How can legal decision makers increase the likelihood of a favorable response from other legal and social actors? To answer this, we propose a novel theory based on the certainty expressed in language that is applicable to many different legal contexts. The theory is grounded in psychology and legal advocacy and suggests that expressing certainty enhances the persuasiveness of a message. We apply this theory to the principal–agent framework to examine the treatment of Supreme Court precedent by the Federal Courts of Appeal. We find that as the level of certainty in the Supreme Court's opinion increases, the lower courts are more likely to positively treat the Court's decision. We then discuss the implications of our findings for using certainty in a broader context.

All the recent attention to the so-called obesity epidemic provides a fascinating context for understanding interactions between civil rights consciousness and the ordinary lives of fat people, who both deploy and resist the ideological formations that make up our most basic presumptions about who deserves rights protections. This study of fat acceptance advocates asks how stigmatized people who are excluded from legal protections muster descriptions of themselves as deserving inclusion in antidiscrimination laws. Analysis of in-depth interviews with fat acceptance advocates from around the United States reveals elaborate techniques for managing social life and enacting legality that coexist with more narrowly framed and contradictory arguments for rights. Culturally dominant logics for reasoning about what persons deserve prefigure what is possible to say in defense of fat people, in many ways even for fat advocates themselves. And yet in their struggles to overcome the limitations of the presumptions they are given, fat advocates reveal deep tensions in our antidiscrimination ethics and hint at a new way to think about difference.

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. inmate population has increased dramatically, and the penal system has acquired growing attention in accounts of recent trends in economic stratification. As the prison system has expanded, its population has aged; incarceration rates have risen sharpest among older age groups. A large body of research documents differences in criminal offending and incarceration over the life course, but little attention has been paid to how the effects of spending time in prison depend on the timing of incarceration in the life course. Using state administrative data that provide significant variance in the age of offenders, this article investigates how the timing of incarceration in the life course influences its effects on post-release employment and wages. We do not find consistent evidence that incarceration effects vary by age at admission. Instead, incarceration appears to have important consequences for employment and wage outcomes regardless of when individuals are admitted to prison. Even the most motivated offenders suffer sizeable and significant wage penalties and, over time, decreased likelihood of employment. These findings underscore the relevance of legal and institutional shifts associated with carceral expansion and the aging of the inmate population for life course theories of criminal desistance, accounts of labor market inequality, and prisoner reentry programs.

This article analyzes the phenomenon of “corporate social responsibility” (CSR; specifically: social private regulation) in light of two sociological paradigms of globalization: “world-culture” and “world-capitalism.” The study treats three analytically distinct features of CSR: the political contestation over its meaning, the role of business studies in transforming it into a managerial model, and its consolidation as a market of authorities. The study finds that (1) while CSR may be theorized as a emergent “world cultural” model, the culture paradigm does not take sufficient account of the role of corporations in shaping it, and (2) while both paradigms recognize the transition from political contestations over the character of CSR to its deployment by means of private regulation, the world-capitalism paradigm offers stronger tools for theorizing the mechanisms of change that mediate between political agency and institutionalized regulatory outcomes.

In the wake of mass immigration from Latin America, legal scholars have shifted focus from racial to ethnic inequality under the law. A series of studies now suggest that Hispanics may be the most disadvantaged group in U.S. courts, yet this body of work has yet to fully engage the role of citizenship status. The present research examines the punishment consequences for non-U.S. citizens sentenced in federal courts between 1992 and 2009. Drawing from work in citizenship studies and sociolegal inequality, I hypothesize that nonstate members will be punished more severely than U.S. citizens, and any trends in Hispanic ethnicity over this period will be linked to punitive changes in the treatment of noncitizens. In line with this hypothesis, results indicate a considerable punishment gap between citizens and noncitizens—larger than minority-white disparities. Additionally, this citizenship “penalty” has increased at the incarceration stage, explaining the majority of the increase in Hispanic-white disparity over the past two decades. As international migration increases, these findings call for greater theoretical and empirical breadth in legal inequality research beyond traditional emphases, such as race and ethnicity.

Building on job satisfaction, occupational segregation, and life course literatures, I analyze temporal dimensions of career mobility within the legal profession with a sample of Canadian lawyers. I use a continuous-time stochastic model of the underlying processes of movement across work settings to examine factors accounting for gender differences in career paths. The findings suggest that women's integration into the legal profession remains marginal: women continue to be underrepresented in law firm partnerships, moving significantly more slowly than men toward these positions. In addition, women exit law firm practice at a rate significantly higher than that of their male counterparts. Empirical evidence also suggests that the rapidly increasing size of entry cohorts to the legal profession has restricted the number of partnerships available to aspiring associates and has hastened the departure of lawyers from law firm practice. I document emerging paths from law and examine causal factors “pushing” lawyers out of law firm practice, as well as those “pulling” them toward other more attractive options.

