In the United States, legal representation increases the likelihood that undocumented immigrants win legal claims. Yet private attorneys are expensive, and free and low-cost attorneys are scarce. How do legal services providers make representation decisions when demand outweighs capacity? Drawing on interviews with attorneys in thirty-eight nonprofit organizations who represent affirmative, humanitarian status seekers, this article describes how lawyers face pressure to represent winnable cases. Attorneys assess case winnability in two ways. First, attorneys aim to maximize clients’ cultural legibility as “deserving immigrant victims.” Simultaneously, attorneys aim to minimize case representation burden by considering the time, resources, and expertise needed to represent each claim. Attorneys assess both cultural legibility and case burden at every stage of the representation process (client selection, attorney assignment, relief pursual, and application production). In doing so, attorneys try to represent clients as the most deserving of status and in the most efficient way. These findings extend past research on attorneys’ selection processes that occur well before a client’s application is filed with the federal immigration bureaucracy. By highlighting how attorneys’ constrained decisions exacerbate legal stratification, these findings complicate calls for an immigrant legal inclusion strategy that depends on the labor of attorneys rather than on changes to the state’s demands on immigrants themselves.

This review essay looks at the relationship between Deborah Tuerkheimer’s Credible (2021) and Meera Deo’s Unequal Profession (2019) in order to make a substantive point about inequality in legal institutions and the methods that are employed in dissecting them. At first glance, the connections between these projects might not seem apparent, although each deals with the inequalities in which its actors in focus are embedded. But both projects go deeper by unveiling institutional inequities that are often in plain sight when we investigate the background frameworks implicated in their production, and they reveal the problematic relationship between everyday discrimination and the systemic biases that justify them. Finally, reading these books together allows us to make an intervention about the methods and credibility of narratives within socio-legal scholarship more generally. In theorizing about legitimacy, we ask how the way in which we are told to look at structures of normativity changes the kinds of inequities we are able to see.

This review essay of Hendrik Hartog's (2012) Someday All This Will Be Yours undertakes a brief overview of some of the massive changes in middle‐class planning for old age and inheritance in the United States over the course of the past century, focusing on the increased role of the state as a source of funding and regulation, the rise of the elder law bar, and the resulting new tools and motives for the transfer of property in exchange for care in the age of Medicaid.

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.

In this exploratory cross-cultural study, we use interview data from representatives of social service, criminal justice, and policy-making agencies in two capital cities (Washington, D.C.) and Madrid, Spain) to compare responses to domestic violence within each country's sociolegal and cultural context. While both countries have patriarchal structures, there is great difference in the history, funding, development, and participants of the battered women's movement. For instance, in Spain the government determined the appropriate response to domestic violence from the onset, whereas in the United States the power to frame, find, and respond to the issue operated through a more insidious process of state cooptation. In both countries, wider social changes did not result; rather, services were provided as the movements became tied to finding requirements and to satisfying bureaucratic exigencies. Within this context, we analyze respondents' perceptions and interpretations of domestic violence as well as the institutional practices and future strategies proposed for continued social action.

In All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (2010), Keith Bybee considers the hypocrisy of modern law—that is, the widespread view that judges are both principled and partisan—by drawing an analogy with courtesy. Both law and courtesy contain and manage the diverse and potentially divisive interests that would, were they not contained, disrupt social life. In this essay I extend this argument by considering whether the relationship between law and courtesy is more than merely analogical. I suggest that both systems are aspects of larger historical developments out of which emerged the modern subject and the modern state, creating a social world made up of apparently bounded individuals and institutions. As such, law and courtesy do more than conceal and contain interests and subjectivity; they produce the unruly, partisan subjects they are designed to manage.

Stories told by and about men who batter women in the courts of Hawai in the mid-19th century and in the late 20th century are strikingly similar. Courts, then as now, accept some justifications for battering and reject others, in the process constructing the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Throughout this period, the legal system claimed to focus only on the violent act itself, not the emotional or personal violation. The law interprets the violence as brute fact, knowable without regard to the social relationship or system of cultural meanings within which it occurs. There are persistent contradictions between the law's construction of domestic violence as an unambiguous physical act and litigants' and judges' views that these violent acts are moments within the social dynamics of gendered power relations. At the same time, there are recurrent tensions between the efforts of the legal system to portray violent acts against women in terms of rational categories of action and, in contrast, the experience of violence and the meanings within which it occurs that are often opaque to such sense-making, defiant of a simple means-ends calculus.