The British who ruled Mandate Palestine established a prison visiting system that enabled inspection and oversight of carceral conditions by officials and lay representatives. In often contradictory and variegated ways, both the British and their subjects used this system as a political tool. For the British, lay participation in prison visiting was consistent with colonial pursuits such as advancing penal reform, attempting to “civilize” the local population, preserving the colonial difference, pacifying the locals, and co-opting opposition. The colonized employed prison visits for their own conflicting purposes: to advance both national goals and a universal agenda, to defy the colonial difference and to embrace it at the same time. British repurposing of reformist ideology to advance its civilizing mission was thus vulnerable to the claims of the colonized, who employed prison visiting to advance claims for ethnic and national equality, striking at the core principle of colonial difference. By examining the prison visit policy in Mandate Palestine, this article offers a pioneering approach to the political history of the colonial prison and the tension between penal reform and the larger colonial agenda.

In the 1970s, LGBT students at fourteen US colleges and universities took their institutions to court after newly established gay student groups were denied official recognition. While the students suffered defeats along the way, by the end of the decade they had won the war for recognition. This article provides a broad overview of these cases, discusses their significance, and argues that we cannot understand the struggle for gay student group recognition without considering its relationship to the state regulation of sex. Advocates for gay student groups won most of their battles by responding to the claim that recognition would be tantamount to aiding and abetting criminal sexual activities. They did so by pursuing strategies of desexualization, which denied that gay student groups encouraged same-sex sex. The article explores these strategies by focusing on three 1976 Virginia cases, one about gay student group recognition, one about the criminalization of same-sex sex, and one about the application of the state’s sodomy law to an interracial threesome. The divergent outcomes help us understand the strategic effectiveness and political limitations of LGBT desexualization strategies.

This study empirically examines whether and how the introduction of disability rights impacted the portrayal of disability in personal injury court decisions in Israel and offers a method for doing such research in other legal realms and contexts. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of Israeli district court judicial rulings over twenty years to measure whether a discursive shift occurred from a medical-individual view of disability to a social constructionist and a rights-based understanding of disability. Our coding system included descriptive and conceptual indicators, forming two indexes: a conventional index and a progressive index. Our findings reveal a steady dominance of the conventional discourse and a gradual yet limited rise in progressive discourse. Moreover, individual court decisions often manifest both types of discourse but are still dominated by a conventional view of disability and rarely apply direct disability rights terminology. These findings provide pioneering empirical evidence that substantiates the disability critique of tort law, demonstrating that judicial decision making is slow to adopt a disability rights perspective. More broadly, our findings show that the infusion of a disability rights orientation does not necessarily replace the older medical-individual view of disability but adds to it, resulting in a mixed discourse that includes both conventional and progressive elements.

Police custodial violence was a normal occurrence in the southern Indian province of Madras through the twentieth century, across the colonial and postcolonial periods alike. While governmental authorities attributed torture to individual deviants and the press attributed the practice to a lack of government will in punishing offenders, this article locates police impunity in broader structures of power that permeated society. Specifically, it shows how the deployment of seemingly objective forms of evidence in adjudicating cases of torture—the testimony of respectable persons, medical expertise, and police writing—discounted the voices of victims of violence, reaffirming instead policing’s alignment with class, caste, and gendered authority. Equally, the very act of witnessing produced some subjects as socially privileged by virtue of their respectable status, their expertise, or their literacy, further separating them from bodies that were vulnerable to state violence. Police sovereign power within the station was thus constituted in conjunction with disciplinary power across society.

This article examines aspirational laws in a randomized field experiment. We analyze the impact of an unenforced public smoking ban on individual behavior and attitudes. The findings indicate that aspirational laws, like public smoking bans, can make rights holders sensitive to behavior that violates their rights, irrespective of the material consequences of infringements and their personal views about the law. The results present a mixed position in the debate between rights-based social movement lawyering and critics of hollow rights. On the one hand, aspirational laws can create unforeseen social frictions when rights are declared, but their implementation and enforcement are ineffective. On the other hand, aspirational laws may also have self-fulfilling potential. Due to the adverse experience of rule breaking, rights holders may seek enforcement and compliance even if the law fails to influence public beliefs.

