Drawing on fieldwork and political theory with Lacanian psychoanalytic influences, this article analyzes how fantasy and fetishes help sustain strategies shown to be no solution to U.S. border control problems. More than a decade after the official launch of the border control paradigm of “prevention through deterrence,” predicated on the assumption that ramping up walls, barriers, policing, and the human costs of border crossing would deter, there has been scant evidence of deterrence and much evidence of diversion of migrants to more dangerous crossing points where death rates have soared. Attempts to mitigate the cost to life have also proved ineffective but have persisted alongside the policy of diversion. The article is based on research in a region where the reality of diversion and death instead of deterrence was lived but where people still pursue projects of barrier-building and death mitigation that they know to be ineffective. The article analyzes how fantasy fuels action despite knowledge and occludes a traumatic element around which the symbolic order of border law is structured: the foundation of “good life” with its bounty of rights, privileges, and opportunity on the exclusion of basic life denuded of the entitlements that make the good life sweet. The article also examines how fetishes are used to cope with unrealized hopes and to diffuse the impact of the traumatic knowledge that good life is undergirded by the exclusion and even death of basic life.

Although more than 60,000 workers formally charge their employers with unlawful sex or race employment discrimination annually, fewer than one in five charges results in outcomes favorable to the complainant. Building on sociolegal and organizational theory, this study examines how employing organizations avoid unfavorable discrimination-charge outcomes. Using EEO-1 establishment reports matched to discrimination charge data provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I assess the effect of employers' legal experience, resources, and indicators of legal compliance on the likelihood that complainants receive favorable charge outcomes, benefits, monetary settlements, and policy change mandates. In general, I find that legal experience, establishment size, and indicators of legal compliance insulate employers from unfavorable charge outcomes. However, in situations where employers are willing to settle claims, legally experienced establishments are more likely to pay monetary damages and receive mandates to change their workplace policies.

War landscapes have a particular sociology; they are also formed through distinct legal technologies. By examining the genealogy of trees as totemic displacements in the occupied West Bank I demonstrate how the Israeli/Palestinian war is deflected onto the landscape and how this deflection erodes the boundary between law and war. Dealing with issues of colonization, nationalization, and the way that these implicate landscape as a “natural alibi,” the article examines the intricate making of politics into nature. Further, it explores the ironic nesting of colonial processes from Ottoman, to British, to Zionist, and finally to the new Jewish settler society that seeks to unsettle the old colonial landscapes of this place. Utilizing a detailed interpretation of a range of interviews and participatory observations, the article unpacks the mutually constitutive relationship between law, technologies of seeing, and landscape, illustrating how this relationship is played out by various actors in the occupied West Bank.

Existing analyses of informal control within dyadic relations neglect the nonpenal responses that characterize many such control efforts, and they give minimal attention to the interactional and interpretive processes that characterize such responses. And while dispute transformation provides a well-developed model of the development of dyadic disputes, this model is limited in prespecifying “injury” as the starting point for these processes and in neglecting informal reactions other than “claiming.” Integrating theories of informal control and dispute transformation, this article provides a case study analyzing the nature and processes of informal reactions to troubles involving college roommates, identifying three general categories of such response: managerial reactions, which involve unilateral, nonconfrontational efforts to manage the consequences or implications of the trouble or to change indirectly the troubling behavior; complaint-making reactions, where the troubled party attempts to get the other to change the disturbing behavior; and distancing and punitive reactions, which are relationally despairing responses marked by open confrontation and hostility.

This article takes as its launching point a 2005 U. S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California (543 U.S. 499), which ruled that the California Department of Corrections' unwritten practice of racially segregating inmates in prison reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest level of constitutional review, strict scrutiny. Relying on observational data from two California prison reception centers, this research is grounded in an interactionist perspective and influenced by Smith's work on “institutional ethnography.” I examine how racialization occurs in carceral settings, arguing that officers and inmates collaborate to arrive at a “negotiated settlement” regarding housing decisions. They do so working together (but not always in agreement) to shape how an inmate is categorized in terms of ‘race’/ethnicity and gang/group affiliation, within a framework established by official Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paperwork and related institutional understandings of housing needs. The findings demonstrate that administrators, officers, and inmates alike have influence over the process by which people are categorized and ‘race’ is produced, even as they derive their power from different sources and are both enabled and constrained by the relationship between them. I conclude that California prisons are, as Wacquant has put it, “the main machine for ‘race making’” (2005:128), and that the fuel for that machine—a series of patterned, negotiated settlements—happens in real time, “on the ground,” and with important consequences for inmates, officers, and administrators.

This article addresses two basic questions. First, it examines whether incarceration has a lasting impact on health functioning. Second, because blacks are more likely than whites to be exposed to the negative effects of the penal system—including fractured social bonds, reduced labor market prospects, and high levels of infectious disease—it considers whether the penal system contributes to racial health disparities. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and both regression and propensity matching estimators, the article empirically demonstrates a significant relationship between incarceration and later health status. More specifically, incarceration exerts lasting effects on midlife health functioning. In addition, this analysis finds that, due primarily to disproportionate rates of incarceration, the penal system plays a role in perpetuating racial differences in midlife physical health functioning.

