This article applies a sociolegal approach to the study of transnational legal processes and their effects within countries. First, we clarify the concepts of transnational law, transnational legal process, and transnational legal order. Second, we provide a typology of five dimensions of state change that we can assess empirically. Third, we explain the factors that determine the variable effects of transnational legal processes and organize these factors into three clusters. Fourth, we introduce four empirical studies of transnational legal processes' differential effects in five regulatory areas in Asia, Africa, and South America that illustrate these points. Together, they provide a guide of how to study the interaction of transnational and national legal processes, and the extent and limits of transnational legal processes' effects.

This article combines Monahan and Walker's classification of social facts, social authority, and social frameworks with political-institutionalism's view of law and science as competing institutional logics to explain how, and with what consequences, employment discrimination law and industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology became co-produced. When social science is incorporated into enforcement of legislative law as social authority—rationale for judicial rule making—law's institutional logic of relying on precedent and reasoning by analogy ensures that social science will have ongoing influence on law's development. By helping set research agendas and providing new professional opportunities, institutionalized legal doctrine shapes social science knowledge. But because of differences in institutional logic, wherein legal cumulation is backward looking whereas scientific cumulation is forward looking, co-production of law and science may produce institutional mismatch between legal doctrine and scientific knowledge.

Most people in the United States believe that sexual harassment should be illegal and that enforcement is necessary. In spite of such widespread support for antiharassment regulations, sexual harassment policy training provokes backlash and has been shown to activate traditional gender stereotypes. Using in-depth interviews and participant observations of sexual harassment policy training sessions, this study uncovers the micro-level mechanisms that underlie ambivalence about the enforcement of sexual harassment law. I find that while the different locations of men and women in the status hierarchy lead to different manifestations of resistance, gender stereotypes are used to buttress perceptions that sexual harassment laws threaten norms of interaction and status positions that men and women have an interest in maintaining. The research has implications for understanding the role of law in social change, legal compliance, and the potential/limits of law for reducing inequality.

Throughout American history, a peculiar and recurrent disjunction has often arisen between the substance of transformative reforms and the decidedly less-radical governing arrangements that arise in the aftermath of reform. To account for this disjunction, this article puts forth a theory of postreform “recalibration.” Political processes of recalibration are the means by which vague, indeterminate principles of reform are given operational meaning and translated into new governing arrangements. This article illuminates recalibration processes by examining two case-studies: African American rights in the post-Reconstruction era of the 1870s and 1880s, and labor rights in the post–New Deal era of the late 1930s. Finally, the article also highlights the crucial role of the Supreme Court in recalibration processes and sets forth a theory of judicial behavior as driven by an institutional interest in stability.

In opinions addressing whether graduate students, medical residents, and disabled workers in nonstandard work arrangements are employees under the National Labor Relations Act, I analyze partisan differences in how National Labor Relations Board members, under the previous two US presidents, confronted the contradictory permeation of wage-labor into relatively noncommodified relationships. I argue that Republicans mediated the contradictions by interpreting indicia of employer property rights as status authority. They constructed employment as a contractual relationship consummated through exchange relations and demarcated a nonmarket social sphere in which to locate the relationships before them. This construction suppressed the class dimension of employment and the connection between relations of production and relations in production (Burawoy 1979). Democrats mediated the contradictions by recognizing them in part and arguing that the workers were engaged in commodity production. They proposed the Act as a means for workers to negotiate “differentiated ties” (Zelizer 2005) in nonstandard employment.

The following case study investigates the contract enforcement institutions that enable German customers to purchase software in Asia and Eastern Europe. The case study shows that nation-states are hardly able to generate a legal “shadow” for cross-border business relations. The same holds true for the so-called New Lex Mercatoria. Instead, economic actors create their own informal mechanisms. Relational contracts and reputational networks are nowadays far more effective due to developments in the field of information and communication technology. Overall, the importance of formal contract law in international trade is even smaller than is assumed by the classic theory of relational contracts.

For international financial institutions (IFIs), it is a continuing puzzle why the global norms they propagate are enacted either reluctantly or not at all. This article shows that failures of enactment and implementation frequently occur because many IFI-initiated law reforms go far beyond changing the law; they amount to a restructuring of the state itself and the accompanying redistributions of power. This article demonstrates how state restructuring can occur in a technical area of commercial law by reanalyzing the ways global and transnational designs of corporate bankruptcy regimes fared between 1998 and 2006 in three countries variously affected by the Asian financial crisis: China, Indonesia, and South Korea. State restructuring occurred by (1) shifting the boundary between the market and state, (2) shifting power inside the state, and (3) vesting new powers in the state. The article identifies the recursive dynamics through which the changes unfolded and shows how variations in the efficacy of international architects of the state can be attributed to the interplay of four sets of factors: the coherence of global norms, the relative power of global versus state actors, domestic demand and mobilization for restructuring, and the extent of state restructuring that reforms will induce.

