Sobre la base de información recolectada en tribunales de primera instancia y en una unidad del Ministerio Público en Santiago, Chile, en este artículo se explora la manera en que el sistema de justicia penal trata los delitos considerados “flagrantes.” Citando literatura sobre tecnicismos jurídicos, describo cómo los delitos flagrantes se construyen a través de prácticas que hacen posible para los actores involucrados evitar referirse directamente a los supuestos hechos. Desde su identificación en las calles por parte de policías a su asignación a otra unidad del Ministerio Público, los delitos flagrantes se definen por una manera específica de aproximarse a los supuestos hechos, la que consiste en prácticas organizacionales y documentales específicas. Estas prácticas contrastan con el rol marginal de la detención “en flagrancia” según el Código Procesal Penal. Como un tecnicismo, el carácter flagrante del delito expresa ciertas suposiciones epistemológicas respecto a cómo determinar lo que pasó y lo que exactamente lo constituye. Más específicamente, el carácter flagrante expresa suposiciones sobre lo que, por el momento, no puede ser sabido y puede, por tanto, ser ignorado a través del proceso burocrático y judicial.

Public experiences with the law in some neighborhoods are marked by an overwhelming police presence alongside deep-seated beliefs that legal agents are disinterested in ensuring public safety. This mutual experience of intrusive policing and legal cynicism has important implications for people’s recognition of the legitimacy of legal authority. In the context of a global city in the Global South, this study provides a quantitative assessment of the dynamics of perceived police intrusion and cynicism about police protection and the implications of those experiences for beliefs about the legitimacy of legal institutions. Drawing on a three-wave longitudinal survey representative of adult residents of eight neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil (N = 1,200), I demonstrate that perceived police intrusion and cynicism about police protection (a) are two sides of the same coin, being produced by similar social forces and dynamically reproducing each other and (b) operate to undermine police legitimacy. Integrating the legal cynicism and procedural justice theoretical frameworks, this study shows that intrusive as well as unheeding and neglectful policing practices can contribute to delegitimizing legal authority. I conclude with a discussion about the distribution of repression and protection and highlight the urgency of exploring public–authority relations in the Global South.

As Chile embarked on a constitutional replacement process during its worst-ever drought, local environmental activists secured significant representation at the Constitutional Convention responsible for drafting a new constitution, and successfully integrated provisions on climate change and water protection. However, despite the popularity of these measures, the citizenry rejected the proposal. This article, using legal mobilization and constitutional reform studies, examines the dynamics of constitutional mobilization against climate change, presenting two major findings. First, the feasibility of constitutional mobilization hinges on the ability of activists to navigate the politics of constitutional change, as their tactical choices are crucial for enhancing the process’s legitimacy. Second, including environmental measures in a constitutional replacement process tie them to less popular provisions, potentially jeopardizing the entire process, delaying state action on climate change, and weakening activists’ standing. The data supporting these findings come from interviews with Constitutional Convention delegates, archival research, and participant observation. In a context where climate change is intensifying, this article underscores the unintended consequences and challenges of pursuing environmental goals through constitutional reforms.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), often referred to as the “World Court,” plays a central role in the field of international law. Despite the significance of this court, socio-legal scholarship has not examined the ICJ’s inner workings due to limited access. Drawing from field theory and organizational theory, this study addresses this gap by using various data sources including interviews, organizational documents, and publicly available texts from insiders. Based on this data, this article explores how the ICJ’s institutional context shapes its organization and the experiences of its actors. We argue that the ICJ provides a space that tightly connects institutional myths, organizational practices, and individual action. This tight coupling effectively mediates and manages differences among ICJ actors, fostering a stable practice of international law within a field otherwise marked by conflict. This enables the ICJ to produce and sustain a specific way of doing international law which has stabilizing effects in this field. By linking the macro level of the field – an area emphasized in prior scholarship – with a microlevel organizational perspective, this article offers a nuanced understanding of the conflicts and organizational practices influencing the ICJ’s operations and development of international law.

How do sociolegal scholars who liken monetary sanctions to “bleeding a turnip” or “drawing blood from stones” reconcile these idioms with the fact that fines and fees constitute a growth industry? We take up this puzzle by turning our attention to perhaps the most relatable experience with monetary sanctions among the population: parking tickets. Much of the available law and society literature on fines and fees documents how these sanctions disproportionately impact communities subjugated by race and class. Because parking tickets are adjudicated within a legal domain so fundamentally different from fines and fees that dominate the academic focus, we ask whether these insights extend outside criminal counts to municipal ones. Using Chicago as a case study, our inquiry measures the structural determinants of 11.3 million tickets issued between 2013 and 2017. We use a series of count models to predict the incidence rates of tickets at the tract level as well as how many were subject to reprimands for nonpayment. What we find are disparate patterns of racialization in terms of who is targeted by these sanctions versus who is devastated by them. We synthesize key ideas from empirical critical race theory and developing work on predation theory to make sense of these findings.