In this paper we seek to contribute to a greater understanding of legal citizenship by exploring the gendered experiences of Latin-American-origin immigrants in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area as they go through the legalization process. To explore this gendered angle we rely on in-depth interviews conducted from 1998 through 2008 with women and men from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico. The data reveal that although immigration policies and procedures are presumably gender neutral, they are in fact inflected with gendered meanings and enacted in gendered social structures. Gender ideologies permeate the processes to differentially affect the legalization, permanent legal residence, and citizenship processes of immigrant women and men. This article points to key gender inequalities in immigration law.

In this article we examine how the concept of hate crime has been transformed in judicial discourse from a broad ambiguous category, which generated substantial controversy and opposition, to a focused determinate legal construct, which has been largely accepted as a legitimate legal practice. We track changes in judicial rhetoric across 38 appellate court opinions that consider the constitutionality of hate crime cases (1984-1999), and we propose a theoretical framework for analyzing the “settling” of legal meaning. A qualitative interpretive analysis demonstrates that the meaning of hate crime that emerges across the series of cases is much richer and nuanced than the collection of words contained in the statutes, and that the domain of hate crime has expanded across the series of cases to include a broader range of behaviors and mental precursors. Quantitative analysis shows that, over time, judges have developed a more economical and formulaic rhetoric for responding to petitioners' constitutional challenges to hate crime statutes and have converged around sets of arguments for negotiating challenges. We discuss the implications of these findings for traditional jurisprudential analyses, sociolegal research on judicial decisionmaking, and research on the social construction of deviance.

In situations where people have an incentive to coordinate their behavior, law can provide a framework for understanding and predicting what others are likely to do. According to the focal point theory of legal compliance, the law's articulation of a behavior can sometimes create self-fulfilling expectations that it will occur. Existing theories of legal compliance emphasize the effect of sanctions or legitimacy; we argue that, in addition to sanctions and legitimacy, law can also influence compliance simply by making one outcome salient. We tested this claim in two experiments where sanctions and legitimacy were held constant. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a mandatory legal rule operating in a property dispute influenced compliance only when there was an element of coordination. Experiment 2 demonstrated that a default rule in a contract negotiation acted as a focal point for coordinating negotiation decisions. Both experiments confirm that legal rules can create a focal point around which people tend to coordinate.

This article is presented at two levels throughout. On the surface it is a straightforward historical analysis of a directive to British officers in charge of African courts in the late colonial period, with some African data adduced to sketch the local context into which the British were trying to insert new procedures and practices. On a deeper level the article uses the British colonial occasion to explore widely held cultural assumptions in Anglo-American law about the definability of “justice,” the concept of time and timing in legal affairs, and the complex place of the idea of legitimate, authoritative, and permanent “knowledge” in legal institutions.

In this research note, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article in American Political Science Review to the area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We hypothesize that Lemon v. Kurtzman represented a jurisprudential regime in the Supreme Court's decisionmaking in this area of law. Our analysis shows that the predictors of the Court's decisions in the two periods differed in ways that are very consistent with the types of changes one would expect the hypothesized regime shift to produce.

This paper examines the place of critical inquiry within law and society studies. It suggests that such inquiry requires a periodic reexamination of both methodological and theoretical assumptions. In terms of method, critical inquiry would emphasize the particular and intensive as opposed to the general and extensive. In terms of theory, it calls attention to the limits of state legality and invites attention to ordinary social transactions in which the law appears invisible but is nonetheless powerful. The authors argue that it is possible to be both critical and empirical.

Like the new social movements, crime victim movements were part of broad cultural struggles to redefine the character of social order in the late twentieth century. Motivated by pain and outrage over criminal victimization, they were engaged in highly charged moral protests over the rights and duties of state government and the relative value of human life. This article argues that the degree to which crime victims were part of a retributive movement—the restriction of criminal offenders' rights and liberties—or part of a restorative movement to repair victims' well-being depended on the political context in which they were operating, specifically the structure of the democratic process. The case studies suggest that a context with a high degree of democratization but intensive social polarization was more likely to deepen crime victims' demands for vengeance as well as provide their legal and political expression, while a context with intensive civic engagement but well-developed social trust and norms of reciprocity was more likely to bring about pragmatic measures, intermixing restorative and restrictive approaches to criminal victimization. This article seeks to extend the literature on political institutionalism by integrating the structural constraints of institutions with the power of human agency.

