Incorporating behavioral insights into regulation is plausibly the most significant development in regulatory theory and practice in recent years. Behaviorally informed regulation encourages self-benefiting and socially desirable behaviors with little intrusion on autonomy. Drawing on new empirical findings, this article puts forward the hitherto overlooked possibility of employing the deadline effect as a regulatory tool. Deadlines serve as an antidote to procrastination and forgetfulness. Many empirical and experimental studies have examined the use of deadlines in marketing. This study explores the possible use of deadlines by legal policy makers. It describes two survey experiments, a randomized field experiment and a natural experiment, which suggest that deadlines may encourage self-benefiting and socially desirable behaviors, and that relaxing deadlines may discourage less desirable behavior. The article discusses the practical and normative aspects of using deadlines as a regulatory means, compared to alternative tools, such as default rules and required choices.

Substantive justice is often seen as elusive in courts dominated by low-income individuals. Complex court rules, coupled with pervasive lack of counsel, can make it difficult for the traditional adversary process to identify and redress legitimate grievances. This article takes on the social problem of substandard housing and examines whether inquisitorial procedure has the potential to produce accurate outcomes in a tribunal dominated by the unrepresented. Relying on in-court observations of nearly 300 hearings, and a longitudinal review of nearly seventy-five cases, this article surfaces the regularized procedures utilized by a purported “problem-solving” housing court, and theorizes that the inquisitorial features of judicially controlled investigation and enforcement may motivate landlords to repair substantiated housing code violations. This article adds nuance to our understanding of informal justice by identifying the hidden procedural formalisms that may guide alternative decision-making processes. Furthermore, it evaluates the relationship of one iteration of experimental formalism to substantive justice, and suggests that inquisitorial procedures may be correlated with improved accuracy in case outcomes.

Frederick Schauer's The Force of Law (2015) and Richard McAdams's The Expressive Powers of Law (2015) are noteworthy contributions. However, both authors exaggerate the importance of law, as opposed to other means of social control. Schauer largely omits the role that self-help measures, ranging from negative gossip to violent self-defense, play in deterring misconduct. Contrary to Max Weber, the state in practice cannot monopolize the legitimate use of physical force. McAdams valuably analyzes law's potentially expressive effects. He might have devoted more attention, however, to identifying the contexts in which state speech tends to be more salient than private speech, such as a statement by the pope or another esteemed private pundit.

Mental health courts (MHCs) offer community-based treatment in lieu of criminal prosecution for chronic offenders with psychiatric disabilities, and MHC judges enjoy expanded powers to achieve the court's objectives. Because scholars know little about how judges transition into a new occupational role in the problem-solving courtroom, this ethnographic study of four MHCs in the United States focuses on how judges learn to orchestrate their responses to treatment noncompliance in this novel court setting. The goal of this article is to examine the professionalization of MHC judges and the emergent craft of therapeutic adjudication. To achieve this goal, I investigate judicial strategies for motivating, questioning, and defending participants accused of wrongdoing. I conclude that the art and practice of problem-solving justice requires judges to rise to the larger institutional challenges embedded in the alternative courtroom, a process I call the politics of benchcraft.

To understand how law works outside of sanctions or direct coercion, we must first appreciate that law does not generally influence individual behavior in a vacuum, devoid of social context. Instead, the way in which people interact with law is usually mediated by group life. In contrast to the instrumental view that assumes law operates on autonomous individuals by providing a set of incentives, the social groups view holds that a person's attitude and behavior regarding any given demand of law are generally products of the interaction of law, social influence, and motivational goals that are shaped by that person's commitments to specific in-groups. Law can work expressively, not so much by shaping independent individual attitudes as by shaping group values and norms, which in turn influence individual attitudes. In short, the way in which people interact with law is mediated by group life.

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.

When claimants press their claims without counsel, they fail at virtually every stage of civil litigation and overwhelmingly fail to obtain meaningful access to justice. This research program harnesses psychological science to experimentally test a novel hypothesis: mainly, a claimant's pro se status itself sends a signal that biases decision making about the claimant and her claim. We conducted social psychological experiments with the public (N = 157), law students (N = 198), and employment discrimination lawyers (N = 39), holding the quality and merit of a Title VII sex discrimination case constant. In so doing, we examined whether a claimant's pro se status itself shapes stereotypes held about the claimant and biases decision making about settlement awards. These experiments reveal that pro se status influences stereotypes of claimants and settlement awards received. Moreover, the signaling effect of pro se status is exacerbated by socialization in the legal profession. Among law-trained individuals (i.e., law students and lawyers), a claimant's pro se status generates negative stereotypes about the claimant and these negative stereotypes explain the adverse effect of pro se status on decision making about settlement awards.

This article analyzes how the lower criminal courts in Chile transitioned from an inquisitorial to an adversarial justice system between 2000 and 2005 as part of the Criminal Procedure Reform. Drawing on the frame analysis of the street-level bureaucracy and judicial ethnography, I examine the transition between two different types of judicial bureaucracy from the perspective of the actors who implemented the reform. The study is based on in-depth interviews with officials and judges of both inquisitorial and adversarial courts, administrative managers of the new courts, and actors who designed the administrative reorganization of lower criminal courts. The study involved a three-month, weekly observation in an inquisitorial court in Santiago de Chile. The article emphasizes the specificity of the Chilean judiciary, where both inquisitorial and adversarial criminal courts still coexist.

