic inequality into the law and society literature.

Street railway strikes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were frequently the occasion for large‐scale collective violence in North American cities and challenged the capacity of local authorities to maintain civic order. However, this was only the most visible manifestation of the challenge that street railway workers' collective action posed to the order of liberal capitalism, an order constructed on several intersecting dimensions. Using the example of Canadian street railway workers from 1886 to 1914, a period of rapid urbanization and industrialization, this article explores the ways the collective action by workers and their community sympathizers challenged the workplace, marketplace, and “streetplace” orders of liberal capitalism. It discusses how those challenges were met through political and legal processes of resistance and accommodation, taking into account the fragmentation of state power, hostile public opinion toward the street railways, and conflicting views over the legitimate scope for workers' collective action.

Governments, like business organizations, are exposed to risks of many kinds and have a wide range of options how to respond–from bearing the full risk themselves to obtaining full insurance coverage. The author discusses some of the traditional approaches to governmental risk management in the light of new and increasing risks–such as the liability risk–and the growing sophistication of risk management methods. He notes in particular how a government's risk management decisions differ from those of a business organization because of the unique characteristics of government entities: perpetual existence; taxing power; the need to prevent nepotism, bribery, and corruption in government administration; and political mandates and pressures of all kinds. These forces account for restrictive procurement rules and for various forms of “self-insurance” arrangements. The author finds, among other things, that in most states the rules have not kept pace with the multiplication of risks and the development of new risk management and insurance techniques, and that small and medium municipalities, especially, suffer from inadequate access to sound risk management services. On the basis of an examination of European municipal risk management practices, the author then suggests as an appropriate solution the formation of special mutual insurance organizations for municipal governments, controlled and administered by local government officials.

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 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.

This article aims to explain the differential use of litigation by social movements pursuing social change. While previous studies have sought to compare non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that turn to litigation with those that do not, we study organizations that have all resorted at least once to legal action. Taking Belgium and the field of antidiscrimination as a case study, our research confirms the findings of previous literature that the characteristics of the legal environment do impact on the choice of organizations whether or not to go to court. But we also find that legal action is used differentially by NGOs depending on two factors in particular: their position as an insider or outsider in the political realm and their possession of legal resources. Based on a quantitative measure of legal actions initiated by NGOs and interviews with activists, we propose a typology of civil society organizations—which we label “experienced litigants,” “occasional litigants,” and “litigants by necessity”—that could be transposed to other contexts and other types of interest groups.

In the context of a national movement to defund police departments, many American cities are starting to reimagine public safety, as activists demand new practices that maintain safety while minimizing harm, as well as ensuring accountability when harms occur. Drawing on Everyday Peace Indicators methodologies, we argue that “community-centered” measurement, combined with researcher-practitioner partnerships, can help move both researchers and policymakers toward a more meaningful approach to policy design and evaluation. However, the application of community-centered measurement to the context of American policing raises important theoretical and practical concerns—in particular, the question of how community is defined, and who gets to define it. In this article, we ask: how do we define “community” in participatory research contexts where the concept of community is overlapping and contested? Using the example of a recent study carried out in the City of Oakland, we illustrate the complexities of applying a community-centered measurement process to the case of public safety and, more broadly, to police reform in American cities. We conclude with a discussion of both the benefits and limitations of our own approach, as well as a set of considerations for those engaging in participatory research.

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.

This essay on Mitra Sharafi's Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772–1947 (2014) focuses on the relationship between certain minorities and the law of the state. It seeks to expand the discussion found in Sharafi's book in three directions: first, by comparing the attitude of Parsis in South Asia to the law of the state with the attitude of German Jewish immigrants in mandatory Palestine and Israel to state law; second, by asking whether the Parsis' embracing of state law was linked to their economic success; and, finally, by pointing to the nature of law itself as a “minority discourse.”