Educational research is increasingly subject to legal restrictions designed for the protection of human subjects of research. In this article the author discusses legal restrictions–both in the courts and under HEW regulations–on educational research, comparing these restrictions with those on biomedical research. He finds that although educational research in particular instances may give rise to suits for damages for invasion of privacy or intentional infliction of psychological distress, the legal issues relating to educational research will most often be resolved in proceedings before institutional review boards charged by HEW with the responsibility for passing upon proposals to conduct research on human subjects. He argues that the interests protected in proceedings before institutional review boards are not limited to those that have received judicial recognition in suits for damages. The author finds that the requirement that the informed consent of subjects be obtained presents difficult issues for educational research. He notes in particular the problems presented by research proposals that as an element of the research design contemplate the observation of subjects without their knowledge and the use of children as research subjects.

Most discussions of lawyer-client decision making concern the difficult question of deciding when a lawyer must (or may) disregard his client's wishes because of conflict with some other significant interest outside the lawyer-client relationship. One of the ideological bases of the adversary system is a strong commitment to client control of decision making, which in theory must be balanced or reconciled with concerns about such control distorting the truthfinding functions of the legal system or causing harm to others. Little discussed until recently has been the fact that, despite this ideology, lawyers in many cases significantly control their clients' decisions and exert broad discretion over the means necessary to implement decisions.

How do courts mediate the relationship between the practice of torture and the content of law in places where torture is neither explicitly criminalized nor authorized? If torture is recounted in court, then what happens? Drawing on sixteen months of observation and documentary research in Thailand, this article outlines a jurisprudence of torture in which judges accommodate the practice by denying the facticity of narratives about torture, or accepting the narratives’ facticity but denying that anyone can be held responsible, or accepting that someone might be held responsible but excusing them of responsibility in the name of duty or by holding only one or two of them, or their employer, in some way liable. Through this jurisprudence, judges in Thailand have kept torture at the limits of law: not on a boundary between the legal and illegal, but on a line between the legally ordered and unordered, which is to say, in the realm of the alegal.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the interdisciplinary cooperation and interaction between American legal realists and anthropologists during the interwar period. Using scholarly publications and manuscripts as its sources, it argues that despite the lack of recognition in earlier studies, there were transfers of important methodological and substantive influences that were crucial to the creation of legal anthropology as it is known today, as well as the whole field of law and society studies. Writers of the era like Karl N. Llewellyn, E. Adamson Hoebel, Felix S. Cohen, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski utilized interdisciplinary influences to criticize scholarly formalism as well as social and political conservatism, seeking to replace conceptual structures with scientific facts gained from studies.

Constitutional drafters often look to foreign constitutional models, ideas, and texts for inspiration; many are explicit about their foreign borrowing. However, when implemented domestically, the meaning of borrowed elements often changes. Political scientists and scholars of comparative constitutional law have analyzed the transnational movement of constitutional ideas and norms, but the political processes through which the meaning of foreign provisions might be refashioned remain understudied. Sociolegal scholars have examined the “transplantation” and “translation” of laws and legal institutions, but they rarely scrutinize this process in the context of constitutions. Drawing on an examination of borrowed constitutional elements in four cases (Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Israel), this article builds on research in comparative politics, comparative constitutional law, and sociolegal studies to provide a nuanced picture of deliberate efforts to import “inclusive” constitutional provisions regarding religion-state relations while, at the same time, refashioning the meaning of those provisions in ways that “exclude” specific forms of religious, sectarian, doctrinal, or ideological diversity. Building on sociolegal studies regarding the translation of law, we argue that foreign constitutional elements embraced by politically embedded actors are often treated as “empty signifiers” with meanings that are deliberately transformed. Tracing the processes that lead political actors to engage foreign constitutional elements, even if they have no intention of transplanting their prior meaning, we highlight the need for detailed case studies to reveal both the international and the national dynamics that shape and reshape the meaning of constitutions today.

A growing body of research suggests that contemporary law firms face challenges with the retention of legal talent—especially women and racialized lawyers. Yet, we know little about the conditions that prompt lawyers to leave law firms or where they go after leaving. This article builds on the scholarship of John Hagan, emphasizing the role of social capital in law firm culture, and work by Emmanuel Lazega, tracing dimensions of law firm collegiality—both with implications for lawyers’ careers within and beyond law firms. I draw on data from a twenty-seven-year longitudinal survey of Canadian lawyers. Using piecewise exponential survival models, I examine organizational, cultural, and individual factors that may encourage mobility from law firms. The study reveals a pervasive gender difference that is not explained by human capital, organizational characteristics, or individual traits. Results also demonstrate the importance of social capital and firm culture—specifically, the presence of workplace policies of flexible scheduling, lawyers’ sense of a good match with their firm, their satisfaction with status rewards, and finally, the role of mentors—in shaping the flow of legal talent from law firms to various job destinations.

In common law, trespassers could not sue for injuries. In the early 1870s, however, courts exempted child trespassers injured by industrial machinery from this rule. The development of the hotly contested “attractive nuisance” doctrine illustrates turn-of-the-twentieth-century debates about how to allocate the risk of injury from industrial accidents, which linked responsibility to the capacity to understand danger and to exert self-control. Although at first courts in attractive nuisance cases perceived children as innocent, irrational “butterflies,” they gradually reconceived child plaintiffs to be rational, risk-bearing individuals, a change reflected and accelerated by the Safety First campaign launched by railroad corporations. This reframing of children's ability to bear risk created the standard of the “reasonable child,” which transferred responsibility for industrial accidents to children themselves. Although by the 1930s the attractive nuisance doctrine had been widely accepted, in practice the “reasonable child” standard posed a difficult hurdle for child plaintiffs to overcome.