Given that democratization is an ongoing, dynamic process, what explains the emergence and maintenance of some types of political institutions and the decline of others? The answer, we argue, lies not in the intentional design of long-run constitutional principles but rather in the short-run strategic choices of political actors. While many would agree with this vision as applied to legislative or executive institutions, we claim that it is equally applicable to courts. After laying out our argument—a theory of institutional emergence and maintenance—in some detail, we test it by applying game theory to a critical moment in American history: the defining sequence of events for American presidential-court relations that played out between President Thomas Jefferson and Chief Justice John Marshall in the early 1800s. Our analysis allows us to assess factors fundamental to most explanations of the Jefferson-Marshall conflict: the political and institutional preferences of the actors (especially Jefferson's preferences over judicial review) and the larger political environment in which the conflict took place. It also provides important insights into how we might study other interinstitutional interactions, be they of historical moment or of future concern.

Studies in nations with different social and economic systems indicate that the norms of contract law are seldom applied through the litigation process and that disputes are avoided or settled where there is a long-term relationship between the parties. Yet legal scholarship, as well as many proposals for reform, continue to be based on a picture of the contracts lawsuit, to a great extent. It is likely that this distortion is prompted by overgeneralization from a nonrepresentative sample of possible and actual disputes, and by the indirect influence of legal norms; it may also express the needs of legal scholars and reformers. It is questionable whether capitalist, socialist, or mixed economic systems would benefit if more disputes were resolved by the application of officially sanctioned contract norms.

One hundred persons who were committed involuntarily to mental hospitals on 72-hour holds under California's Lanterman-Petris-Short Act (1967), and who filed writs of habeas corpus, were observed during petition hearings. Involuntary commitment criteria were frequently “bargained down” from dangerous to others, dangerous to self, and gravely disabled during the 72-hour hold to gravely disabled at the petition hearing. Most frequently used criteria for continued hospitalization as gravely disabled included prior hospitalization, refusal to take medication, and failure to cooperate with the hospital system. Persons adjudged dangeros to self were generally suicidal in action or talk. Although a minority of persons judged at the petition hearing to be dangerous to others were assaultive or threatening, evidence for the imminence and seriousness of dangerousness was not offered.

This article examines how the quality of domestic regulatory institutions shapes the role of global economic networks in the cross-national diffusion of private or voluntary programs embodying environmental norms and practices. We focus on ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 14001, the most widely adopted voluntary environmental program in the world, which encourages participating firms to adopt environmental stewardship policies beyond the requirement of extant laws. We hypothesize that firms are motivated to signal environmental stewardship via ISO 14001 certification to foreign customers and investors that have embraced this voluntary program, but only when these firms operate in countries with poor regulatory governance. Using a panel of 129 countries from 1997 to 2009, we find that bilateral export and bilateral investment pressures motivate firms to join ISO 14001 only when firms are located in countries with poor regulatory governance, as reflected in corruption levels. Thus, our article highlights how voluntary programs or private law operates in the shadow of public regulation, because the quality of public regulation shapes firms' incentives to join such programs.

Today, passengers at every major Western airport are subjected to heightened levels of security screening that not only are inconvenient, but also raise important questions about the treatment of members of specific groups that are seen as presenting special security risks. Our study examines the importance of ethnic identity in explaining perceptions of legitimacy in airport screening among a random sample of Jewish and Arab passengers in Israel. The main hypothesis of our study is that ethnicity will play a major role in predicting passengers’ attitudes toward the airport security process. In fact, our survey shows that Israeli Arab passengers are, on average, significantly more negative regarding the legitimacy of security checks than Israeli Jewish passengers are. However, using a multivariate model, we find that ethnicity (Arab versus Jew) disappears as a significant predictor of legitimacy when we included factors of procedural justice and controlled for specific characteristics of the security process. The results of our research indicate that differences in legitimacy perceptions are by and large the result of the processes used in airport screening and not a direct result of ethnic identity. In concluding, we argue that profiling strategies aimed at preventing terrorism, which often include embarrassing public procedures, may actually jeopardize passengers’ trust in airport security. Such security is dependent on the cooperation of citizens, and heightened security procedures focused on particular groups may compromise legitimacy evaluations and thus the cooperation of the public.

Lower federal courts are crucial to the interpretation and implementation of Supreme Court decisions. Research demonstrates considerable variation in their responses to these decisions. Explanations of these responses are not well developed, and few efforts test competing hypotheses. My research tests the hypotheses derived from two models of lower court behavior—a legal model and a political model. The analysis demonstrates that the legal model accounts for more variation in the use of Supreme Court decisions by lower federal courts.