Current research in sociolegal studies focusing on resistance provides one way to continue the progressive politics of studying social transformation through law. In response to earlier concerns that the turn to postmodernism and the focus on individual acts of resistance has deflected scholarly work from attention to progressive politics, this article advocates broadening the question to examine a range of forms of resistance and their impact on cultural meanings as well as political mobilization. Through the examination of three examples of resistance that take place within and by means of legal institutions, the article endeavors to expand the frame of analysis to include the myriad processes by which the cultural world is made and remade.

Over the past 20 years, international commercial arbitration has been transformed and institutionalized as the leading contractual method for the resolution of transnational commercial disputes. It has become an important institution of the growing international market. Although the process is far from unidirectional, this work of social construction can be described as a rationalization in the Weberian sense and also as an “Americanization” that has permitted U.S. litigators to shape the rules to favor their adversarial skills and approaches. An informal justice system has come increasingly to resemble “offshore litigation.”

Drawing on Bourdieu's analytical tool of the legal “field” and, in particular, using the notion of an “international legal field,” this case study reveals how the continuing competition for business and for legitimacy—between civil law and common law, “grand old men” and “technocrats,” academics and practitioners—constructs and transforms the system of (international private) justice. As is true generally with respect to law, the details of the competition serve to build the careers of practitioners, to develop the area of practice, and to produce and legitimate the relevant “law.”

In 1973 the Cuban government abolished the private practice of law, replacing it with a system of law collectives known as bufetes colectivos. These law collectives were designed to provide low-cost legal services to the public in ways consistent with the ideology of a nonadversarial relationship between lawyers and the state. I examine both the relationship between the ideological and legal bases for the socialist practice of law in Cuba and the actual practice of law in one bufete colectivo. Using a combination of documentary and ethnographic information to reconstruct the day-to-day practice of law in the bufete colectivo, I examine the ways Cuban attorneys I observed sought to serve their clients' interests and to pursue their own professional goals within an ideological framework that stressed a nonadversarial model of lawyering. I give particular attention to criminal defense which, more than civil cases, often required attorneys to balance their clients' interests against the socialist ideal of nonadversarial lawyering. These attorneys, as intermediaries between citizens and the state, often found ways to utilize the formal framework of substantive and procedural laws to represent clients' interests despite an official ideology that emphasized nonadversarial lawyering.

Despite the great varieties of imperial relationships, most scholarship has focused on law as an instrument of imperial domination. This article invites greater attention to the motives and actions of the subject population. In the Middle East, the pattern of legal change suggests that imperial control affected the outcome of elite efforts but did not supplant them. In Egypt, legal reform was largely the fruit of efforts undertaken by a centralizing elite that sought to circumscribe foreign influence even when it collaborated with it. This elite used law to preempt imperial penetration and strengthen the administrative capacity of the Egyptian state. The Egyptian population subject to the new legal system shaped its development still further.

Community standards for sexually explicit and violent depictions were measured using a representative sample of Western Tennessee residents. The residents were randomly assigned to view sexually explicit films charged in an obscenity case, violent materials, or control materials. The results showed that residents believe the sexually explicit films charged in the case did not appeal to a self-reported shameful, morbid, or unhealthy (prurient) interest in sex, and are not patently offensive. Community members indicated they would be substantially less accepting of the sexually explicit materials if they contained rape and bondage, and they showed virtually no acceptance of materials including children actors under the age of 18. Despite acceptance of sexually explicit films, there was no evidence that a majority of members of the community accepted violent “slasher” films. However, participants believed that the majority of others in the community tolerated the violent films they had viewed. These findings are discussed in light of an obscenity standard that presumes to take into account conventional morality and community opinion and the discrepancy between the obscenity code and community standards.