“Predatory policing” occurs where police officers mainly use their authority to advance their own material interests rather than to fight crime or protect the interests of elites. These practices have the potential to seriously compromise the public's trust in the police and other legal institutions, such as courts. Using data from six surveys and nine focus groups conducted in Russia, we address four empirical questions: (1) How widespread are public encounters with police violence and police corruption in Russia? (2) To what extent does exposure to these two forms of police misconduct vary by social and economic characteristics? (3) How do Russians perceive the police, the courts, and the use of violent methods by the police? (4) How, if at all, do experiences of police misconduct affect these perceptions? Our results suggest that Russia conforms to a model of predatory policing. Despite substantial differences in its law enforcement institutions and cultural norms regarding the law, Russia resembles the United States in that direct experiences of police abuse reduce confidence in the police and in the legal system more generally. The prevalence of predatory policing in Russia has undermined Russia's democratic transition, which should call attention to the indispensable role of the police and other public institutions in the success of democratic reforms.

Previous studies have shown that female offenders frequently receive more lenient judgments than equivalent males. Chivalry theories argue that such leniency is the result of paternalistic, benevolent attitudes toward women, in particular toward those who fulfill stereotypical female roles. Yet to date, studies have not examined whether such leniency is indeed associated with paternalistic societal attitudes toward women. The present study goes beyond the investigation of demographics and employs Glick and Fiske's (1996) concepts of hostile and benevolent sexism. We use these concepts to highlight the role of individual differences in attitudes toward women as a key to our understanding of lenient attitudes toward female offenders. Eight hundred forty respondents from a national sample of Israeli residents evaluated the seriousness of hypothetical crime scenarios with (traditional and nontraditional) female and male offenders. As hypothesized, hostile and benevolent sexism moderate the effect of women's “traditionality” on respondents' crime seriousness judgments and on the severity of sentences assigned.

The judge in a jury trial is charged with excusing prospective jurors who will not be impartial. To assess impartiality, prospective jurors are typically asked whether they can be fair. Using an experimental paradigm, we found that small changes in jurors' self-reported confidence in their ability to be fair affected judges' decisions about bias but did not affect the judgments of either attorneys or jurors. We suggest why a judge's role and unique relationship with jurors is likely to foster a decision strategy based on reported juror confidence, and we discuss the implications of our analysis for current legal debates over jury selection practices. Unexpected patterns in our results also highlight the ways in which perceptions of impartiality are affected, in part, by the social characteristics of the observer.

Past research indicates that front-line criminal justice workers are the critical players in determining whether innovations in penal policy are realized. Recent attempts to understand the diversity in the application of the penal harm movement have, however, sidestepped the primary audience of these policies, the population of convicted offenders. This article uses data from two prisons to examine the effects of correctional officers on women prisoners' adjustment to prison life. Using regression models and interview data, we find that correctional officer behavior has a profound impact on women's ability to adjust to prison, and this effect is largely independent of the prisoners' characteristics and the institutions in which they are housed. On a theoretical level, the findings speak to recent calls to examine the background and foreground of penal culture. On a practical level, they highlight the need to understand the environments from which women are emerging, not just the communities into which they are released.

The worldwide expansion of international law firms has generated regulatory battles and workplace conflicts in advanced market economies as well as developing countries. This article uses the case of China to explore the changing global–local relationship in the globalization of the legal profession and to understand the role of the government in constituting the corporate law market. The author argues that the globalization of the Chinese corporate law market is a process of boundary-blurring and hybridization, by which local firms become structurally global-looking and global firms receive localized expertise. Boundary-blurring occurs in law firms' workplaces, in lawyers' career trajectories, and in state regulatory policies. It has produced a localized expertise that can be diffused conversely from local firms to global firms and has partially changed their relationship from collaboration to competition. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult for the government to make or enforce any substantive policy to clarify the market boundary between these two types of law firms.

Despite a growing health care crisis, Americans remain reluctant to treat “health security” as a right or entitlement of citizenship. This article examines the effects of unmet health care needs on the beliefs that individuals hold about family, market, and state responsibility for health security. Drawing on a study of individuals caring for family members with chronic diseases, I find that when imagining solutions to unmet long-term care needs, individuals evaluate a range of alternative social arrangements, but they select the model that is most consistent with previously existing beliefs about family, market, and state responsibility for care provision. This process of discursive assimilation, of integrating new needs for public provision with more familiar ways of thinking about social welfare, produces claims for entitlements that challenge existing social arrangements but do so within a welfare state framework that conceives of only a minimal role for the state in safeguarding social welfare.

