Law exists solely in and through language. Nonetheless, systematical empirical analysis of legal language has been rare. Yet, the tides are turning: After judges at various courts (including the US Supreme Court) have championed a method of analysis called corpus linguistics, the Michigan Supreme Court held in June 2016 that this method “is consistent with how courts have understood statutory interpretation.” The court illustrated how corpus analysis can benefit legal casework, thus sanctifying twenty years of previous research into the matter. The present article synthesizes this research and introduces computer-assisted legal linguistics (CAL2) as a novel approach to legal studies. Computer-supported analysis of carefully preprocessed collections of legal texts lets lawyers analyze legal semantics, language, and sociosemiotics in different working contexts (judiciary, legislature, legal academia). The article introduces the interdisciplinary CAL2 research group (www.cal2.eu), its Corpus of German Law, and other related projects that make law more transparent.

This study of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from the late 1970s reports on the differing ways that women and men have responded to the conflicting claims of work and family. It finds that women with children who have entered the profession have indeed continued to bear the principal responsibilities for the care of children, but it also finds that these women, with all their burdens, are more satisfied with their careers and with the balance of their family and professional lives than other women and than men.

How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006–2007, we find that—contrary to standard depictions of corporate client-provider relationships—(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring; and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following “star” lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The combination of long-term relationships and subunit rivalry provides law firms with steady work flows and allows companies to keep cost pressure on firms while preserving relationship-specific capital, quality assurance, and soft forms of legal capacity insurance. Our findings have implications for law firms, corporate departments, and law schools.

This article uses interviews and comparative professional histories to explore the stakes of the battle—pre-Enron and seen in reactions to the Enron crisis—between the organized bar and the multidisciplinary practices (MDPs) associated with the Big Five accounting firms and their law firms. The paper examines modes of professional practice—family, Continental corporate law, and the Cravath model—to describe the tensions and potential solutions to maintaining professional legitimacy without appearing too close to business or economic power. The paper then seeks to explain preliminarily why the MDP debate became so strong in the United States despite the fact that the actual threat to U.S. corporate lawyers appeared relatively small. It suggests that the interjection of the Big Five potentially threatened a relatively precarious professional legitimacy with different impacts for different sectors of the bar.

This article investigates how lawyers manage legal and bureaucratic uncertainties associated with humanitarian immigration law by examining their representation of undocumented crime victims petitioning for U Visa status. Immigration attorneys craft dual narratives to persuade adjudicators that their clients qualify for and deserve this new legal status, but representing migrants well creates moral dilemmas. I explore how lawyers elicit and script narratives of “clean” victimhood to demonstrate that their clients qualify for U Visa standing. Next I argue that attorneys construct narratives articulating migrants’ civic engagement to position their clients as contributing members of society who deserve legal status. The final section illustrates how the production of these narratives generates a range of professional and ethical dilemmas for lawyers. This examination of how law is developed within a confining legal framework that is at the same time not totally institutionalized extends the “law in action” paradigm, which has been animated primarily by analyses of how legal actors tailor the idiosyncratic details of discrete cases to match existing precedents.

This essay provides an overview of actor-network theory (ANT) and its potential interest for sociolegal scholars. It focuses on Bruno Latour's 2002 ethnography of La fabrique du droit: une ethnographie du Conseil d’État [The factory of law: an ethnography of the Conseil d’État] (2002b), which provides an analysis of the workings of the French Conseil d’État. The essay seeks to introduce non-French-reading sociolegal researchers to this work and draws out methodological and theoretical implications for research on legal institutions, legal knowledge, and bureaucracies.

This article focuses on discourses conducted in Central/East European countries, and Poland in particular, with respect to the issue of participation of former secret agents in the new power structures. It exposes the reader to the range, style, content, and variety of lustration discourses. It explores their relevance for the ongoing power struggle, paying special attention to their focus on and contribution to the processes of construction and control of truth about the past.

Given that the procedural and legal-institutional issues occupy a marginal place in the debate, it is inferred that the main sources of discord are more ideological and political than legal. The two main strains within the global lustration discourse are identified as: (1) dystopian discourses that paint a frightful picture of a lustrated society and imply that the upheaval of lustration would ruin the chance for democratic evolution, and (2) affirmative discourses that assert the need for lustration and portray the refusal to implement it as a barrier to successful transition to democracy. The article elaborates on assumptions and beliefs, which tend to link the dystopian opposition to lustration with the left-wing political affiliation or self-identification and the affirmative discourse with the right-wing orientation.

Unwelcome touching, groping, and kissing are illegal, but widely tolerated in public drinking settings. This contingency in the law's response means that patrons routinely negotiate the moral boundaries of nonconsensual sexual contact. We use 197 interviews with college-age individuals to examine the discursive strategies young people employ when negotiating those boundaries. We find that most interviewees have experiences with sexual aggression, do not categorize it as aggression, but advocate for stronger legal punishments against offenders. In accounting for this paradox, they draw on contradictory legal and cultural narratives that both normalize and condemn men's sexual aggression. We build on legal consciousness theories and gender theories by highlighting the complex ways that gender stereotypes enshrined in law are implicated in the construction of a social problem. We also contribute to the sociology of culture by explicating the often unconscious link between culture and action revealed in young people's narratives about sexual aggression.

