Despite burgeoning interest in prisoner re‐entry and the “collateral consequences” of criminal convictions, we know little about the practical operation of policies governing the rights and privileges of people with criminal convictions. This study examines New York's Certificates of Relief from Civil Disabilities to explore the workings of the US carceral state at the intersection of criminal and civil law. These certificates remove some legal restrictions accompanying convictions, particularly licensure barriers, and are easier to achieve than pardons; other states have used New York's policy as a model. Interviews with judges and probation officers reveal deep variations in how they understand and award certificates. In some cases, differences stem from informal local agreements, particularly concerning firearms in rural communities; in others, from discretionary judgments in a context of legal ambiguity. These practices demonstrate how specific legal, organizational, and cultural factors contribute to complexity and variation in the US carceral state.

This article analyzes why Chinese lawyers report a high level of perceived deterrence in relation to tax evasion even though enforcement is weak. It finds that deterrence here originates from multiple sources, most directly through clients and more distantly through the firm and the state. Lawyers have highly contextual notions of detection probability and a vague understanding of sanction severity unfitting of the high deterrence found here. In the cases studied, deterrence arises out of a general fear lawyers have of state authorities and clients, as well as through personal morals and social norms in their firms. This shows a broader and deeper approach to deterrence, beyond certainty and severity of punishment for the violation studied, one in which the general perceived risk of such violation is central, whatever its source.

Studies of legal consciousness have flourished over the last few decades, but these studies and the very concept of legal consciousness have recently come under critique. This article uses the case of studies of the legal consciousness of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people to demonstrate that legal consciousness has been a valuable conceptual tool for exploring experiences of sociolegal marginalization. Research on LGBT people advances the study of legal consciousness without sacrificing a critical stance or reading lack of overt resistance as evidence of law's hegemonic power. Consideration of this research highlights that focusing on marginalized populations is a way to retain a critical edge in legal consciousness research. Future research should include more exploration of the relationship between marginalization and legal consciousness, further theoretical elaboration of the forms and conditions of resistance to law, and greater attention to how social interactions and institutions produce legal consciousness.

On January 14, 2011, after twenty‐three years in power and one month of popular protest demanding his resignation, President Ben Ali fled Tunisia. Lawyers, wearing their official robes, had marched frequently in the uprising's demonstrations. By engaging with and supporting the uprising, lawyers—both the profession in general and the bar's leadership—gained considerable symbolic influence over the post‐uprising government that replaced Ben Ali's regime. This article outlines the various forms of political lawyering undertaken by Tunisian lawyers and their professional associations from Tunisia's independence to post‐uprising transitions. We demonstrate that economic concerns, professional objectives, and civic professionalism contributed to the collective action of Tunisian lawyers before and after the uprising. Tunisian lawyers moved beyond the realm of their profession to adopt a role as overseers of the post‐uprising government.

In We Want What's Ours: Learning from South Africa's Land Restitution Program, I introduced the concept of “dignity takings,” which I defined as property confiscation that involves the dehumanization or infantilization of the dispossessed. I argued that the appropriate remedy for a dignity taking is “dignity restoration”: material compensation to dispossessed populations through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency. For this symposium, contributors were invited to examine these paired concepts through case studies beyond the South African context. This introductory essay summarizes the central arguments of We Want What's Ours and considers how the symposium contributions confirm, extend, or revise the concepts of dignity takings and dignity restoration.

Judicial scholars have often speculated about the impact of elections on the administration of justice in the state courts. Yet relatively little research has concerned itself with public perceptions of state court selection methods. Of particular interest is the concept of legitimacy. Do elections negatively affect public perceptions of judicial legitimacy? Bonneau and Hall (2009) and Gibson (2012) answer this question with an emphatic “No.” Judicial elections, these studies show, are not uniquely troublesome for perceptions of institutional legitimacy. This article aims to extend the findings of Bonneau and Hall and Gibson via a laboratory experiment on the effects of elections on public perceptions of judicial legitimacy. In the end, we find that because elections preempt the use of the other main selection method—appointment—they actually enhance perceptions of judicial legitimacy rather than diminish them.

