Mexico’s 1917 Constitution has gone through 737 reforms; no other codified constitution has been subjected to such a constant pattern of renewal through amendment. We argue that the study of Mexican patterns offers important theoretical insights for the study of constitutional change by calling into question the generalizability of the thesis—articulated by Donald Lutz and currently endorsed by most specialists in the field—according to which amendment and interpretation are substitute means of constitutional updating. Based on two original data sets containing all constitutional amendments and all Supreme Court precedents on constitutional matters from 1917 to 2020, we find that in Mexico hyper-reformism is correlated to a steep increase in the number and diversity of binding constitutional precedents. Quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that these precedents not only apply the Constitution, but substantively revise it, suggesting that, in Mexico, amendment and interpretation are not alternative but complementary channels of constitutional change. Our account suggests that, in Mexico, hyper-reformism has actually led to innovative constitutional interpretation as a mechanism to cope with its effects. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and comparative insights this case offers for better understanding the nature, causes, and effects of the different modalities of constitutional change.

Business courts can function as loci of privilege, both institutional and substantive, expressing a clear privileging of business as a sphere of social action. Using an original case study, we show how the establishment of a new business court privileged businesspersons in two ways: by providing them with expert judicial services and by receiving into law a rule that gives them unique protection from liability—the Delaware Business Judgment Rule. We did not find that this reception reflected court capture by businesspersons. It did reflect a conviction that Delaware law is best, inculcated by US-educated academics, and inter-jurisdictional competitive aspirations. Our case study demonstrates how business courts express the structured power of business and businesspersons.

Across the globe, people who mobilize to protect their rights in highly oppressive contexts may have to navigate government institutions that not only fail to implement protections but also engage in discriminatory practices. This article introduces the term “circumventive legal resistance” to describe practices of making legally grounded claims but facilitating relief through processes of expression and negotiation that are distinct from explicit mechanisms of legal enforcement. Based upon a study of twenty-seven rural, semi-rural, and urban areas across the north and north-west regions of India, this article documents how Dalit women—from the most marginalized groups at the base of the caste pyramid—mobilize to protect their rights in contexts where local institutions do not enforce laws prohibiting caste discrimination and instead perpetrate caste-based forced labor practices. In particular, I focus on a campaign to end manual scavenging—a form of caste-based forced labor that is one of the worst surviving symbols of untouchability. With local channels to legal relief largely foreclosed, Dalit women who leave manual scavenging engage in circumventive legal resistance: they draw on law to make claims but win relief through avenues distinct from those envisioned within the parameters of the law.

Law school students are encouraged frequently to “network.” However, depending on demographic categories, they may have access to differently resourced social networks in law school. In this article, we draw from our mixed-methods research to explore this diversity of experience, its limitations of access, and the possible network inequalities that may limit the value of legal education to diverse students across different institutional contexts. Using survey and network data (N = 744), collected during the fall of 2019 from three law schools, as well as supplementary interview data (N = 55), we examined students’ social networks, the structures of these relationships, and their associations with law school satisfaction. We find that, while students tended to cluster based on shared characteristics (that is, race, gender, sexual identity, political orientation, religion, and age) and contexts (that is, type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homophilous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black and White students, but the same embeddedness was associated with lower satisfaction with law school for Asian and Latinx students. These results provide grounds for rethinking how diversity matters in law school and its implications for marginalized students’ experience and success.

Over the past several years, socio-legal researchers have focused attention on the phenomenon of eviction, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color. One major aspect of the eviction phenomenon has been largely overlooked: how and why certain eviction filings result in forced, legally compelled tenant moves and others do not. Through coding of the legal documents associated with eviction filings and multi-level regression analysis, this article advances the analysis of evictions in two crucial ways. First, it identifies and describes the frequency of the distinct legal procedural pathways that result in forced tenant moves once an eviction case has been filed. Second, it identifies the case, tenancy, neighborhood, and property correlates of forced tenant moves and of distinct procedural pathways to forced tenant moves. The article demonstrates that move-out agreements are the primary procedural pathway by which tenants are forcibly moved, yet they have been largely overlooked in previous eviction research because they are not easily analyzable in administrative datasets. The regression analyses advance the growing work examining the role of landlord characteristics in shaping tenants’ housing stability and break new ground in identifying the characteristics of the different pathways through which tenants are forced out of their homes following eviction filing.

With the upsurge of anti-globalizing ideologies and politics, the increasing institutionalization of xenophobia within the legal system has emerged as a pressing concern. Existing law and social science research has underexplored xenophobic bias in the US legal system. This article conceptualizes xenophobic bias as consisting of racism and nationalism. It investigates whether mock jurors reach different verdicts on defendant companies from foreign countries of origin (Japan, France, and China) compared to domestic (US) companies. Using a test simulating a patent lawsuit, the research finds no evidence of general xenophobic bias in juror liability verdict decisions, yet there is a specific bias against the Chinese company when granting damage awards. The similarity-leniency effect that has been established in the previous literature is corroborated in this article. Additionally, political views moderate the effects of the company’s country of origin on juror decisions. This research offers a more nuanced conceptual framework of xenophobic bias in juror decision-making for future law and social science research and informs judicial policies seeking to improve jury instructions and jury selection to reduce xenophobic bias.