In 2014, the provincial government unveiled a new courthouse in Thunder Bay, Ontario, featuring a conference area designed to emulate an Anishinaabe roundhouse. The “Aboriginal Conference Settlement Suite” epitomizes efforts to support Indigenous justice within the criminal justice system. However, despite similar efforts in the past, the circumstances of Indigenous peoples in Canada have not improved. This ongoing commitment to legal solutions is emblematic of mainstream views of law as a problem-solving instrument. Notwithstanding awareness of its failings, law reformers remain dedicated to using law as a tool for social change. Employing a case study method focusing on the new courthouse, I challenge a prevailing wisdom that law reform outputs are manageable and in our control. I argue that similar to a courthouse, which is a concrete, physical structure as well as a symbol of justice, so too is the legal instrument both material and metaphorical, with concrete outcomes and symbolic forms. While treating law as a literal tool may give law reformers a longed-for sense of mastery, this approach belies law’s diffuse constitutive power and the various paradoxes in reformers’ actions. Accepting law’s dual nature is essential for candid and accurate assessments about the possibilities and limits of change through law.

This article enquires into colonial officials’ invocations of the “rule of law” and the persistence of racial difference in the modern British Empire. To unravel this contradiction, I examine the debates over the freedom of women during the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances in the directly ruled Crown Colonies of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1886 and 1890. Although the apparent purpose of these laws was the containment of venereal diseases, officials employed them to police prostitution and subject working-class, “native” women to medical surveillance. Despite the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances across the empire, officials in both colonies continued to regulate prostitution in the name of native women’s freedom, invoking the rule of law. Through the historical ethnography of the rule of law, I demonstrate how the language of this ideal rendered an evocative frame of beneficence, legality, and protection against which officials articulated social difference in racialized, and intersectional, ways—what I call racialized legalities. In comparing the colonized in terms of racialized legalities, officials designed a differentiated sovereignty in determining the protections granted to native women. Expressing the cultural power of law, the rule of law was a constitutive myth.

The probability that an event will avalanche into an impairment of essential services constitutes a “systemic risk.” Owing to the inherent complexities of modern societies, the outbreak of a novel disease or the failure of a financial institution can rapidly escalate into an impact significantly larger than the initial event. Through the lens of complex system theory, this article draws a parallel between financial crises and disasters to contend that the regulatory framework for financial systemic risk is unequipped to address its fundamental dynamics. Epitomized by the market failure rationale, financial regulation is premised on a reductionist view that purports both systemic risk and law as external to the actions of market participants. Conversely, this article advances a twofold conceptual framework. First, it shows that systemic risk emerges from the same complex dynamics that generate the financial system. Second, it understands law as an agent of complexity, thus contributing to the emergence of finance and its inherent instability. Normatively, this conceptual framework reveals the limits of current regulatory approaches and constructs a holistic risk governance framework that is akin to the one adopted to govern disaster risks.

In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, coverage of executions in the Atlanta Constitution and the New Orleans (Times-)Picayune occasionally portrayed African Americans executed by the state as legally, politically, and spiritually similar to their white counterparts. But as radical white supremacy took hold across the South, the coverage changed. Through an analysis of 667 newspaper articles covering the executions of Black and white men in Georgia and Louisiana from 1877 to 1936, I found that as lynching became the principal form of lethal punishment in the South, accounts of Black men’s legal executions shrank in length and journalists increasingly portrayed them as ciphers, nonentities that the state was dispatching with little fanfare. In contrast, accounts of white men’s executions continued to showcase their individuality and their membership in social, political, and religious communities. A significant gap between the material reality and the cultural representation of capital punishment emerged. Legal executions in Georgia and Louisiana overwhelmingly targeted Black men. But on the pages of each state’s most prominent newspaper, the executions of white men received the most attention. As a result, capital punishment was increasingly represented as a high-status punishment that respected the “whiteness” of those who suffered it.

