What are the origins and effects of legal ambiguity in authoritarian regimes? Using a detailed case study of nationality rights in Jordan – which draws from interviews with 210 Jordanian political officials, judges, lawyers, activists, and citizens/residents – we develop a framework for understanding how legal ambiguity emerges, and how it matters, under authoritarianism. We first conceptualize four discrete forms in which legal ambiguity manifests: lexical ambiguity (in legal texts); substantive ambiguity (in status as law); conflictual ambiguity (between contradictory legal rules); and operational ambiguity (in enforcement processes). We then scrutinize the emergence and effects of legal ambiguity in Jordanian nationality policy by integrating historical process tracing, detailed interview evidence, and a content analysis of archival documents, laws, and court verdicts pertaining to nationality rights. Our findings contribute to scholarship on legal ambiguity, authoritarian legality, and discretionary state authority by showing that (1) crisis junctures make the emergence of legal ambiguity more likely; (2) legal ambiguity takes a variety of different forms that warrant conceptual disaggregation; and (3) different forms of legal ambiguity often have disparate effects on how authoritarian state power is organized and experienced in public life.

Scholars have recognized the role that legal intermediaries can play in shaping the law through their interpretations of legal ambiguity and guidance to rule-takers on legal compliance. Although legal intermediaries thus have the potential to effect social change, most research in the area of employment discrimination has focused on the way they facilitate only symbolic compliance with the law. In this article, we examine how the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) took steps that legitimized a new area of claiming, classifying sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”) discrimination as prohibited sex discrimination. Drawing on 2012–2016 confidential charge data, we analyze which alleged issues had a greater likelihood of being identified by EEOC actors as strong cases of discrimination. We use quantitative administrative data and a unique dataset generated from the coding of charge narratives to develop our description of the EEOC’s categorization of SOGI charges. Our findings indicate that first by accepting SOGI charges and then by assigning 34% – much higher than other discrimination charge bases – with the highest processing category, the EEOC made new law, expanding Title VII protection. At the same time, our findings reflect that the EEOC exhibited restraint in this expansion through prioritizing charges that were closely aligned to prior gender stereotyping cases, rather than more directly signaling an SOGI identity-based protection. These findings illustrate the exercise of initiative within prior legal constraint, defining a new area of legal claiming.

People simultaneously entangled in multiple state systems are often subject to contradictory legal mandates that can foster distrust and incentivize system avoidance. This study focuses on those indebted to both the child support system and the criminal legal system, a situation we describe as dual debt. We ask whether and how the imposition of legal debts with punitive surveillance and collections mechanisms fosters alienation in the form of legal cynicism and estrangement, which we refer to jointly as legal anomie. Drawing from interview data in Minnesota, we find that legal anomie and system avoidance are mutually reinforcing processes, as debts in these systems triggered consequences that pushed people out of the formal labor market and heightened their distrust of legal institutions. The case of dual debt demonstrates how alienating and contradictory policy systems can foster both legal anomie and system avoidance, particularly in the context of economic and social precarity.

In a context promoting partners’ active participation in their divorce or dissolution, family lawyers often put their clients to work – from stating goals and supplying information for the written file, to embodying the case at the hearing. This article focuses on the coproduction of legal work between family lawyers and their clients, based on long-term collective research on family law in mainland France: interviews with attorneys, observations of encounters between lawyers and clients in lawyer offices and in courts, as well as a “3,000 family cases” database. Using a relational, materialist, structural, and intersectional theoretical approach, we show that coproduction of legal work and its meaning varies greatly depending on the power dynamics between lawyers and clients, – on a spectrum that goes from exploitation to empowerment of the client. Coproduced legal work varies according to configurations of class, race, gender, and age on both side of the desk, as well as according to the structure of the legal market. Interactions between lawyers and their clients thus contribute to shape inequality before the law.