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.

We present a factorial survey experiment conducted with Iraqi judges during the early military occupation of Iraq. Because U.S. soldiers are immune from prosecution in Iraqi courts, there is no opportunity for these judges to express their views regarding highly publicized torture cases. As legally informed representatives of an occupied nation, however, Iraqi judges arguably have a strong claim to a normative voice on this sensitive subject. We are able to give voice to these judges in this study by using a quasi-experimental method. This method diminishes social desirability bias in judges' responses and allows us to consider a broad range and combination of factors influencing their normative judgments. We examine why and how the U.S. effort to introduce democracy with an indeterminate rule of law produced unintended and inconsistent results in the normative judgments of Iraqi judges. A critical legal perspective anticipates the influences of indeterminacy, power, and fear in our research. More specifically, we anticipated lenient treatment for guards convicted of torture, especially in trouble cases of Coalition soldiers torturing al Qaeda prisoners. However, the results—which include cross-level, judge-case interaction effects—were more varied than theoretically expected. The Iraqi judges responded in disparate and polarized ways. Some judges imposed more severe sentences on Coalition guards convicted of torturing al Qaeda suspects, while others imposed more lenient sentences on the same combination of guards and suspects. The cross-level interactions indicate that the judges who severely sentenced Coalition guards likely feared the contribution of torture tactics to increasing violence in Iraq. The judges who were less fearful of violence were more lenient and accommodating of torture by Coalition forces. The implication is that the less fearful judges were freed by an indeterminate law to advance Coalition goals through lenient punishment of torture. Our analysis suggests that the introduction of democracy and the rule of law in Iraq is a negative case in the international diffusion of American institutions. The results indicate the need for further development of a nuanced critical legal perspective.

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.

This article draws upon the law-in-action, repeat players, and motive to understand how legal actors construct the “good case” in dispute settlement systems. The construction of “good cases” is examined at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a relatively new and unexplored site for the study of dispute settlement. Findings show that the good case encompasses flexible sets of motives including economic, political, and symbolic characteristics of trade grievances to mobilize WTO law. The flexibility is due to uncertainties associated with litigation, which are manifestations of four features of the WTO: the newness of the system, the organizational and legal structure of the dispute system, the context of the WTO as an intergovernmental agreement, and the persistence of inequality between states. Six variations of the good case are identified.

Clemency in capital cases today has become quite rare. Capital clemency has been a victim of the rejection of rehabilitation as the guiding philosophy of criminal sentencing and of the increasing politicization of issues of crime and punishment since the 1960s. Yet despite the reluctance of governors to grant clemency, despite the difficulty of rectifying miscarriages of justice through the clemency process, petitions seeking commutation or pardon in death cases still are regularly presented to chief executives. With so little chance of success, filing them may seem to be nothing more than an empty ritual. In this article, I examine clemency petitions from Texas and Virginia, and I argue that those petitions may serve another function, and take on meaning in another way. This function I label “memorialization.” These pleas provide an archive of stories of law's failures, of alleged breakdowns in the legal process, of a legal process in disrepair, as well as of racial prejudice, of lives shattered by violence and neglect, of remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption. They are cultural artifacts, documents that address both governors and an indeterminate audience beyond them and that memorialize miscarriages of justice. While they reveal the importance of religion, family, and good works in American thinking about remorse, redemption, and mercy, they also should be seen as histories of the present, documenting the breakdowns and inequities in the death penalty system as well as the tragic circumstances of lives shaped and shattered by poverty, abuse, and neglect.

In this article I report the results of a quantitative and qualitative empirical study of how those who were injured or lost a family member in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks evaluated the tradeoff between a cash payment—available through the Victim Compensation Fund—and the pursuit of litigation. Responses make it clear that potential plaintiffs saw much more at stake than monetary compensation and that the choice to forego litigation required the sacrifice of important nonmonetary, civic values: obtaining and publicizing information about what happened, prompting public findings of accountability for those responsible, and participating in the process of ensuring that there would be responsive change to what was learned about how the attacks and deaths happened. The results shed light on the framing component of the transformation of disputes, and in particular on how potential litigants see the decision to sue, or not, as a decision as much or more about how they understand their relationship to their community and their responsibilities as a citizen as how they evaluate monetary considerations.

A new era has emerged in the ways in which candidates for state judicial office campaign. In the past, judicial elections were largely devoid of policy content, with candidates typically touting their judicial experience and other preparation for serving as a judge. Today, in many if not most states, such campaigns are relics of the past. Modern judicial campaigns have adopted many of the practices of candidates for other types of political office, including soliciting campaign contributions, using attack ads, and even making promises about how they will decide issues if elected to the bench.

Not surprisingly, this new style of judicial campaigning has caused considerable consternation among observers of the courts, with many fearing that such activity will undermine the very legitimacy of legal institutions. Such fears, however, are grounded in practically no rigorous empirical evidence on the effects of campaign activity on public evaluations of judicial institutions.

The purpose of this article is to investigate the effects of campaign activity on the perceived legitimacy of courts. Using survey data drawn from Kentucky, I use both post hoc and experimental methods to assess whether public perceptions of courts are influenced by various sorts of campaign activity. In general, my findings are that different types of campaign activity have quite different consequences. For instance, policy pronouncements by candidates do not undermine judicial legitimacy, whereas policy promises do. Throughout the analysis, I compare perceptions of courts and legislatures, and often find that courts are far less unique than many ordinarily assume. I conclude this article with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the contemporary debate over the use of elections to select judges to the high courts of many of the American states.