How is law made worthless to the marginalized? Drawing on ethnographic observations in Paris and New York City, I establish a typology of devaluation practices in deportation hearings. I analyze how informal court practices devalue court actors, the hearing, and the law itself. Despite different levels of formal protections for migrants, deportation adjudication is pared down and devalued in both cities. This devaluation, however, followed distinct logics. New York hearings were characterized by a utilitarian law logic, where process and ritualistic elements deemed inessential were shed, leaving a stripped-down core focused on case processing. The minimal protections available to migrants were weakened further. By contrast, hollow law emerged in Parisian hearings, where everyday court practices eroded the more generous protections granted to migrants through formal law. While analyses of immigration adjudication have focused on decision-making, determinants of legal outcomes, and the interpretation of formal criteria, I instead conceptualize the courtroom as a space where value is actively unmade through informal practices, drawing on insights from the sociology of valuation and evaluation.

While sociologists have focused on the national adoption of public-sphere women’s rights such as the right to vote in elections or participate fully in economic matters, less work has examined the diffusion of private-sphere women’s rights, rights of women in the home. We address this gap by examining the cross-national adoption of laws that criminalize marital rape. Building on prior research that finds that women’s rights organizations and women’s rights focused treaties, we explore the cross-national determinants of the criminalization of marital rape. Using an event history analysis covering 131 countries from 1979 to 2013, we find support for the global institutionalist framework that contends that socialization into the global system and direct advocacy efforts of global organizations contribute to faster rates of criminalization of marital rape. Further, we suggest that these global institutionalist processes become amplified when they are focused by events that set the agenda for international organizations. Implications for world-society scholarship on the global adoption of women’s rights are further discussed.

The scope of negligence liability of public authorities in English law has undergone significant changes in the Post-World War II period, first expanding and then, from the mid-1980s, retracting. This article tries to explain why this happened not by focusing, as is common in most commentary on this area of law, on changing doctrinal “tests,” but rather by tying it to changes in the background political ideology. My main contention is that political change has brought about a change in the law, but that it did so by affecting the scope of the political domain, and by implication, also the scope of the legal one. More specifically, I argue that Britain's Post-War consensus on the welfare state has enabled the courts to expand state liability in accordance with emerging notions of the welfare state without seeming to take the law into controversial territory. When Thatcher came to power, the welfare state was no longer in consensus, thus making further development of legal doctrines on welfarist lines appear politically contentious. The courts therefore reverted back to older doctrines that seemed less politically charged in the new political atmosphere of the 1980s.

The first difficulty in Eder is that the experience of academics working in the common law tradition renders us skeptical about the possibility that there could be something like an overall sociological theory of “the law.” What those in the Weberian tradition, including for these purposes Habermas, see as the law appears to us as quite a jumble of relatively discrete topics, such that the law of torts which looks different from the law of criminal procedure and, what is worse, the law of the sixth amendment's requirements with respect to counsel which looks different from the law of the sixth amendment's requirement with respect to confrontation of adverse witnesses. Nor does it seem to us that there are any readily available generalizations concerning long-term trends, as distinct from short-term variations attributable to differences among judges in their political preferences.