Conventional wisdom holds that the role of the U.S. federal judiciary was underspecified and undefined until the era of Chief Justice John Marshall. In contrast, I argue that prior to the Marshall era, the Supreme Court had the specific institutional role of providing an administrative remedy to aggrieved nations to deprive potentially hostile nations of any excuse for belligerence. Specifically, concern among the Framers about this nascent country's absence of dispute resolution mechanisms in the areas of trade and admiralty was critical in the institutional design of the judiciary. Original jurisdiction was designed primarily to remedy trade disputes. The independent judiciary made trade commitments more credible and self-help by the aggrieved less likely. By providing this administrative remedy and lowering the uncertainty associated with trading with revolutionaries, the Framers claimed a seat for the new country at the table of nations. Moreover, enhanced commercial credibility that the administrative avenue for redress provided was instrumental in the early economic development of the United States.

Traditional views hold that citizens' attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are responsive to systematic and periodic national-level political factors. In particular, we show that national elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using a logistic regression model and diachronic data from Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, we find that attitudes toward the police and the national government are linked, and this linkage is responsive to the influence of national election campaigns in varying degrees. In addition, we find that attitudes toward the Mexican police are sensitive to partisan changes in the composition of the national political government. We find no such sensitivity in the police attitudes of Costa Rican and U.S. citizens. This suggests that police attitudes are not only affected by the performance of the national political government but also by the character (consolidated versus unconsolidated) of the national political government. In short, police attitudes in new democracies are an indication of the unconsolidated nature of the state apparatus.

A long line of research, beginning with Macaulay's (1963) well-known study of “Non-Contractual Relations in Business,” suggests that the formal trappings of domestic law often have effects on private behavior that are, at best, “indirect, subtle, and ambiguous” (Macaulay 1984:155). Law and society scholars have spent somewhat less time exploring whether international law's effects on behavior are similarly attenuated. In this article I examine whether foreign investors take the presence of strong formal international legal protections into account when deciding where to invest. I focus on whether the presence of bilateral investment treaties, or BITs, meaningfully influences investment decisions. I present results from a statistical analysis that examines whether the formally strongest BITs—those that guarantee investors access to international arbitration to enforce investors' international legal rights—are associated with greater investment flows. I find no clear link between treaty protections and investment, a finding consistent with past law and society research but in tension with claims common in the BIT literature that the treaties should have dramatic effects on investor behavior.

Through a case study of the early American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), this article examines the empirical ramifications of constitutional scholars' recent exhortations to “take the Constitution away from the courts” in order to promote democratic deliberation about constitutional meaning. While it is now one of the most prominent examples of a litigation-based interest group, the ACLU began its existence demonstrating a commitment to constitutionalism outside the courts. Through coding a decade's worth of meeting minutes and examining archival sources, I demonstrate that the ACLU's mounting unpopularity rendered extrajudicial politics impossible, precipitating the ACLU's shift toward litigation. The ACLU's move toward litigation, despite its early devotion to political activism outside the courts, suggests that it is not always possible for political actors to make constitutional arguments without courts. Furthermore, the ACLU's use of courts to publicize and dramatize its constitutional arguments demonstrates that litigation may actually promote popular deliberation about constitutional meaning. These political realities both highlight and contradict two empirical assumptions underlying arguments about the normative desirability of restricting courts' involvement in constitutional politics. First, the state is not a neutral arena in which all political actors are equally free to pursue their constitutional visions through majoritarian processes. Second, courts may facilitate (rather than hinder) popular deliberation about constitutional questions.

Presumptive arrest and prosecution policies are designed to eradicate domestic violence by disrupting abusive relationships and transforming the subjectivities of victimized women and abusive men. Using in-depth interviews with 30 persons arrested and prosecuted for domestic violence, this article examines the power of presumptive policies by exploring how intimate abusers experience them. The study finds that while the police and courts are able to secure arrests and convictions on domestic violence cases, nearly all the respondents in this study understand their punishments as unfair sanctions meted out by an unjust local legal system rather than as the consequences of their own actions. These injustice claims emerge from abusers' group identities as well as the very practices through which the police and courts gain authority over them. These findings demonstrate that the power of the law as a force for social change may be more limited than some have claimed. In addition, they reinforce calls to reform society's response to intimate violence through procedures that can go further in empowering victims and having offenders recognize their responsibility for violence.

This article evaluates how the social structure of American legal institutions influenced the diffusion of wrongful-discharge laws over the period 1978–1999, and it assesses whether economic or political variables influenced the diffusion process. The results are surprising and quite striking. Precedents by other courts within the same federal circuit region were generally more influential in the diffusion process than precedents by courts in neighboring states or by courts within the same census or West legal reporting region, even though the precedents were on matters of state law rather than federal law and the decisions were usually made by state courts rather than federal courts. There is some limited evidence that political variables may also have been a factor, but economic variables were not statistically significant, even though the new employment laws may have had important economic consequences.