Legal authorities’ second-order legal consciousness—their perceptions of others’ understandings of law—shapes the social realization of legal power. Analysis of interviews with welfare fraud enforcement workers from five US states reveals their perceptions of how clients view law, policy, and enforcement practices, and shows these perceptions’ consequences. Enforcement workers’ perceptions influence the discretionary work of policy implementation, as fraud workers attempt to circumvent what they see as clients’ evasive maneuvers and act in ways they believe will influence clients’ thinking and behavior. Fraud workers’ second-order legal consciousness can also influence welfare law, when their perceptions of clients’ understandings and behaviors drive changes in written rules. Together, these effects demonstrate the power of authorities’ second-order legal consciousness to affect both law in action and law in books. Through documenting the impact of authorities’ second-order legal consciousness, this study fills an important gap in social scientific knowledge of how ongoing, dynamic processes of assessing others’ thinking and responding accordingly shape law-infused environments.

Though most countries have established public defense systems to represent indigent defendants, this is far from implying their offices are in good shape. Indeed, significant variation likely exists in the systems' effectiveness, across societies and at the subnational level. Defense agencies' performance likely depends on their configuration, including their funding, their internal arrangements, and their selection and retention mechanisms. Centered on public defense in Argentina, this article compares the performance of public and retained counsel at the country's Supreme Court. Public defenders' offices received a boost in the last two decades, and are institutionally well positioned to square off against prosecutors, putting them at least on par with the averaged retained counsel. Using a fresh dataset of around 3000 appeal decisions from 2008 to 2013, the study largely tests representational capabilities by looking at whether counsel meets briefs' formal requirements, a subset of decisions particularly valuable to reduce potential biases. It finds that formal dismissals are significantly less frequent when a public defender is named in an appeal, particularly when a federal defender is involved. It also discusses and tests alternative mechanisms. The article's findings illuminate discussions of support structures for litigation, criminal justice reform, and criminal defendants' rights.

The recent influx of police officers into US public schools has reshaped the context and frequency of children's interactions with police. Yet we know little about how the presence of these officers in schools impacts the legal socialization of students, and whether youth of color might be affected or socialized in different ways than white youth. In this study, we analyze data from interviews with school police officers as well as focus group data from school staff, parents, and students that shed light on how school police interact with youth. In particular, school police officers discussed their desire to build relationships with students that instill trust in police among students. Officers discussed their efforts to teach students that police should be trusted and relied on, and that negative views of policing and involvement with the justice system are the result of a negative news media and individual citizens' criminality, respectively. Importantly, officers discussed how they devote particular attention to imparting these lessons on youth of color and others who may see police in a negative light. We consider how these outreach efforts, what we call acting as police ambassadors, might have different impacts on youth of color compared to white youth, given existing racial disparities in interactions with police.

Morality has been a key factor in naturalization. However, defining what constitutes good moral character has never been specified, leaving interpretation of the good moral character requirement to the discretion of immigration officials and judges. Based on an analysis of court cases filed by marriage migrants, this article expands our understanding of the legal interpretation of the “good morality” requirement in two significant ways. First, by examining the nature of the morality requirements applied to marriage migrants applying for citizenship, we identify that controlling sexual morality is one of the key mechanisms of gendering the path to legal citizenship. Second, our analysis questions the fairness of the judicial rulings and shows that judges are not reliable allies for immigrant spouses. South Korean judges tend to show great deference to the administrative branch and rarely rule against the decisions of the immigration officials. Further, the rulings tend to follow cultural and gendered, rather than legal, understanding of “good” wives and husbands. Ultimately, in the case of South Korea we show that that marriage migrant moral jurisprudence deviates from the developing jurisprudence that decriminalizes intimate choices and challenges the traditional gender roles within a family.

Contemporary international criminal law suggests that head of state immunity does not extend to atrocity crimes, but the executive's office continues to be the safest place for suspected perpetrators. Moreover, indicted suspects can use the threat of international accountability to win democratically contested elections. This article asks how suspects and their surrogates translate an indictment from an international criminal tribunal into an electoral victory and suggests that the path between an indictment and electoral victory unfolds in one of two ways: (1) the consolidation of existing coalitions around the indicted suspects and their allies; or (2) the creation of new coalitions that span existing cleavages. The article evaluates these assumptions through two cases: Lebanon and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon and Kenya and the International Criminal Court. These two decidedly different cases exemplify the ways in which coalitional politics shield suspects international accountability and reward them with high office.

Constitutions are an important feature of many authoritarian regimes. But what role do they in fact perform in processes of authoritarian regime stabilization and legitimation? Much of the contemporary literature focuses on authoritarian constitutionalism in transitions away from constitutional democracy. This article considers the opposite scenario: pre-emptive constitution-making as a mechanism of authoritarian constitutionalism to contain a potential transition toward constitutional democracy. This is illustrated through the case of Myanmar. Since the 1960s, Myanmar has experienced successive periods of direct military rule without a constitution, followed since 2011 by a new constitution. Adding to the comparative literature on constitutions in authoritarian regimes, this article explains how pre-emptive constitution-making limits a transition to liberal democracy and contributes to authoritarian-regime resilience. This article further identifies “military-state” constitutionalism as a variation of authoritarian constitutionalism in Myanmar. The case of Myanmar offers comparative insights into the ways constitutions are used to contain transitions to constitutional democracy and illustrates the varieties inherent in authoritarian constitutionalism.