This article is part of a larger study on the history of industrial safety law in the United States, one that places particular emphasis on the development of competing attributions of the causes of industrial injury as that development relates to changes in technology, political economy, and culture. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, long noted as a catalyst for Progressive Era factory reform, worked a change in the legal culture's “common sense” of why and how industrial injuries took place. By focusing on and making tangible causal theories that had been in circulation for some time but never embodied successfully in the law, the Triangle fire destroyed long-standing ideological barriers to factory legislation. It thus played a significant role in laying the epistemological foundation of the modern regulatory state.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the acquisition, possession, and use of small quantities of all psychoactive drugs. The significance of this legislation has been misunderstood. Decriminalization did not trigger dramatic changes in drug‐related behavior because, as an analysis of Portugal's predecriminalization laws and practices reveals, the reforms were more modest than suggested by the media attention they received. Portugal illustrates the shortcomings of before‐and‐after analysis because, as is often the case, the de jure legal change largely codified de facto practices. In the years before the law's passage, less than 1 percent of those incarcerated for a drug offense had been convicted of use. Surprisingly, the change in law regarding use appears associated with a marked reduction in drug trafficker sanctioning. While the number of arrests for trafficking changed little, the number of individuals convicted and imprisoned for trafficking since 2001 has fallen nearly 50 percent.

Although judges were included in the street-level-bureaucracy (SLB) group by Lipsky (1980), sociolegal scholars have barely used this theoretical framework to study them. This article aims to specify their position with respect to SLB in order to bridge the gap between public administration and sociolegal research. Specifically, using a cross-national ethnography of judicial institutions, it compares family trial judges' practice on the ground in France and Canada. General conditions separate them from the core SLB group: encounters with clients are less direct; discretion is more legitimate. However, French judges are far closer to the SLB group than their Canadian counterparts regarding public encounters and case processing. As such, the accuracy of the SLB framework depends on professional and cultural patterns that combine differently in these two national contexts.

This essay reviews three books as they document and explain the 1990s crime decline: Alfred Blumstein and Joel Wallman, eds., (2006) The Crime Drop in America; Arthur S. Goldberger and Richard Rosenfeld, eds., (2008) Understanding Crime Patterns: Workshop Report; and Franklin E. Zimring (2007), The Great American Crime Decline.

It presents the empirical detail of the crime decline and examines the most commonly cited explanatory factors: imprisonment, policing, demography, and economic growth. It then suggests alternative lines of research in urban sociology—urban development, youth culture, and immigration—that may better explain the decline as the result of changes in the cultural and social fabric of American society, particularly in cities where the steepest declines occurred.

This paper examines the impact of a “disability rights model” on the emerging disability rights movement in Germany. Traditional German disability politics and activism are based on the expansion of welfare and special needs provisions rather than on equal rights and integration. Inspired by the 1990 Americans with Disability Act, German activists adopted a disability rights model and successfully worked toward the passage of a constitutional equality amendment in 1994 and ant-discrimination legislation in 2002. Using the literature on rights mobilization, this paper argues that German disability activists use rights talk to both support and contest culturally specific approaches to disability rights, equal treatment, and the role of the state in guaranteeing welfare rights. The globalization of disability rights should not be viewed as an imposition of American norms but as a more complex process of adaptation and cultural transformation that involves constructing locally legitimate approaches to disability rights with an American import.

This paper documents the recent emergence of constitutional review of legislative and administrative action in Korea and Taiwan, two East Asian countries seen to be historically resistant to notions of judicial activism and constitutional constraint. It argues that the ability to draw from foreign legal traditions, especially those of the United States and Germany, empowered judges in these countries and therefore helped to alter the structure of public law away from executive-centered approaches of the past. This is consistent with viewing judicial review as essentially a foreign transplant. Nevertheless, the institution of judicial review has some compatibilities with Confucian legal tradition, a point that has implications for how we think about institutional transfers across borders. By constructing a locally legitimate account of what is undeniably a modern institution of foreign origin, the paper argues that constitutional constraint should not be viewed as an imposition of Western norms, but as a more complex process of adaptation and institutional transformation.

Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the police organization responds to and further constructs the surrounding urban environment. I examine a police department’s move toward local and decentralized approaches, captured in a redistricting reform and subsequent district-level strategies and initiatives. I draw on several sources of data, including public documents, in-depth interviews with decision makers and stakeholders, a year of ethnographic observation of police work in two districts, and data on calls for police service. I find that the police drew upon symbolic ideas that emphasized the violence of black neighborhoods and the economic value of white neighborhoods in developing local strategies. As they acted in relation to these distinctions, the police amplified disparities in service provision and social control, consolidating the character of an already segregated and unequal landscape

Jurors are laypersons with no specific expert knowledge, yet they are routinely placed in situations in which they need to critically evaluate complex expert testimony. This paper examines jurors' reactions to experts who testify in civil trials and the factors jurors identify as important to expert credibility. Based on in-depth qualitative analyses of interviews with 55 jurors in 7 civil trials, we develop a comprehensive model of the key factors jurors incorporate into the process of evaluating expert witnesses and their testimony. Contrary to the frequent criticism that jurors primarily evaluate expert evidence in terms of its subjective characteristics, the results of our study indicate that jurors consider both the messenger and the message in the course of evaluating the expert's credibility.