In recent decades, the Taiwan judiciary has taken steps toward securing Indigenous people’s access to the justice system. These measures reflect a vision of access to justice framed narrowly on national courts and legal actors through the provision of free legal counsel, courtroom interpreters, and special court units dedicated to Indigenous people. These measures embrace a thin understanding of access to justice that overlooks important hurdles to both seeking and providing such access to Indigenous people. This article considers some of the key challenges of Indigenous people’s access to justice in Taiwan and the role of the judiciary in both perpetuating and addressing those challenges. It argues for a thicker understanding of access to justice that addresses the circumstances of contemporary Indigenous life and confronts the entrenchment of colonialism in the state framework. Field research in eastern Taiwan shows how aspects of normativity, spatiality, economics, order, language, and institutions, ensconced in a legal framework that reinforces an unequal power relationship between the state and Indigenous people, have shaped the character of access to the justice system and, in turn, continue to operate as obstacles to meaningful access to justice for Taiwan’s Indigenous people.

Preemption is one of the most important legal doctrines for today’s progressives to understand because of its power to constrain progressive policymaking and social movement lawyering at the state and local level. By examining the detailed history of a decades-long campaign by the labor and environmental movements to improve working conditions in an industry at the heart of the global supply chain, Scott L. Cummings’s Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America’s Port (2018) provides a case study about the doctrine and impacts of preemption. The study also inspires lawyers and activists alike to reexamine core questions of factual relevance, representation and voice, and precedent.

Lawyers play an important role in mobilizing rights, yet the lawyer-client relationship can be challenging to navigate. This is especially true for immigrants who face barriers to accessing rights and protections. Undocumented status multiplies existing challenges, enhancing the need for an advocate. Based on sixty-six interviews with low-wage immigrant workers (thirty-one documented, thirty-five undocumented) from 2012 to 2014, I reveal how immigration status impacts why and how clients seek legal counsel, the expectations they have for their lawyers, and their eventual sense of satisfaction—or frustration—with their claim. As victims of an enforcement regime and legal system seemingly rigged against them, undocumented clients often have lower expectations of their lawyers and may doubt the integrity of the legal process itself. As a result, they often seemed resigned to follow their attorneys’ lead, minimizing conflict. However, undocumented status also limits labor mobility and generates uncertainty about the future, making claimants more willing to settle claims in order to move on. While they are often willing to come forward, many undocumented claimants nonetheless reject abstract notions of justice in favor of a more pragmatic attitude toward legal mobilization: a certain legal cynicism masquerading as client satisfaction.

This article analyzes rights consciousness as distinct from legal consciousness, and uses the post-1989 housing restitution in Romania to study property rights consciousness as a type of rights consciousness. I argue that property rights consciousness is only partially an outcome of state power and the political regime, and that rights consciousness more generally must be explicitly analyzed beyond formal rights, legal mobilization, and litigation. I explore sources of rights consciousness for former owners and their heirs, state tenants, and lawyers. Sources of rights consciousness include state policies under distinct property regimes, value systems and ideologies, history, identity, practices, supranational actors, and expectations of what rights can deliver. I find clear distinctions between legal and rights consciousness, as well as variations between and within the groups. The article is based on extensive archival research, interviews conducted in the city of Timişoara, Romania, textbooks, academic articles, and court decisions pre- and post-1989.

As law deepens its engagement with visual data, legal scholars have expressed concern that courts all too often uphold photographic evidence as objective representations of truth, rather than as necessarily partial portrayals of reality. To combat this naïve realism in legal institutions, some are incorporating insights from media studies in calling for a jurisprudence of the visual. Drawing on an ongoing lawsuit over the disclosure of detainee abuse photographs taken in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, I suggest this project expand its scope to examine litigants' interpretations of images in courtrooms, as well as concerns beyond photographic objectivity that arise in disclosure disputes, including images' unique privacy implications and national security risks. Though the stakes in this case are atypical, these specific concerns are to varying degrees more germane. Having all been raised before, they are likely to be heard again, if only by a single judge or jury.

The competence of attorneys, and more particularly the competence of trial lawyers, is currently an issue of considerable controversy both within the judiciary and within the legal profession itself. This article addresses the issue of attorneys' courtroom performance as observed by judges. Drawing on data from a survey administered to state and federal judges sitting in trial courts of general jurisdiction, this article explores the relationship of demographic and judicial characteristics to various judicial evaluations of advocacy competence. While it provides important insights into the present state of trial advocacy competence, it also constitutes a systematic examination of the judiciary's perceptions of the trial bar.

Historically, the federal government has had a major role in regulation of coastal activities, restricted until recently, however, primarily to regulation of activities affecting navigable water bodies. On the sea coast, regulation of areas landward of such jurisdictional boundaries as “mean high tide line” was generally left to the states or their delegates.

In eleven countries, same-sex sexual intimacy is punishable by death. Applying a legal pluralistic framework, we argue that “state-enabled killing” of same-sex-attracted people occurs in at least twenty-three countries. State-enabled killings range from extrajudicial and quasi-judicial killings, where state actors carry out the killing, through instances where the state retrospectively authorizes, through bias or lawful excuses to homicide, the killing of same-sex-attracted people by private actors, to cases where the state permits or endorses forms of so-called “conversion therapy” that can lead to death. We contend that a narrow focus on the death penalty as the only genuine form of state-enabled killing of same-sex-attracted people is analytically unwarranted and strategically dubious in terms of law reform advocacy. Critical legal pluralism allows us to pursue the practical and normative implications of hypothesizing a functional equivalence between the death penalty and these other forms of state-enabled killing.

Pulled Over: How Police Stops Define Race and Citizenship, by Charles R. Epp, Steven Maynard-Mood, and Donald Haider-Markel, is an important piece of law and society scholarship that isolates investigatory police stops as an institutional practice with profound consequences for racial inequality. Pulled Over also speaks to scholarship on race and ethnicity by addressing an ongoing tension between a focus on the socially constructed nature of racial categories and their stratifying significance. Pulled Over offers an important model for future studies by incorporating social constructionist insights into how race is measured, empirically documenting institutionally produced racial inequalities, and linking these inequalities to the evolving meaning of race itself.

Law firm pro bono work provides access to justice to low-income people and other vulnerable populations. The professionals that manage pro bono programs are at the forefront of that process. The limited available research on these professionals do not often distinguish lawyers from other managers or theorize about their status vis-à-vis other law firm lawyers. Yet the status of lawyers who are also managers of pro bono programs influences both their identities and the management and provision of legal services and advocacy. Drawing on original demographic and interview data, this article shows how law firm pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles and negotiate their status as lawyers and managers. I find that pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles by striving to be perceived as “real” lawyers, reframe their roles as business generators, conform to the billing culture, and establish a common identity. They also negotiate their titles and office spaces to raise their profiles. Gender inequality influences the negotiation of office spaces and the approval of pro bono matters. These findings have implications for lawyers who manage pro bono programs and the legitimacy of pro bono work.