This study argues that rights discourse influences heterosexual public opinion in Washington State. We tested this through a survey experiment conducted in the 2011 Washington Poll. We broke interviewees into three groups, with each group exposed to a different frame: a pro–lesbian and gay equal rights frame, an anti–lesbian and gay special rights frame, and a control or no frame. Immediately following the treatment, we asked interviewees if they agreed with a pro–lesbian and gay policy: changing state antidiscrimination law to encompass those who identify as lesbian and gay. Overall, this study concludes that a special rights frame dampens support among some while an equal rights frame has no effect. Respondents who indicated that they were against same-sex marriage even more strongly opposed altering antidiscrimination policy to include sexual orientation when confronted with an equal rights frame than when confronted with the special rights frame or no frame at all.

While research on legal mobilization shows how social movements contribute to the definition and implementation of rights, it remains excessively centered on litigation to the detriment of administrative rights enforcement. This article maps out how street-level bureaucracies impact rights enforcement by distinguishing between allocation, access, and process, and analyzes how social movements intervene in these three aspects. It then focuses on allocation, using the case of French disability policy to analyze the forms of advocacy deployed by movement actors who take part in the rights allocation process at the local level. The article argues that conformity to institutional norms derives not so much from a pressure to conform as from the knowledge and experience of the limited means locally available to make rights effective. Further, it shows how advocacy is reframed from the defense of individual claims to a role of scrutiny and control of the bureaucratic allocation of rights.

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.

In the terms of Erving Goffman's classic role-distancing analysis, newly admitted law students often aspire to an “embraced” lawyer role that directly expresses their personal and political values. Empirical research has suggested that during law school these students are instructed in an amoral and apolitical vision of professionalism. The literature has paid less attention to how students internally experience these norms within their continual processes of self-construction. This article takes an exploratory micro-dynamic look at professional identity formation drawing on longitudinal interviews and identity mapping with three student cohorts. Over the course of their legal education, students bound for large corporate law firms tended to report increasing professional role distancing. In contrast, students who pursued jobs in the public-interest sector tended to sustain a more proximate conception of professional identity, overlapping with racial, gender, political, and other centrally constitutive roles. The article concludes with normative and theoretical implications.

How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)? Answering this question is key to understanding the impact on transnational legal mobilization of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., in which the US Supreme Court sharply limited the scope of the ATS. Yet sociolegal scholars know remarkably little about the experiences of ATS litigants, before or after Kiobel. This article describes how activist litigants in a landmark ATS class action against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos faced a series of strategic dilemmas, and how disagreements over how to resolve those dilemmas played into divisions between activists and organizations on the Philippine left. The article develops an analytical framework focused on litigation dilemmas to explain how and why activists who pursue ATS litigation as an opportunity for legal mobilization may also encounter strategic dilemmas that contribute to dissension within a social movement.

This article presents findings from ethnographic research in death penalty trials around the United States, focusing on the role of victims and their supporters. Victim impact testimony (VIT) in death penalty sentencing has received intense legal scrutiny during the past thirty years. The ruling jurisprudence allows VIT with the explanation that it deserves parity with testimony about the defendant's background. Drawing on observations and interviews with participants in 15 death penalty trials, I demonstrate that this framing confuses the central role of victim supporters in the courtroom. Victim supporters function as mourners, which grants them a socially elevated position in the courtroom. I argue that the consequences of the institutionalization of VIT can only be understood through this lens.

This article examines the rules and practices of waiting in line as a system of informal order, showing that despite its reputation for drudgery, the queue offers rich insights about social norms and the psychology of cooperation. The article begins by investigating the implicit customs of physical waiting in line, uncovering the surprisingly complex unwritten rules (and exceptions) that give queues stability even in the absence of legal governance or state enforcement. Yet the prevailing norms literature typically explains informal order by reference to close-knit groups that can impose sanctions on violators of extralegal rules. This raises a puzzle: Why do queue norms repeatedly produce informal, yet reliable, order among total strangers unlikely to interact again? This article answers this question by looking to social-psychological research showing that people tend to be strong reciprocators rather than selfish utility maximizers. This model makes sense of both our tendency to defer to line norms as well as the disproportionate sanctions with which defectors from these norms meet.

This analysis examines the effects of administrative templates on legal responses to domestic violence. The discussion focuses on a set of intake forms deployed by a team of grassroots workers who routinely attend Toronto's specialized domestic violence plea courts to enroll defendants into counseling programs. Although these documents are nothing more than mundane, administrative forms, they are crucial to generating the formations required to govern domestic violence through the criminal justice and community partnerships on which the plea courts rely. Along with redefining the responsibilities of the legal and grassroots actors involved in the court network, the documents also generate and formalize notions of wrongdoing that prove to be far more effective in resolving cases than traditional guilty pleas. This analysis illuminates how forms permit the retreat and reassertion of state sovereignty as required in legal regimes involving devolution. It also underscores the methodological importance of constitutive analyses of documents to illuminating machinations of penal power.

The rule of law era has given rise to multiple indicators purporting to measure the concept. This article compares four major indicators of the rule of law and shows that their approaches to conceptualization and measurement differ. Given their disparate conceptualizations and measurement strategies, one might expect a weak correlation between them. Strikingly, however, all four indicators are highly correlated with each other (with the pair-wise correlations between three of them exceeding 0.95). They are also correlated with the widely used measure of corruption. This suggests that the indicators might capture a more encompassing concept, like impartial administration. The article critiques the rule of law measurement enterprise as insufficiently linked to the underlying normative concept. It points to the reliance on expert perceptions and information constraints as a possible cause for the convergence. It concludes that measurement strategy, rather than differences in conceptualization, explains the convergence between the indicators.