This article explores the character of conservative legal activism in post–civil rights America, arguing that this activism is motivated by two related factors: (1) resentment over the increased political participation of historically marginalized Americans and (2) principled allegations that these historically marginalized Americans are making illegitimate claims for “special,” not equal, rights. I argue that the allegation of special rights is tied to the activists' resentment in multiple and complex ways. On the one hand, the allegation that the rights claims of the historically marginalized are illegitimate claims for special rights is itself an expression of resentment. Like arguments that oppose redistributive social change by relying upon discourses of color blindness, states' rights, evangelical Christianity, and community harmony, special rights talk channels resentment into recognizable and intelligible forms. But, on the other hand, the use of special rights talk is not simply cover for an underlying, fully formed resentment. Instead, the allegation of special rights propels and amplifies activists' resentment, transforming it from one that is based primarily upon competing self-interests into one that is concerned with values, morality, and national identity. Special rights talk thus partially constitutes resentment; it hardens the resolve of opponents of redistributive social change, encouraging them to understand themselves as defenders not only of their own self-interests but also, primarily even, as defenders of the core American values and ideals that are promoted by equal rights and assaulted by special rights. Thus convinced that their opposition is authorized by American tradition, conservative legal activists redouble their counter-mobilization efforts, leading to an exacerbation of already tense conflicts. A case study of the nationwide anti-treaty-rights movement grounds this analysis.

Extensive sociolegal scholarship has addressed the utility of law as a mechanism through which marginalized groups may promote social change. Within this debate, scholars employing the legal mobilization approach have thus far highlighted law's indirect impact, beyond the formal arenas of law, via effects on the “legal consciousness” of reformers and would-be reformers. This article contributes to this debate, and the legal mobilization framework in particular, by theoretically identifying and empirically documenting ways through which the constitutive power of law may be effectively used by challengers to more directly pursue changes in institutionalized practices themselves. The article examines the strategic use of law by a set of American Indian tribal leaders in the state of Washington who, over a 13-year period, consciously meshed or “cohered” legal and extrajudicial efforts to gain recognition of their sovereign political status. Through a mode of agency known as “institutional entrepreneurship,” they utilized the multiplicity of law and exploited resources and opportunities inhering within the state itself, but outside the courts. In the context of ambiguous legal precedent and widespread local challenges to tribal rights, they mobilized latent discourses of federal Indian law that legitimated the sovereign governmental status of tribes. Importantly, they circulated tribal sovereignty discourses well beyond the field of law, but through the authoritative activity and voice of the state, and in doing so, generated a precedent-setting recognition of tribal sovereignty.

The most notorious lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1890 and 1940 involved publicity, crowds, ritual, and abnormal cruelty. Several hundred of these “public torture lynchings” took place, most of them in the Deep South. The author develops an interpretation that takes seriously the specific forms and discourses that lynchers and their supporters used to describe and justify these events—characterizing them as criminal punishments, albeit summary, informal ones that were shaped by a white supremacist culture and a politics of racial domination. An interpretation of the penal context and meanings of these public torture lynchings helps us understand their specific forms and their claims to legitimacy. The penal character of these lynchings increased the probability that they would be tolerated by local (and even national) audiences and thus made them a strategic form of violence in struggles to maintain racial supremacy. The author argues that a consideration of these events should lead us to revise our standard narratives about the evolution of modern punishments.

Despite concerns over racial disparities in imprisonment across the United States, little empirical attention has been paid to how changing the structure of sentencing might affect levels of disparity. This article examines whether Ohio's shift to determinate sentencing corresponded with significant changes in legal and extralegal effects on case outcomes, both generally and differentially for African American and white defendants. Bilevel analyses of felony defendants from 24 jurisdictions reveal relatively few substantive changes in these effects over time. Some changes involved reductions in race-related disparities (e.g., in the severity of charges convicted on), with others reflecting increased disparity (e.g., higher imprisonment likelihoods for African Americans). Findings underscore a modest link between restructured sentencing and actual case outcomes overall, with some relatively mixed effects on levels of disparity.

In analyzing the data from a structured interview survey with Japanese litigants of civil trials, we examined the relationships between their perceptions of outcomes and process of the trials, responses to the trials, and evaluation of the judicial system. The results showed that both favorability of trial outcomes and procedural fairness of trials increased satisfaction with the trial outcomes and evaluation of the judicial system. Satisfaction was largely determined by perceived favorability, while the evaluation of the judicial system was largely determined by perceived procedural fairness, suggesting a justice bond effect that justice fortifies people's societal commitment. Consistent with procedural justice theories, the perception of procedural fairness was increased by the sense of control and the appraisal of relational factors, though both were affected by favorability.

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law-on-the-books and law-in-action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo-institutional scholarship on law.