Bernadette Atuahene's We Want What's Ours focuses on deprivations that go beyond property losses. Her focus is on the dignity harms to South Africans over centuries, such as denial of citizenship, that accompanied the theft of their land. I focus here on one grotesque episode of violence, the Tulsa race riot of 1921, to gauge dignity takings in a US context. Thousands were, in the parlance of the times, run out of town in a “negro drive.” They lost property, but also their community, and they could not assert their rights after the riot. This article turns to the ways in which African Americans in Oklahoma obtained rights through the courts that should have been protected around the time of the riot. This expands our sense of the range of responses, from apologies and compensation, to additional judicial process and substantive rights, that are needed for past racial crimes.

We develop a political history of Wards Cove v. Atonio (1989) to show how Robert Cover's concepts of jurisgenesis and jurispathy can enrich the legal mobilization framework for understanding law and social change. We illustrate the value of the hybrid theory by recovering the Wards Cove workers’ own understanding of the role of litigation in their struggle for workplace rights. The cannery worker plaintiffs exemplified Cover's dual logic by articulating aspirational narratives of social justice and by critically rebuking the Supreme Court's ruling as the “death throe” for progressive minority workers’ rights advocacy. The cannery workers’ story also highlights the importance of integrating legal mobilization scholars’ focus on extrajudicial political engagement into Cover's judge‐centered analysis. Our aim is to forge a theoretical bridge between Cover's provocative arguments about law and the analytical tradition of social science scholarship on the politics of legal mobilization.

At precisely the same time that gay and lesbian activists were securing marriage rights for same-sex couples nationwide, courts and “tough on crime” state legislatures were devising new ways to regulate sex. Despite recent estimates that over 750,000 Americans are registered sex offenders, few sexuality scholars have examined the growth of punitive policies regulating sex offenders. In this article, I draw on a unique set of data on the population of sex offenders in the United States to analyze: (1) whether recent trends in sex offender registration mirror those of corrections more generally, and (2) whether these policies disproportionally impact racial minorities. Findings reveal that sex offender registries grew dramatically between 2005 and 2013; that this growth is out of step with concurrent trends in corrections; and that black communities are disproportionately impacted. I conclude by considering whether these data reveal a new mode of “governing through crime” specifically targeting sex.

Brazil today has a legal market that allows for foreign lawyers and foreign firms, but existing regulations are restrictive. Foreign lawyers cannot practice domestic law or litigation, nor can Brazilian‐licensed lawyers working for foreign firms or partnering with foreign lawyers. This was not always the case, however. Until 1963, there was little regulation of the legal profession. Beginning in 1913, elite US lawyers traveled to Brazil, with some even becoming prominent domestic practitioners. They partnered with local elite lawyers (who maintained their domestic privileges) and served as key brokers for US businesses seeking market entry. Drawing on the elite theory literature, and on ethnographies, interview data, and over 1,000 pages of rare Portuguese and English archival sources, this study's thesis is that sophisticated US and Brazilian legal elites capitalized on the lack of regulation to advance their financial interests, and in the process transformed Brazil's corporate legal sector.

Despite recent legal advances for LGBT citizens, including the Supreme Court's recognition of a constitutional right to engage in private, consensual, same-sex sex, prisons continue to regulate sex in much the same way they have been doing since the nineteenth century. Nationwide, prisons bar consensual sex among prisoners, and those who violate this policy face severe punishment, including administrative segregation. Interviews with prison officials from twenty-three states uncover beliefs linking consensual sex with violence that places the overall security of the prison at risk. While supporting LGBT rights and the decriminalization of same-sex sex in society, officials insist that prisons are not suited for similar change. This article explains why prison officials have been so committed to this policy and argues that the time has come to reconsider prison regulation of consensual sex.

This short comment challenges efforts to expand the notion of a dignity taking to traditional legal structures, like those identified with “coverture.” It suggests that the inequalities of gender oppression are better understood as forms of “slow violence.” It also suggests how difficult it is to imagine and to institute remedies for wrongs rooted in long histories and in powerful structures of socialization.

