Public interest lawyers seek to empower clients through collaborative approaches to direct representation that redistribute legal knowledge and affirm clients’ agency; however, the legal settings in which attorneys operate shape their capacity to subvert dynamics they consider oppressive. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork at a legal nonprofit serving asylum seekers in Los Angeles, this study explores how the broader environment of a restrictive immigration system transforms the aspirations, possibilities, and strategies of public interest lawyering. Drawing from sociolegal literature on cause lawyers, access to justice, and the U.S. immigration system, the article argues that the politicization of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy destabilizes foundational legal norms, hindering the agenda of public interest attorneys. Procedural formalism constitutes one of the only resources at attorneys’ disposal, yet here it often impedes lawyers’ ability to disrupt perceived power hierarchies. Specifically, the prevalence of complex legal procedures that obstruct access to asylum reconfigures opportunities to uplift clients. These findings illuminate how hostile legal settings strain lawyers. They also contribute to timely debates around how attorneys protect access to justice and advance meaningful social transformation.

Jury service is a positive, even transformative, experience for many jurors. Prior research establishes that jurors who deliberate on a court case develop more positive views of courts in the relatively short time of jury service, but we know little about the reasons underlying why these positive changes develop. This research focuses on changes in jurors' views after serving on criminal cases because jury service is one of the few opportunities community members have to participate directly in the criminal justice system, with jurors acting as the conscience of the community regarding the extent of prosecutorial power. Unlike most work using actual jurors, this research utilizes surveys with jurors both before and after jury service to understand how jury service brings about increased trust in courts. We examine the influence of three categories of potential factors, deliberating on a case, juror satisfaction, and jurors' attitudes relating to law and justice, finding all three categories work together to significantly predict whether jurors' trust in courts increases, decreases, or stays the same. Policy suggestions include developing innovative ways to capitalize on the positive and overall legitimizing aspects of jury service in criminal cases by increasing community members' meaningful involvement in the courts.

Islamic law, or shari‘a, has been incorporated into the legal systems of many states. In much of the existing literature, this process is understood as part of the colonial and postcolonial state's attempt to render law legible—that is, codified, standardized, and abstract. In this article, I show how some state actors chose to move in the opposite direction, actively discouraging the transformation of shari‘a into a formal and codified system of law. Using the case of colonial and postcolonial Sudan, I argue that these actors viewed legal legibility as a threat to state power, recognizing the jurisgenerative potential of an informal and uncodified law.

Political science has generally been divided into the fields of political theory, comparative government, international relations, public administration, policy formation, state and local government, and public law. The public law or legal process field has also been called the law and politics field to emphasize that it is the study within political science of the judicial process, constitutional law, and related subjects. Law and politics research has changed greatly since 1955 in both methodology and substance. It is the purpose of the articles in this symposium to illustrate some of the more recent trends in law and politics research, particularly trends of interest to law professors, sociologists, and others in the broader area of law and society research.

Feierabend, Nesvold, and Feierabend (1970) suggest two major hypotheses relating the concept of permissiveness-coerciveness of political regimes to the occurrence of political instability. First, they expect that “Low levels of political coerciveness (that is, political permissiveness) and high levels of coerciveness are associated with internal stability while mid-levels of coerciveness are associated with political violence.” Second, they hypothesize that “The greater (lesser) the fluctuation in level of political coerciveness, the higher (lower) the level of political violence.” The justification of these hypotheses are largely in terms of the psychology of frustrations and aggression. Political coerciveness is conceptualized as a set of restraints on the behavior of individuals imposed by a political regime. The more restraints imposed by the regime the more likely is any particular individual to be inhibited from performing certain of his desired behaviors. This situation is seen as producing, in the aggregate, higher levels of system-wide frustrations. It is appreciated, however, that if the number of restraints imposed is sufficiently large, then along with higher levels of frustration there will also appear a deterrent effect. The deterrent effect will presumably prevent these frustrations from becoming manifest in politically violent behavior.

On January 19, 1971, President Nixon, catching most White House observers by surprise, issued a terse, 275-word statement halting further construction of the Cross Florida Barge Canal. This was imperative, the President declared, “to prevent potentially serious environmental damages” and was done at the urging of the new Council on Environmental Quality; the Council v/arned that the project “could endanger the unique wildlife of the area and destroy this region of unusual and unique natural beauty.” Thus was the nation notified that the canal, weighed by the President against the newly minted values expressed in the National Environmental Policy Act, had been judged a $50 million mistake.

The following article analyzes the dispute between legal philosophers Ronald Dworkin and H.L.A. Hart over the nature of legal rights. The author argues that central to this dispute is a pervasive methodological problem of social theory, the “problem of theoretical perspective.” He makes use of a distinction between “internal” and “external” perspectives to defend what he conceives to be Hart's more fully social approach to the conceptualization of legal rights.