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) migrants’ disclosure of their identity or “coming out” has significant stakes. It can facilitate access to resources (institutional disclosure), cultivate intimacy and belonging (social disclosure), or support claims for legal protections (legal disclosure). This article analyzes SGM unaccompanied minors’ disclosures as shaped by the evolution of their legal consciousness in pursuing legal relief and incorporation in the United States. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews from 2014–2019 with 11 SGM unaccompanied minors reveal a striking pattern in their disclosure practices. During apprehension and detention, minors engaged in social, institutional, and legal disclosure of their SGM status. However, their interactions with agents from the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services led them to believe that SGM rights, support, and acceptance were contingent on legal status. Later, upon release from state custody, minors withheld legal disclosure from their deportation proceedings and immigration cases, even against the advisement of their attorneys. They also became more strategic in their social and institutional disclosure across other contexts. Post-legalization, however, minors broadened their disclosure practices and embarked on claims related to their SGM status. This study raises implications for research and policy. By analyzing shifts in legal consciousness over time, how certain experiences become reference points for how immigrants understand the law with respect to their identity and related behaviors are illustrated. It also extends the discussion of the far-reaching implications of SGM punishment and the disadvantages of immigration detention for children and youth.

This article analyzes how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) handles evidence of pushback, where states violently force asylum seekers away from borders. An examination of how the experiences of pushback survivors get translated (or not) into judgments contributes to theoretical discussions about truth, epistemic practices, and law. The article asks why so little of what researchers, journalists, civil society actors, and international organizations have documented about European border violence is visible in the court’s judgments. Based on a mix of legal and anthropological research methods, the article traces how states and the ECtHR erase pushback evidence at borders and during litigation. Taking seriously on equal grounds the construction of facts outside and inside a court room, the article connects external perspectives on the production of evidence with an internal analysis of evidence in judgments. In doing so, the article highlights the political dimensions of seemingly merely technical and legal procedures. We argue for a clearer separation of courts’ and states’ versions of facts, contending that the presumption of the states’ good faith should no longer apply when there is evidence, including in case law, of misrecordings and false statements by respondent states.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has come under challenge in recent years as some countries have decided, or considered, to withdraw from it. Against this backdrop, an emerging literature has begun to examine attitudes toward the court among the general public as a key court constituency. However, little is known about how domestic elites perceive the court. This research gap is particularly surprising given that domestic elites have a considerable impact on both public and state support of the court. This article explains why political and societal elites across world regions have confidence or lack confidence in the ICC. We present the results from a unique survey of 722 elite respondents conducted from 2017 to 2019 across six countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. We furthermore enrich our analysis by using public opinion data to draw comparisons between elites and the general public. The analyses reveal that the views of elites are most consistently related to their perceptions of other, more well-known international organizations and their country’s relationship with the ICC. Our findings indicate both similarities and differences between how elite and public opinion about the ICC are formed, demonstrating the value of further research on elite opinion on international courts.

The animal protection movement has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the criminal punishment system through lobbying and campaigning for harsher punishments for animal abuse, while at the same time showing an interest in restorative justice (RJ) as a response to harm against animals. In this article, we take a critical position aligned with anti-carceral feminists and prison abolitionists against the carceral systems that fail humans and animals in circumstances of violence. We consider the potential of RJ as an alternative approach to address and prevent harm against animals in abuse cases on an individual level while highlighting the limitations of RJ in achieving the necessary changes on a societal level to end structurally produced violence against animals, such as industrial animal exploitation. We propose that transformative justice (TJ), which involves some RJ processes, is the most promising approach that could achieve justice for both humans and nonhumans in the long term without reproducing traumas and violence for the individuals and communities involved in harm reduction and prevention. Drawing on examples of RJ and TJ as developed and practised in marginalized human communities, we apply their lessons to thinking through similar practices in the context of animal abuse and neglect.

Legal institutions rely on monitoring and prediction technologies to enforce the law. Drawing on three recent books—Predict and Surveil by Sarah Brayne (2021), Data Driven by Karen Levy (2023), and Policing Patients by Elizabeth Chiarello (2024)—this review essay examines how the incorporation of these technologies brings about three shifts in the work of frontline enforcement. First, it broadens the categories of actors with the capacity to facilitate the formal enforcement of law. Second, it reorients enforcement to increasingly center on generating information for future use by institutional actors beyond the original information gatherer. Third, it increases the variety and frequency of agents’ decisions about how much to engage with new tools. These shifts are likely to exacerbate a persistent challenge faced by frontline agents: navigating conflicting goals and flawed laws with inadequate resources and guidance.