This article is a story about tetherings, a concept that illuminates the power of law in the relational dynamics of individual-family-state. The concept emerges from my qualitative study of parental maintenance litigation in Taiwan over the provision of financial support to troublous parents, who mistreated their children when they were young. Troubled parental maintenance litigation arises when nobody wants to look after these elderly people, and the state restricts their access to social welfare by holding their estranged children financially responsible. Such litigation leads to empowerments and disempowerments for litigants, as well as legal reform and detriments for the state. Bridging sociolegal scholarship on continuing relations with feminist vulnerability theory, “tetherings” is both an empirical and a normative concept concerned with the relational nature of power, and the openness of humans and institutions to harms and other changes. The concept is empirical, being the paradigm through which I trace disputes and other relational processes of individual-family-state; it is normative because my empirical analysis aims to expose the state’s workings and detail how people respond to law and power that binds them to one another and the state. “Tetherings” advances feminist vulnerability theory and offers a circumspectly optimistic view on the potential of law.

Rights constitutionalism faces a global crisis of legitimacy, and recent years have seen a surge in scholarship on the crisis. The vast majority of analyses focus on broad structural factors and processes. This article takes a different approach: sociological and bottom up. I use qualitative discourse analysis to examine how social actors in Israel justified their antagonism toward rights constitutionalism in three cases where judicial intervention for human rights encountered exceptional public opposition and political backlash. The analysis reveals that social actors used discourses of belonging—both liberal and non-liberal—to challenge rights constitutionalism as a constraint on democratic politics, when they perceived rights protection as conflicting with or undervaluing boundaries of collective identity. Based on these findings, I introduce a new concept—the challenge of belonging—that expresses the normative tension between individual rights and collective belonging. By highlighting the ethical dimension of social opposition to rights constitutionalism, the sociological approach allows a nuanced understanding of such opposition. The challenge of belonging can account for mixed attitudes in the same polity and even in the same social group on rights-oriented judicial intervention, and it points to a common normative thread linking attacks on liberal constitutionalism in vastly different sociopolitical settings.

In recent years US prisons have failed to meet legally required minimum standards of care and protection of incarcerated people. Explanations for the failure to protect prisoners in the United States focus on the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and lack of adequate external oversight. However, very little scholarship empirically examines how different systems of accountability for prisoners’ rights work (or do not work) together. In this article, we introduce an accountability framework that helps us examine the prisoners’ rights “accountability environment” in the United States. We then compare two post-PLRA case studies of failure to protect incarcerated women from sexual assault in two different states. We find that the prisoners’ rights accountability environment is a patchwork of legal, bureaucratic, professional, and political systems. The patchwork accountability environment consists of a web of hierarchical and interdependent relationships that constrain or enable accountability. We argue that ultimately the effectiveness of prisoners’ rights accountability environments depends on whether protecting prisoners’ rights aligns with the priorities of dominant political officials. Our argument has implications for efforts to improve prison conditions and incarcerated people’s well-being.

The French, American, and English legal professions are compared in terms of four common goals: to control admission and training, to protect their jurisdiction, to regulate the behavior of their members, and to enhance their cooperative status. The varying ways in which revolutionary attacks affected their capacity to realize these goals is traced. It is argued that these attacks, and the way lawyers in these societies recovered from them, largely explain the differences between the three professions in the modem world.

I want to thank the editors of Law and Social Inquiry for giving me the chance to convey my immense admiration—indeed, reverence would not be too strong a word—for James Heckman and his work, on the occasion of his being awarded the 2000 Nobel prize in economics. It's a great pleasure to be able publicly to acknowledge my personal and professional debts to Jim; but I've come to realize that it's also a great burden to have to say something worthy of the occasion and the person. Jim's own writing tends toward the terse rather than the expansive. In that spirit, the tersest thing I can say that adequately conveys the importance of his work is that I'm certain that people will still be reading and talking about both his methodological and substantive ideas 100 years from now.