The local political economy links courts to society. A consideration of this linkage helps explain why so few of New York City's nineteenth-century homicides resulted in punishment. Their punishment requiring both state and local governments' cooperation and expenditures, high homicide rates manifested fiscal contradictions imposed by local voters, who desired high service but low taxes. Thus trials for homicides did not index homicides but were complex, indirect outcomes of fiscal, political, and soical processes.

While a large body of literature emphasizes the importance of judicial reform in new democracies, few scholars have examined the reform of military justice systems in these settings—despite the potential for these courts to compete directly with civilian courts and subvert the rule of law. This article focuses on Latin America to empirically examine how the process of reforming military courts has played out in each democracy following authoritarian rule. We outline two distinct pathways: (1) unilateral efforts on the part of civilian reformers, and (2) strategic bargains between civilian reformers and the military. Within the unilateral category, we further distinguish efforts driven by civilian courts, those pursued by politicians, and those undertaken in the context of larger political transformations. Ultimately, we find that, absent a dramatic defeat of an authoritarian regime and its armed forces, reform efforts that do not engage and bargain with the military directly often fail to achieve long-term compliance and improvements in human rights practices. The success of such reform efforts, therefore, may come at a cost in other areas of democracy and civil-military relations. We conclude the article by summarizing our findings and reflecting on the lessons they provide for ongoing military justice reform efforts around the globe.

Law and globalization studies have documented how Global South lawyers compete over the adaptation of international norms. Yet, little is known about how this adaptation legitimates worldviews beyond the law. To advance this literature, this paper proposes a discourse-centered field analysis of the legal globalization of anti-corruption ideas in Brazil. It examines Brazilian lawyers' disputes over a 2016 anti-corruption bill. The bill supporters mobilize global anti-corruption discourses that are exogenous to the legal field to defend harsher criminal law. Their critics counter the reform by mobilizing endogenous legal ideas against criminal law expansion. In so doing, they do not challenge reformers' ideas about corruption. I show how this discursive mismatch leads to a form of globalization by stealth, whereby local dynamics allow global ideas to remain unchallenged in local fields.

When Ralph Nader addressed the 35th Annual Meeting of the State Bar of Michigan in September 1970, he said, “Anybody who talks to law students today sees a tremendous difference between their concepts, aspirations, and indignation levels and the law students of yesteryear.” Nader's views on this occasion have been shared by other members of the bench and bar as well as by social and political commentators whose opinions appear regularly in the mass media. They claim that one of the by-products of the social turmoil and the subsequent new politics that emerged at the end of the sixties was a shift by a large proportion of the recent law graduates into careers that involved protection of civil rights and civil liberties, defense of indigents, protection of consumers, and affiliation with inner city citizens' groups that seek basic changes in welfare policies, taxation, housing, and so forth. For a fuller discussion of this issue by members of the legal profession, see Yale Law Journal (1970), McGovagle (1970), and Riley (1970).

Almost two decades ago Reisman (1951) published an article in which he criticized the lawyer for his ethnocentric view of law and invited the anthropologist to study the organization and functions of American legal institutions and the activities of lawyers. Very few anthropologists have done so. In fact, few anthropologists have made the general study of law their special area of research. In this country, there are perhaps a dozen or two. However, the field is now beginning to attract more people. As a look at the tables of contents and the indexes of ethnographic monographs published in recent years will show, most anthropologists still neglect to report on the law of the people they have studied—yet rarely fail to have chapters on social organization, economy, religion, and the remaining traditional categories with which we “domainize” the culture of a society. Legal scholars, on the other hand, often in cooperation with sociologists and political scientists, have increasingly turned to the kind of research which Schubert (1968) has called, “behavioral jurisprudence.” Outside the United States, this interdisciplinary focus in the study of law and society has been very productive in Scandinavia (see Blegvad 1966).