This article argues that jihads waged in recent decades by “foreign fighter” volunteers invoking a sense of global Islamic solidarity can be usefully understood as attempts to enact an alternative to the interventions of the “International Community.” Drawing from ethnographic and archival research on Arab volunteers who joined the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, this article highlights the challenges and dilemmas facing such jihad fighters as they maneuvered at the edges of diverse legal orders, including international and Islamic law. Jihad fighters appealed to a divine authority above the global nation‐state order while at the same time rooting themselves in that order through affiliation with the sovereign and avowedly secular nation‐state of Bosnia‐Herzegovina. This article demonstrates an innovative approach to law, violence, and Islam that critically situates states and nonstate actors in relation to one another in transnational perspective.

Reexamination and reinterpretation of the “mature” (1955–1984) New Deal era of congressional attacks on the Supreme Court reveals a new hypothesis: that Court‐curbing efforts played a previously unrecognized role in party system development. Court rulings that create inter‐ and intraparty tension provide opportunities for various actors to attack the Court in an effort to solidify their faction's standing within national coalitional politics. Congressional attackers can use Court‐curbing resolutions and amendments in efforts to help them maintain coalitional cohesion, build a new majority, or consolidate previous victories. Thus, we might see legislative‐judicial relations as an unrecognized “site” of political development, where coalitional change is opposed and wrought.

This article uses an original database of confirmation hearing dialogue to examine how the Senate Judiciary Committee's role in Supreme Court confirmations has changed over time, with particular attention paid to the 1939–2010 era. During this period, several notable developments took place, including a rise in the number of hearing comments, increased attention to nominees’ views of judicial decisions, an expansion of the scope of issues addressed, and the equalization of questioning between majority and minority party senators. We demonstrate that these changes were shaped by both endogenous and exogenous factors to promote the legitimization of the Judiciary Committee's role in the confirmation process and to foster the instrumental goals of senators. This research contributes to our understanding of the development of political institutions, interbranch interactions, and how institutional change affects the behavior of legal and political actors.

This article examines the “dilemma of difference” transgender prisoners pose and face within a sex-segregated prison system organized around the pursuit of safety and security. Our analysis uses data from a study of the culture and experiences of transgender prisoners in four men's prisons. Using qualitative data from interviews with transgender prisoners, focus groups with prisoners, and focus groups with staff, our findings reveal a common contention that transgender prisoners are (according to staff) and should be (according to prisoners) treated like everyone else, despite their unique situations. This further demonstrates the stakes that this dilemma carries for the prison regime and transgender prisoners' roles in challenging it without engaging in overt resistance—which carries high stakes for them. Accordingly, we elucidate how the rigidity of an institutional structure built on inherent contradictions can have the potential to complicate the achievement of institutional goals.

Asian victims of Japanese imperialism have filed lawsuits against the Japanese government and corporations since the 1990s, which became prime sites for redress decades after Japan's defeat in World War II. As this ethnography demonstrates, this process paradoxically exposes a legal lacuna within this emergent transnational legal space, with plaintiffs effectively caught between the law, instead of standing before the law. Exploring this absence of law, I map out a post‐imperial legal space, created through the erasure of imperial and colonial subjects in the legal framework after empire. Between the law is an optic that makes visible uneven legal terrains that embody temporal and spatial disjuncture, rupture, and asymmetry. The role of law in post‐imperial transitions remains underexplored in literatures on transnational law, legal imperialism, postcolonialism, and transitional justice. I demonstrate how, at the intersection of law and economy, post‐imperial reckoning is emerging as a new legal frontier, putting at stake law's imperial amnesia.

Taking a cue from Bernadette Atuahene's concept of “dignity takings” and her insight that government expropriation inflicts more than economic injury, this essay analyzes how American revolutionaries defined political membership, penalized and expropriated British loyalists, and then allowed some to join the American polity in the decade after the Revolution. Many recovered their property, professions, and legal privileges. However, because most loyalists could choose to remain loyal or join the Revolution, they did not lose human dignity as Atuahene defines it. Case studies of two reintegrating lawyers, Richard Harison and William Rawle, explore loyalism, the loss of dignities that loyalists suffered, and some paths toward reintegration. Their appointment as federal attorneys helped make the government conversant in the common law, British statutes, and the law of nations, which in turn supported the Federalist goal of reintegrating the United States into the Atlantic World: achieving, in other words, national dignity.