In recent decades, alternative dispute resolution processes have gained worldwide recognition, a growing role in legal practice, and increasing academic attention. Despite their professed advantages, they have also faced fierce opposition. In a seminal article, Owen Fiss argued that ADR exacerbates imbalances of power between the parties. But while the theoretical argument has been widely developed, empirical evidence has remained scant. This article empirically examines the impact of representation patterns and dispute resolution methods on case outcomes. Arguably, professional representation of weaker parties may reduce the effects of inequality, whereas less formal, transparent, and adjudicatory processes may exacerbate them. The article focuses on small claims settlement conferences, using the Israeli labor courts system as a test case. The main findings are that representation increases the probability of a successful settlement conference, and that the more formal the process, the greater the ratio between the sum obtained by the plaintiff and the sum claimed.

The competition between the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, a cosmopolitan common law supreme court, and the Chinese National People's Congress Standing Committee, a Leninist parliamentary body, over the “proper meaning” of the Hong Kong Basic Law constituted a very important facet of the territory's constitutional history since the end of British rule in 1997. This article applies the insights of game theory to explain why constitutional stability, in the sense that the two players have never entered into an open collision with each other despite the ambiguity of the Basic Law and the “One Country, Two Systems” formula, endured until the present day. It is argued that successful coordination between the two resulted from the strong aversion of the Court and the Standing Committee to constitutional crises, as well as from the fact that neither entity was capable of credibly signaling its commitment to an aggressive strategy all the time.

Housing demolition has been one of the major sources of social conflict in contemporary China. Drawing on evidence collected in fieldwork investigations, this article examines the pressure of protest‐supported housing demolition litigation and its impacts. It finds that under the pressure of litigation, the courts have devised coping mechanisms to constrain the housing demolition authorities, and that social change angling toward more transparency and accountability has occurred. The article argues that this change is made possible as the maintenance of social stability has become not only the paramount concern of the regime, but also the performance assessment criterion for local officials and judges. The findings deepen our understanding of the causes and consequences of judicial empowerment in China and shed light on the dynamics of judicial politics in other regimes.

The question whether unjust dispossessions of land perpetrated on whole peoples in the past should be corrected by restitution in kind, that is, granting reparations in the form of returning land to the dispossessed former owners or their present‐day successors, is substantially more complex than the questions posed by other forms of reparations. I argue that the complexities involved in all the situations where claims for land reparations are made to correct historic injustices give us good reasons to be hesitant about granting such claims. At the same time, we should not dismiss such claims out of hand. Reparations that take a form other than restitution of dispossessed land may be both necessary and sufficient to establish a public marker of acknowledgment.

One of the most replicated findings of the procedural justice literature is that people who receive unfavorable outcomes are more likely to believe that the process was nonetheless legitimate if they thought that it was fair. Using interviews of 150 people compensated through the South African land restitution program, this article examines whether these findings apply in the transitional justice context where it is often unclear who the winners and losers are. The question explored is: When all outcomes are unfavorable or incomplete, how do people make fairness assessments? The central observation was that the ability of respondents and land restitution commission officials to sustain a conversation with each other had the greatest effect on whether respondents believed that the land restitution process was fair. The study also contributes to the existing literature by exploring the institutional arrangements and resources necessary to facilitate communication and to overcome any communication breakdowns encountered.

Violent hazing has been a longstanding issue within African American, collegiate fraternities and sororities, otherwise known as black Greek‐letter organizations (BGLOs). This article investigates how and what hazing victims know about their hazing experiences. Additionally, the article examines how victims' knowledge of hazing may hold serious implications for tort defense doctrines like assumption of risk and comparative fault. Specifically, the authors conduct two studies—one quantitative and the other qualitative—to find that not only are BGLO pledges aware that their pledge experiences are likely to involve mental and physical hazing, but that they believe such experiences will likely continue throughout the entirety of their induction process. Moreover, appreciation for hazing experiences is often captured in the fraternal chants, greetings, and songs they learn or create, which together reflects some understanding of danger and risk. The authors contend that these elements of black “Greek” hazing culture may serve as evidence of assumption of risk or comparative fault.