This article examines the performative aspect of face-to-face interactions among various legal actors and defendants in routine criminal trials in China. Using 105 trial videos as empirical data, the author develops a face-work framework to understand how an individual judge's “face”—signifying judges' legal and political roles, and their professional status—is established, protected, and enhanced during courtroom interactions. The study shows that the legal face of judges can be established by some characterizations of the nature of criminal trials such as the demarcation of legal space, the speed of the trial, and the apprising of rights to the defendants. Nevertheless, the legal face can also be disrupted by trial interactions due to judges' lack of judicial authority. Hence, Chinese judges maintain their authority through the establishment of their political face. They also use both their political face and legal face to establish their situational professional status. These interactions often lead to punitive and coercive measures against defendants in trials. While the article focuses on routine criminal trials in China, the face-work framework has the potential to explain courtroom interactions in other types of social contexts and legal proceedings.

The major aim of this article is to examine how migrations affect private governance, taking as a case study the Prud'homie de pêche, a private order that has governed the fishery of Marseille for the past six centuries. Scholarship generally argues that social norms guarantee the efficiency of private orders and their ability to resist the arrival of newcomers. My data suggest that the Prud'homie has failed to accommodate social changes prompted by migratory flows, not despite but because of its social norms. This paper suggests that social norms are not only powerful tools of governance for private orders, but also forces of inertia that can prevent these orders from accommodating social changes.

The call for studies of the social impact of particular judicial, legislative, administrative and executive rules, decisions and practices is sounded sporadically and acted upon but rarely. To read the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States overruling established precedents in many areas of our constitutional law is to catalogue a long list of missed opportunities for social scientists. As an example of the cause for this lament, I shall present Keyishian v. Board of Regents which for all practical purposes overruled Adler v. Board of Education.

It is obvious that overpopulation is the most critical social problem of our time. As such, it is necessarily the greatest legal problem of our time and the greatest challenge which faces the legal profession today. Since the population problem is fast becoming the population crisis, it is essential that our laws and our legal order must now be subject to reexamination. We dare wait no longer in studying, formulating, and augmenting the proper and precise laws and legal machinery both to help restrain the population growth and to alleviate the ills inherent in overpopulation and unwanted population.

But we must, in our quest for the best laws, be wary of the trap of talking solely in terms of population curtailment. We must take as our guiding principle the words of population expert, John D. Rockefeller, III: “Our constant goal is and must be the enrichment of human life, not its restriction.” In other words, our new laws on the population problem must at the same time make for a better society.

South African plaintiffs are suing numerous multinational corporations under the American Alien Tort Claims Act for aiding and abetting apartheid's crimes against humanity. This article argues that Re South African Apartheid Litigation should be understood as a cosmopolitan re-membering of the nation. This interpretation runs counter to theoretical and political presumptions of an inherent antagonism between cosmopolitanism and nationhood. The apparent divide between cosmopolitanism and nation-building is bridged by the concept of victimhood. Insofar as nation-building in South Africa depends upon the restoration of victims, so too is cosmopolitanism victim-centered in its commitment to prevent harm and suffering. The apartheid litigants enact the duality of cosmopolitanism: they press for justice on the basis of cosmopolitan right, yet they do so in part because of their continued marginalization in the “new” South Africa with respect to issues of “truth” and reparation. Following on the “unfinished business” of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the apartheid litigation illustrates the intersection of cosmopolitanism with national memory and belonging.

The legal profession claims a duty of public service that calls on lawyers to volunteer their time through “pro bono” work (i.e., free legal service). And increasingly law firms strongly endorse pro bono and even remunerate time that is provided to clients without charge. But what happens when pro bono is mandated by the law firm, even compensated? Is altruism undermined? Drawing on a survey of 845 lawyers, we develop an integrated theoretical model to account for how volunteering takes place in the course of legal work. The analysis reveals psychological traits, collective norms, economic exchanges, and organizational dimensions shape lawyers' pro bono work in intriguing ways with marked distinctions emerging when pro bono is remunerated by firms. Collective norms known to foster altruistic behavior appear most relevant to pro bono that is outside the job (i.e., unpaid), while organizational supports and constraints as well as economic exchange factors appear most salient to pro bono that is compensated within firms. We argue that a theory of pro bono work requires a more refined understanding of the forces promoting helping behaviors across several dimensions: whether to help, how much to help, and with or without compensation.