After more than half a century of law and society scholarship, two recent volumes propose to survey and advance the field. Edited by Mariana Valverde, Kamari Clarke, Even Darian-Smith, and Prabha Kotiswaran, The Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (2021) draws on an international list of contributors to refocus law and society scholarship on fresh topics and themes. The Research Handbook on Modern Legal Realism (2021), edited by Shauhin Talesh, Elizabeth Mertz, and Heinz Klug, presents a comprehensive guide to the New Legal Realism (NLR) movement that emerged from law and society around fifteen years ago. This review essay explores how the volumes’ common call for a more prominent and methodologically diversified social science of law also encourages a renewed attention to the internal logics of legal doctrine.

Recent years have seen a growing literature on citations between courts from different countries. What explains why such cross-citations occur between some courts but not others? This article addresses this question with original data on 2,967 citations between the private law supreme courts of the twenty-eight member states of the European Union. These cross-citations form a valued network of twenty-eight nodes, which can be analyzed with tools of network analysis. The article uses the method of a multiple regression quadratic assignment procedure in order to address the dependency of observations in a network. The explanatory variables distinguish between variables that proxy for legal similarities between countries and other factors, and, thus, this article contributes to the wider debate about the predominance of either legal or nonlegal factors in judicial decision-making. The main finding is that nonlegal factors play a decisive role, notably a common native language and overlapping language skills, while legal families are not found to be a significant determinant.

Legislatures often require a specific or minimal sentence be imposed if certain conditions are fulfilled. This study shows how such rules might benefit defendants. Israeli law requires that a suspended prison sentence be activated if the offender is reconvicted of a further offense during the term of suspension. Hence, the suspended sentence becomes a sort of minimum sentence for a breach offense. Yet judges are allowed to prolong the suspended term if, among other things, the breach offense is minor and hence does not result in a prison sentence. Using propensity score matching to analyze a rich database of magistrate court cases, we find that courts use the exception much more often than expected and, more importantly, that judges refrain from sentencing breaching defendants to prison, even if the breach offense justifies imprisonment, in order to circumvent the requirement to activate the suspended sentence. Moreover, for severe offenses, courts are less likely to sentence an offender to prison if the offender is in breach of a suspended sentence, compared to a similar offender who is not in such breach. For such offenses, being in breach of a suspended sentence reduces the likelihood of a prison sentence. For some offenders, the suspended sentence thus becomes a benefit rather than a punishment.

Explanations of altruism remain fragmented across disciplinary lines and focus heavily on phenomena such as philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and volunteering outside the workplace. Yet numerous professions, including law, claim a duty of service that calls on their members to volunteer. Using a mixed methods approach that draws on thirty interviews and a survey of 845 lawyers, the authors develop an integrated framework on altruism to account for how volunteering takes place in the course of law practice. The analysis reveals psychological traits, collective norms, exchange relationships, and organizational dimensions that shape lawyers’ volunteering. In particular, a cultural norm endorsing volunteer efforts is a powerful driver of volunteering legal services. At the same time, organizational features, such as time constraints, condition cultural norms to hinder volunteering, while business opportunities for client recruitment condition cultural norms to foster volunteering. We conclude with directions for advancing our integrated approach to altruism in the context of lawyers’ professional service.

The law often lays down mandatory rules, from which the parties may deviate in favor of one party but not the other. Examples include the invalidation of high-liquidated damages and the unenforceability of excessive noncompete clauses in employment contracts. In these cases, the law may substitute the invalid term with a moderate arrangement, with a punitive arrangement that strongly favors the protected party, or with a minimally tolerable arrangement (MTA), which preserves the original term as much as is tolerable. This article revisits the choice between the various substitutes. Based on theoretical analysis and five new empirical studies (N = 2,089), it argues that the incidence of MTAs should be rather limited. It demonstrates that people find moderate substitute arrangements more attractive than the alternatives. It also points to two overlooked incentive effects of the substitute arrangement (in addition to its impact on the drafting of contracts). First, the applicable substitute strongly influences customers’ inclination to challenge excessive contract terms once a dispute arises. Second, when the invalidation of an excessive term is discretionary, the applicable substitute can affect decision makers’ inclination to invalidate excessive clauses in the first place.

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.

In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Celebrated as a victory for global lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, Taiwan’s 2019 law privileges marriage and biological parent-child ties as the foundation for LGBT family rights and (co-)parental recognition. This article contributes to sociolegal debates about the benefits and limitations of marriage equality by asking how restrictive legal approaches to legitimating LGBT parenthood may harm LGBT families, with consequences both for families ostensibly protected under the new laws and for those denied newly bestowed rights and protections. Drawing from legal and ethnographic research on Taiwan’s same-sex marriage law and the family formation strategies of Taiwanese LGBT parents, we interrogate how marriage equality interacts with related legal domains and prevailing stigmas of illegitimacy, adoption, and homosexuality in Taiwan. Encoded in, and reproduced through, the substance and implementation of law, these stigmas narrow the scope of legal rights and foster potentially discriminatory forms of recognition. The article shows how progressive laws may reduce LGBT family stigma for some, while also creating new stigma interactions that devalue diverse forms of LGBT parenthood.