This article reports the results of a study that uses social network analysis to compare the persuasiveness of legal precedents in the diffusion of the strict liability rule for manufacturing defects. This new study tests which legal precedents were most influential and also whether certain state judicial variables influenced the diffusion process. The results are striking. The federal circuit regions appear to define an important reference group in the diffusion process, and social network effects dominate economic and political variables. In addition, the de facto separation of powers in the enactment of new state legislation appears to influence courts' propensities to adopt the strict liability rule. When the executive and legislative branches were controlled by the same political party, regardless of whether it was Republican or Democratic, state courts were more inclined to adopt the strict liability rule.

People in all societies have a tendency toward magical thinking. This human inclination is extensively exploited by modern advertising, which routinely suggests that consuming goods will make us successful, happy, and fulfilled. In this article, I suggest that such advertising creates a system of beliefs resembling a totemic religion. In this religion, brands perform the role of sacred objects.

Trademark law initially aims at preventing consumer confusion. Yet, today, famous trademarks are extensively protected against nonconfusing associations. I argue in this article that this broad protection is based on magical thinking. Pointing out the parallels between the laws of magic and trademark doctrines, such as the doctrine of dilution, I suggest that famous marks are legally treated as magical, sacred objects. This legal approach amounts to endorsing the commercial religion of brands.

Despite its rampant presence, judicial corruption in China has often been regarded as the idiosyncratically deviant behavior of a few black sheep eluding prescribed judicial conduct. This entrenched assumption has both discouraged in-depth investigation of the phenomenon of judicial corruption and inhibited proper understanding of the functioning of China's courts. This article, based on an empirically grounded examination of the processing of court rulings tainted by corruption, showed that judicial corruption in China is an institutionalized activity systemically inherent in the particular decision-making mechanism guided by the Chinese Communist Party's instrumental rule-by-law ideal. In investigating what has contributed to the institutionalization of judicial corruption, the interplay between law and party politics in China's courts was also examined. The findings, therefore, also shed light on behind-the-courtroom judicial activities and on the enduring perplexity of the gap between the law in the book and the law in action.

Access to essential medicines remains highly contested around the globe and a vital issue in South Africa. At the same time, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the demand for medical services are having important political and social consequences in a society heavily impacted by the pandemic. Legal and institutional changes within the postapartheid state in South Africa are in part a reflection of the interaction of opportunities and constraints both within and across the country's geographical boundaries. The transformation of state institutions in this context has been set in motion and shaped by different policy imperatives: from demands for medical care to the promotion of economic competition and the need to implement international trade commitments, including specific levels of intellectual property protection. Despite a strong commitment to social change, to address the legacies of apartheid, as well as the relative strength and political will of the dominant political party, the African National Congress, the transformation of a number of state institutions was significantly framed by the global environment in which the country found itself. In the context of South Africa's democratic transition and the devastating HIV/AIDS pandemic, the state responded to a range of shifting opportunities and constraints, whether real or perceived. As a result, impetus was given to different policies and competing political and economic factions, enabling particular institutions and rules to be embraced, created, reshaped, or simply foregone.

Does law influence the legitimation of news? I examine legitimations offered during ethics debates about news stories in which private people are thrust into the media spotlight. When navigating the space between what can be published lawfully and what should be published, journalism organizations offer legitimations that vary in ways that reflect the hierarchy of legal frameworks for decision. According to field theory, the cultural capital of the juridical field is constitutive of status hierarchies in the journalism field, even though the First Amendment leaves journalism to structure itself. This structuring leads to two paradoxes. First, in the performance of negative legitimation, news organizations justify ethics violations by converting the minimum standard of lawful speech into claimsmaking about laudable speech. Second, in acts of displacing legitimation, reporters suggest that more publicity is the remedy for invading privacy, translating the valorization of speech rights over privacy rights into a puzzling norm.

The purpose of this article is to provide a comparative analysis of the transnational legal processes that Brazil and Argentina underwent to address money laundering. The article discusses the interaction between the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) norms and a number of changes both countries have experienced in the last decade. The comparison focuses on the three central pillars of the anti-money laundering order (AMLO): criminalization, administrative obligations imposed on the financial sectors, and the creation of a financial intelligence unit. Building from the analytical framework developed by Shaffer (2011), the evidence gathered in this study illustrates different dimensions of state change and highlights the main challenges to assess the effectiveness (output legitimacy) of transnational legal orders empirically.