This essay examines the intellectual history of the idea of judicial restraint, starting with the early debates among the US Constitution’s founding generation. In the late nineteenth century, law professor James Bradley Thayer championed the concept and passed it on to his students and others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, who modified and applied it based on the jurisprudential preoccupations of a different era. In a masterful account, Brad Snyder examines Justice Frankfurter’s attempt to put the idea into practice. Although Frankfurter arguably made a mess of it, he passed the idea of judicial restraint on to Alexander Bickel and others. Today it remains a topic of much academic debate, while Supreme Court Justices occasionally give the idea lip service when it advances outcomes they desire.

I propose that the intellectual history of judicial restraint reflects the all-too-human inability to refrain from exercising power. The founders, focused on the need to mitigate the flaws of human nature in designing the executive and legislative branches, failed to sufficiently foresee how the same flaws would affect members of the judiciary. The failed idea of judicial restraint stands as the legacy of the founders’ mistake.

This article demonstrates a method to measure the extent and variation of ethnoracial disproportion in world prison populations. Using a novel data set covering eighteen democracies for the year 2016, this method shows that conspicuous ethnoracial disproportion in prisons is pervasive in democracies for which data is available. Socioeconomically marginalized ethnic and racial groups are overrepresented in the prisons of every case. Further, this pattern extends to countries known for penal progressivism, which otherwise are regarded as models of fair and rational criminal justice implementation. Correlation between prison disproportion and national socioeconomic and criminal justice characteristics suggests the complexity of the issue. A selection of single-case analyses drawn from the sample describe prison disproportion emerging under significantly varied national conditions. I discuss causal hypotheses for why ethnoracial disproportion would occur in such differing places.

This article argues that there is body of governing laws appearing widely throughout the global history of religions that warrants classification as constitutions. Like national constitutions, these religious constitutions present themselves as a form of “higher law” that declare the identity of a given a community, organize its structures of governing power, define its foundational norms, and authorize further acts of rulemaking. In this article, I offer an overview of these texts across several traditions and a defense of their importance in the study of comparative constitutional law. I then draw on fieldwork from Sri Lanka to provide a firsthand account of what a modern religious constitution looks like and how it works to govern one of the country’s largest communities of Buddhist monks. I conclude by urging scholars to view religion and constitutional law not as opposing legal domains but, rather, as homologous forms of social ordering that draw upon similar concepts and logics to address common human dilemmas.

In South Africa, municipal noncompliance with legislation promoting the constitutional right to sufficient water is both a failure of the rule of law and a betrayal of that right. Judicial intervention has prompted formalistic compliance with water law, but the underlying commitment to sufficient water remains unfulfilled. Does the inability of courts to achieve social justice despite enforcing social legislation confirm the thesis that commitments to the rule of law and to social justice are inconsistent, that upholding the rule of law may not advance social justice? This article offers an alternative to this “inconsistency thesis,” arguing that the rule of law can accommodate social justice if it demands normative congruence alongside congruence with formal rules. Empirical investigation reveals that structural challenges and the multifarious normative demands on officials create a condition of normative incongruence that impedes the pursuit of social justice, even as courts compel congruence with formal rules.

The field of public health law has been honing important transdisciplinary methods such as legal epidemiology and legal mapping. These methods can and should be integrated into socio-legal studies because they provide us with a way to capture the legal elements of interlocking power structures, offer ways to meaningfully compare and predict what access to rights will look like across jurisdictions, and capture a new way to study legal pluralism across and within jurisdictions. To illustrate the benefit of such methods for studying legal pluralism, this article offers the State Reproductive Autonomy Index, which compares all fifty states on seventy-five variables. Modeled on legal epidemiology’s survey of multiple types of law, including laws that can be classified as infrastructural (laying the institutional or policy parameters), interventionist (specifically targeted to produce a result), and incidental (distally related, not intentionally), this method integrates the work of reproductive justice scholars with the work on legal pluralism to illustrate the vast inequalities in access to reproductive autonomy across the United States. The State Reproductive Autonomy Index also shows why reproductive justice, rather than reproductive rights discourse, is a more accurate frame for understanding laws relating to reproduction and bodily autonomy.

How do transnational lawyers valorize their expertise in a political and economic crisis? This article argues that knowing how transnational lawyers valorize their expertise is critical to understanding how transnational law evolves and affects society, especially when existing legal frameworks prove to be inadequate and novel practices must pave new paths. Using the acute phase of the Eurozone crisis between 2010 and 2012 as an empirical case, I examine how European Union (EU) legal agents constructed a framework that accommodated the uncertainty of governing a crisis while also mediating the contentious politics between EU Member States. The analysis shows that as intergovernmental bargaining dominates Eurozone crisis governance, EU legal advisors intervene to reconcile these bargains with the EU legal order using novel practices that simultaneously valorize their legal expertise. These practices in effect engender a high degree of interdependence and interconnection between the EU legal order and several intergovernmental arrangements—especially the European Stability Mechanism—leading to the creation of a unique form of EU governance: semi-intergovernmentalism. This article contributes to debates on legal globalization by empirically examining how transnational legal agents valorize their expertise through strategies directed at defending their autonomy while protecting the normative coherence of their transnational legal order: the EU.