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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In many states, young people today can receive a “blended” combination of both a juvenile sanction and an adult criminal sentence. We ask what accounts for the rise of blended sentencing in juvenile justice and whether this trend parallels crime control developments in the adult criminal justice system. We use event history analysis to model state adoption of blended sentencing laws from 1985 to 2008, examining the relative influence of social, political, administrative, and economic factors. We find that states with high unemployment, greater prosecutorial discretion, and disproportionate rates of African American incarceration are most likely to pass blended sentencing provisions. This suggests that the turn toward blended sentencing largely parallels the punitive turn in adult sentencing and corrections—and that theory and research on adult punishment productively extends to developments in juvenile justice.

Does the rule of law guarantee peace and democracy, as so many people in the development and governance field believe? What are the historical and sociocultural conditions that shape the way rule of law mechanisms work in practice? Mark Massoud's monograph tracing the changing dimensions of the rule of law in Sudan from its colonial period to the present offers an important perspective on these questions, casting doubt on the simple argument that the rule of law produces democracy and peace. Instead, he shows how colonial and authoritarian rulers used the rule of law to consolidate power and legitimate their rule. In Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan, Massoud develops the concept of legal politics, arguing that the way the rule of law works varies with the political system in which it is embedded. He concludes that the forms of legal politics that reinforce the power and authority of legal institutions are more likely to sustain an authoritarian state than to bring democratic rule. His analysis is a valuable caution to those who promote the rule of law as the salvation for all. Taking a sociolegal perspective, he shows how it works in practice.

This essay is a response to Mark Massoud's Law's Fragile State, and through comparative inquiry argues that highly contextualized analysis of courts is critical to gaining an understanding of judicial decision making and judicial empowerment. As Massoud demonstrates, focusing on the legal complex is a particularly worthwhile endeavor in fragile states. Although we may understand the sociology of the legal profession, we do not fully understand how professional networks, career paths, and identities truly impact the institutional pathways of the courts and the legal system as a whole.

Two significant writings, one by Douglas Hay and the other by E. P. Thompson, appeared in 1976. Both sought to explain relationships between law and social (specifically, ruling‐class) power in a manner that avoided treating law either simply as a coercive instrument of class domination (“vulgar Marxism”), or as a good for all “(liberal legalism”). They overlapped and each was influenced by the other, but they differed significantly, in substance, in tone, and in admirers. Mark Massoud sensibly and thoughtfully draws inspiration from both. This article queries, however, whether his account of the role and rule of law in Sudan manages to resolve a significant tension between Hay and Thompson. This results in a certain ambivalence in the telling, a sometimes anguished oscillation between two interpretive modes, perhaps sensibilities, represented by Hay and Thompson, each of which can lead in different directions.

This essay responds to the three commentators in the symposium on my book, Law's Fragile State, by describing the sociolegal study of the rule of law as an investigation into both a set of ideals (the rule of law as a normative question) and a set of practices (the rule of law as an empirical question). Studying the rule of law involves understanding the contingent nature of its ideals as well as investigating the actual work that lawyers, judges, state officials, aid workers, activists, and others have done in specific contexts to promote legal remedies to social or political ills. These overlapping layers of the study of the rule of law—ideals and practices, normative and empirical—provide a sociolegal framework for understanding the successes and failures of legal work and, ultimately, how citizens experience state power in democratic and nondemocratic societies alike.

I review two recent studies of judicial behavior, Posner's How Judges Think (2008) and Epstein, Landes, and Posner's Behavior of Federal Judges (2013). Epstein, Landes, and Posner's volume, the empirically richer of the two books, builds on the conceptual model for explaining judicial behavior put forward in Posner's How Judges Think. I discuss this conceptual model and argue in outline for an alternative model, complementary in part and antagonistic in part to the behaviorist research agenda. Posner and Epstein, Landes, and Posner argue for viewing the judge as a rational actor in a labor market. I argue that analyzing judicial decisions from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge, without axiomatically assuming rationality, will allow us to bring more evidentiary sources to bear on the problem and will allow for a more adequate test of competing theoretical interpretations. Law and society scholars are well positioned to contribute to this line of inquiry.