Ghana has inherited colonial legislation that recognizes and regulates the consequences of Muslim family law (MFL). However, in practice, courts almost never recognize the normative existence of MFL and systematically dismiss the cases on procedural grounds without discussing their merits. What explains the judiciary’s attitudes toward Islamic law? Why do Ghanaian courts refuse to engage with MFL in substantive terms? How does this judicial policy affect Ghana’s pluri-legal system and its multireligious democracy? Drawing on Robert Cover’s insights and concepts from “Nomos and Narrative,” the present article suggests that Ghanaian courts engage in “undignified” jurispathy against Islamic law. Having inherited the colonial narrative that Islamic law is not a native law of the land, the judiciary destroys the legal meanings built around Islamic law without discussing what is at stake. This perpetuates normative tensions between the state and Muslim groups, undermines the rule of law, and erodes public trust in democratic institutions. Utilizing the theoretical and empirical insights drawn from the Ghanaian case, the article urges scholars to expand the scope of their inquiries to include instances of undignified jurispathy to better understand state-religion relations and constitutional debates in pluri-legal societies.

We investigate whether inherent differences between the majority opinions of US Supreme Court justices result in certain justices being systematically more influential compared to their peers. We offer a theory in which lower court adoption of the Supreme Court’s precedents are influenced through justice opinion attributes, case characteristics, and circuit-level influences. To test the predictions, we examine the universe of responses by US Courts of Appeals to the signed majority opinions of individual justices by assembling a dataset of over 130,000 observations. We assess the interdependence of the mechanisms at work through a coarsened exact matching algorithm. We find that intricate tendencies in opinion writing disparately impact lower court attentiveness to the Supreme Court’s decisions. These findings offer new and important implications toward a richer understanding of the influence of individual justices on legal development and policy adoption in the American courts.

Over the past half-century, the US welfare and penal systems have become increasingly fused modes of poverty governance. At the center of the welfare-penal continuum sits probation, a form of community supervision that operates as a central hub, directing people to both services and incarceration. Drawing on interviews with 166 adults on probation in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2019, we argue that the coercive care of probation is structured by the broader project of controlling alcohol and drug use among the poor. Developing the concept of strong-arm sobriety, we show how the “criminal addict” trope undergirds the central processes of probation: treatment, testing, and revocation. We argue that strong-arm sobriety misreads structural precarity as the result, rather than the cause, of individuals’ choices. In doing so, strong-arm sobriety fails to address the circumstances that engender substance use and produces future subjects for coercive care.

Examining what we call “crimmigrating narratives,” we show that US immigration court criminalizes non-citizens, cements forms of social control, and dispenses punishment in a non-punitive legal setting. Building on theories of crimmigration and a sociology of narrative, we code, categorize, and describe third-party observations of detained immigration court hearings conducted in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, from July 2018 to June 2019. We identify and investigate structural factors of three key crimmigrating narratives in the courtroom: one based on threats (stories of the non-citizen’s criminal history and perceived danger to society), a second involving deservingness (stories of the non-citizen’s social ties, hardship, and belonging in the United States), and a third pertaining to their status as “impossible subjects” (stories rendering non-citizens “illegal,” categorically excludable, and contradictory to the law). Findings demonstrate that the courts’ prioritization of these three narratives disconnects detainees from their own socially organized experience and prevents them from fully engaging in the immigration court process. In closing, we discuss the potential implications of crimmigrating narratives for the US immigration legal system and non-citizen status.

During at least part of the post–World War II period, the constitutions of thirty-six states called for the popular election of the judges of the states’ highest courts. In practice, only slightly more than half of those judges (excluding strictly interim appointees) initially obtained their positions by election. This article examines the likelihood of initial election in actual practice, how it has varied over time, and various factors that might be related to election versus appointment (e.g., type of election, mandatory retirement). It concludes that state norms play a substantial role in determining patterns of actual selection.

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 article studies relational contracts whose performance implicates the person of the promisor (as where the promisor is the promisee’s employee). We investigate whether people’s beliefs that their and others’ personalities are relatively malleable (or not) correlate with their tendency to engage in such long-term contracts. Our survey experiment shows that the more people believe that their own personality is intertemporally malleable the less they tend to make long-term commitments; by contrast, the more they believe that others’ personalities are malleable, the more they tend to engage in such commitments. Our findings imply that people’s intuitive tendencies to make long-term commitments align with those that underlie liberal contract law, which is careful about enforcing contracts that constrain the self-determination of contractors’ future selves.

Prison monitoring has been promoted by international human rights bodies as a way to support the prevention of torture and ill-treatment in prison. However, there has been very limited examination of the operation of prison-monitoring bodies, especially from the perspective of those most affected by their recommendations: those who live and work in prisons. This article draws on interviews conducted with people living and working in a Scottish and a Norwegian prison to explore how they perceive a long-standing prison-monitoring body, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). The article provides an examination of the benefit and utility of CPT recommendations from the point of view of people in prison and prison staff. The study further reveals that the effectiveness of CPT monitoring in prisons may be considered in terms aside from state implementation of recommendations and should include how people in prison see its work, its impact, its power to persuade, and its connection to the outside world. Through taking a prison-centered approach, the article contributes to wider discussions on whether and how human rights frameworks can alter experiences of punishment.

Contemporary dictators routinely co-opt institutions crucial for democratic governance. Although an extensive literature examines why and how aspiring autocrats bring elections and parties under their control, constitutions—and the judicial or quasi-judicial bodies charged with interpreting constitutions—are often assumed to reflect the existing balance of power. But following regime change, constitutional courts’ power of review makes them integral for establishing political supremacy. We detail how President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan captured the Constitutional Court via its transformation into the Constitutional Council. The uncertainty and upheaval of the post-Soviet collapse created opportunities for formal institutional changes that made the court susceptible to executive capture. Nazarbayev subsequently used the council rulings to lay claim to democratic and constitutional legitimacy in a clear example of authoritarian constitutionalism. To trace the process of capture and legitimation, we examine key court rulings throughout the president’s tenure using a database of Constitutional Council decisions.

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.