This article explores how private organizations influence the content and meaning of consumer protection legislation. I examine why California forced consumers to use a private dispute resolution system that affords consumers fewer rights, while Vermont adopted a state‐run disputing structure that affords consumers greater rights. Drawing from historical and new institutional theories, I analyze twenty‐five years of legislative history, as well as interviews with drafters of the California and Vermont laws, to show how automobile manufacturers weakened the impact of a powerful California consumer warranty law by creating dispute resolution venues. As these structures became institutionalized in the lemon law field, manufacturers reshaped the meaning of legislation. Unlike California, the political alliances in Vermont and a different developmental path led to a state‐run dispute resolution structure. I conclude that how social reform laws are designed and how businesses influence social reform legislation can increase or decrease the achievement of a statute's social reform goals.

As the Global North experiences a real or manufactured crisis in asylum, deterrence has become the central plank in border control policies. Following a resurgence of boat arrivals and faced with serious overcrowding in detention centers and a spate of drownings, the Australian government returned to the use of offshore detention for asylum seekers. In this article, the official media releases of the major political parties from the period surrounding the reopening of detention facilities on Nauru and Papua New Guinea are subject to systematic discourse analysis. This reveals a range of deterrence scripts that we have labeled “neoliberal deterrence,” “classical deterrence,” and an “ethic of care.” The resuscitation of the deterrence script in this second incarnation of Australian offshore processing arguably reveals increasingly nuanced and combative elements. The article details how these scripts make an important contribution to global immigration governance, which is presently incapable of thinking beyond deterrence in its various forms.

In the aftermath of America's Civil War, national lawmakers who chronicled the fall of slavery described the North as a terrain of states whose representatives assembled in Congress, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–70). Beginning in the early 1900s, scholars who helped establish the field of American constitutional history redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–1870), a first generation of scholars writing during the Progressive Era redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in William A. Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), John W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution (1901–1906), and James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926). Although a second generation of scholars uncovered traces of the lawmakers' perspective of states, new efforts in the wake of the civil rights movement to understand the internal workings of political parties and the contributions of ordinary Americans kept the study of national lawmakers and their states on the margins of inquiry, as evidenced in leading revisionist histories of Reconstruction, including Harold Hyman's A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), Michael Les Benedict's A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974a), and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988). Today, the terrain of Northern states remains in the backdrop, as illustrated in recent studies featuring the wartime national government, including James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (2011), as well as studies of the mechanisms of constitutional change during Reconstruction, including relevant sections of Bruce Ackerman's We the People II: Transformations (1998) and Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography (2005). This review essay argues that incorporating the states back into this century‐old framework will open new lines of inquiry and provide a more complete account of federalism's role in the fall of slavery. In particular, a return to the archives suggests that in the uncertain context of mid‐nineteenth‐century America, slavery's leading opponents in Congress saw the Constitution's federal logic not simply as an obstacle, but as a crucial tool with which to mobilize collective action and accommodate wartime opposition at a time when no one could say for sure what would remain of the United States.

Genres are historical formations; their ability to generate knowledge depends on their interrelationships within a culture. Since law, too, can be viewed as a genre, studies of specific historical relationalities between law and other genres are necessary for law's own history and theory. This essay discusses differentiations between Victorian law and literature, starting out from the recent publication of Ayelet Ben‐Yishai's Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction (2013), which reveals some of that history. I examine two points: differentiations in legal and literary approaches to probabilistic knowledge, and differentiations in the author functions in law and literature. These differentiations bear multiple implications. I discuss implications for evidence‐law debates about probabilistic evidence, for contract‐law debates about the centrality of autonomy and self‐authorship, and for understandings of legal reasoning itself—the elusive notion of “thinking like a lawyer.”