Although Japanese defamation law has been a subject of legal interest for scholars and judges, their main focus was the defamation rules that appeared in cases publicized by legal reporters. The following study coded 232 defamation cases against the media that were decided in district courts in Japan, according to the type of database that reported the cases. Statistical results reveal that newspapers are more likely to report defamation cases than other databases because stories about defamation cases may satisfy readers' interest or because the newspaper might have been informed by plaintiffs who won their cases. The results also show that the professional status of the plaintiff is a predictor of the case outcome. Politicians and officials are less likely to win in defamation cases than are executives and criminals, and they received lower damages than athletes and entertainers.

This article explores the federal marine hospitals of the early republic, the first public health care system in US history. Beginning in 1798, the federal government collected twenty cents per month from mariners' wages and used this revenue to subsidize medical care for sick and disabled merchant mariners. Previous studies have traced links between marine hospitals and modern public policy. By studying governance from the bottom up, this article takes a different approach. I argue that jurists, physicians, and officials' regulation of sailors' entitlement to public health care facilitated and reflected a transformation of national authority. Between 1798 and 1816, sailors' entitlement was a local matter, based on the traditional paternalist understandings of maritime laborers as social dependents. By 1836, though, the federal Treasury redefined entitlement around a newly calculus of productivity: only the productive were entitled to care at the marine hospitals. This story about governance, federal law, and political economy in the early United States suggests that the early American state was a more vibrant participant in the market and society than has been previously understood.

Many recent studies of “regime politics” argue that judicial review is ultimately used to promote the interests of the dominant governing regime. I explore this claim by evaluating whether the invalidation of federal laws by the US Supreme Court fits the empirical expectations of the regime politics approach. I find that the Court frequently invalidates statutes when (1) the ideology of the Court diverges from that of the sitting elected branches (suggesting that the Court does not fear sanctions or nonimplementation), and (2) the ideology of the sitting elected branches converges with that of the elected branches that enacted the statute (suggesting that the Court is defying the sitting elected branches). My findings suggest that the Court does not primarily use judicial review to promote the interests of the dominant governing regime.

Through an analysis of an inquiry into the death of an Aboriginal man in custody, I argue that the contemporary colonial relationship between white settlers and those whom they have dispossessed is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. In Part One, Redemption, I begin with the inquiry's conclusion that Frank Paul was intrinsically vulnerable. In Part Two, Memorializing, I unravel Frank Paul's story, showing the imprinting of colonial power on his body. In Part Three, Cleansing, I show that the Aboriginal body must be repeatedly evicted from the civilized spaces of the settler. In Part Four, Abandonment, when the cleansing ritual proves lethal, death is declared comprehensible, given the body's incompatibility with modern life. In Part Five, Death Worlds, I suggest that the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, Canada where Frank Paul lived is maintained as a death world where humans are reduced to the status of the living dead. Throughout, I argue that Frank Paul must be understood and remembered as an Aboriginal man whose body bore the imprint of an ongoing colonialism.

Examining qualitative historical evidence from cases of federal regulation in the areas of labor, civil rights, and environmental policy, this article provides support for the hypothesis that divergence between legislative and executive preferences—a core and distinctive feature of the American constitutional order—creates an incentive for Congress to rely upon private lawsuits, as an alternative to administrative power, to achieve its regulatory goals. It also shows that this mechanism encouraging statutory mobilization of private litigants had been operative long before its powerful growth started in the late 1960s, that it operated in similar fashion with Republican legislators facing Democratic presidents and Democratic legislators facing Republican presidents, and that it remained a source of controversy and an active influence on congressional decision making throughout the half century covering the 1940s through the 1980s.

Using the case of education, we consider how global cultural and economic forces affect national education spending policies. Our analysis includes both an historical analysis of the construction and transformation of ideas about education at the global level and a statistical assessment of the implementation of conflicting approaches to state education funding within countries. In the historical analysis, we show how the idea of free education, although institutionalized in international law, was subject to powerful challenges from international financial institutions, which advocated user fees for public services, including education. Ultimately, the principle of free education prevailed despite the financial clout behind the opposing view. Using data from poor- and middle-income countries from 1983 to 2004, we also show that the presence of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) advocating child rights was linked to an increase in the levels of state funding for education. This suggests that embeddedness in global discourses, as evidenced by country-specific linkages to INGOs, is critical in making governments more accountable for supporting institutionalized ideas concerning education.

Privacy codes aim at protecting individuals' interests in the treatment of data on themselves held by institutions. One can distinguish between procedural and strategic principles underlying these codes. The former aim at shaping treatment of personal information, once compiled within data systems; the latter aim at limiting and dispersing personal information from the start. A historical view of the workings of these two principles gives more reasons for optimism in the case of strategic measures. In contrast, procedural restrictions on access to personal information are evidently subject to erosion and reversal with changes in larger political climates.