A partir de 2014, a política brasileira foi sacudida pela operação Lava Jato (LJ), uma iniciativa anticorrupção centrada no direito. A LJ expôs um grande esquema de corrupção na empresa nacional de petróleo, a Petrobras, envolvendo seus diretores, dirigentes de partidos políticos e grandes empreiteiras. Para alguns, a LJ representou um marco, um novo capítulo na história do Brasil, promovendo o “estado de direito” e um desejo coletivo de “acabar com a impunidade” na política e nos negócios. Para outros, a operação enfraqueceu a democracia e o estado de direito, abrindo caminho para uma liderança autocrática sob o ex-presidente Jair Bolsonaro. Este artigo contribui para esses debates ao analisar a LJ como um espaço de produção de “consciência jurídica.” Empiricamente, examina conversas lideradas por procuradores da LJ no Facebook entre 2017 e 2019. A questão central abordada é: “Quando os procuradores e o público falavam sobre a LJ, sobre o que falavam?” Os resultados se alinham às visões céticas sobre a operação, sugerindo que as interações entre os procuradores da LJ e seus seguidores no Facebook ajudaram a co-criar um quadro cultural que conflita com o “estado de direito.” Essas percepções oferecem implicações para estudos sobre consciência jurídica e esforços anticorrupção.

How does social science insulate police from social movements’ demand for abolition? We explore this through a content analysis of policing social science research funded by Arnold Ventures, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice published from 2011 to 2022 (N = 143 studies). Our mixed method content analysis revealed what we call “Academic Copaganda,” or studies contesting social movement claims by authors (1) masking their conflicts of interest, or (2) espousing police epistemology. Although Academic Copaganda comprised 20% of studies in the sample, they received most media mentions after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. We conclude by discussing our contributions to legal scholarship on police legitimacy and empirical critical race theory.

A través del lente de la conciencia jurídica, este trabajo analiza la insatisfacción institucional en el marco de un profundo escepticismo hacia las instituciones formales, particularmente en el contexto de la sociedad chilena post-Octubre de 2019. El artículo busca investigar la relación entre la expresión de una profunda antipatía hacia el estado y la postura que los individuos manifiestan con respecto a la legalidad. El trabajo reporta los hallazgos derivados de 12 grupos focales categorizados por edad, género, y locación. Encontramos que, a pesar de los sentimientos negativos prevalentes que albergan las personas hacia estas instituciones, los participantes continúan usando el lenguaje del derecho, expresando su insatisfacción como derechos formales frustrados o por una falta de aplicación de la ley con respecto a las élites corruptas. Concluimos que la existencia de una brecha entre las expectativas normativas y el agudo rechazo por su incumplimiento por parte de actores institucionales abre una estructura de oportunidades para la emergencia de formas más autoritarias de poder estatal.

As societies grapple with mitigating or adapting to climate change, law plays a prominent role in the social relations that constitute a response. In this essay, we briefly review of the many different perspectives on law and climate change offered by the authors in this special issue of Law and Society Review. From transnational human rights activism to constitutional litigation to local practices and all around the globe, both the powerful and the marginalized draw on legal institutions and actors in multiple arenas and at multiple scales to address the consequences of climate change. Together, these articles show that law is not confined to courtrooms or judicial systems or regulations; rather, law offers both limitations and opportunities in the ongoing struggle over climate change.

Our article offers an in-depth account of the role of the transnational practices of collaboration, storytelling, and learning in the diffusion of rights-based climate litigation (RBCL). Drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and quantitative data, we trace how the performance of these practices by lawyers, litigants, communities, scholars, and NGOs have fostered and sustained the transnational generation, exchange, and flow of resources, relationships, narratives, and knowledge underlying the field of RBCL. We argue that all three practices have fostered the diffusion of RBCL by influencing the local determinants of legal mobilization through enabling, discursive, and relational pathways. Finally, we show that these practices have had structural effects that have shaped the ideas and identities of the practitioners in the field of RBCL. Over time, the discursive and relational dimensions of practices have given rise to and have been strengthened by the formation of multiple communities of practice. The emergence of distinct communities provides the possibility for deeper forms of socialization and acculturation among their members, but they also make conflict and competition between different communities more likely. Overall, our article emphasizes the importance of understanding legal mobilization for climate justice as a set of practices that are shaped by the transnational social-legal context in which they are performed.

Bringing critical race theory and settler colonial theory to bear on legal mobilization scholarship, this article examines the ongoing campaign to strike down the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA sought to end the forced removal of American Indian children from their tribes. If successful, the challenges to ICWA’s constitutionality stand to undermine tribal sovereignty writ large. Drawing on a content analysis of documents from 17 major court cases (2013–2023) and a unique dataset of public-facing documents from the leading ICWA challengers, I interrogate the argumentative architecture of this legal mobilization. I find that the campaign to strike down ICWA is structured around three ideological maneuvers: erasure, settler normativity, and reclassification. These maneuvers scaffold a fourth – colorblindness – and the claim that ICWA is an unconstitutional race-based statute. I show how ICWA adversaries use these ideological maneuvers to legitimate white possession of Indigenous children and delegitimize tribal sovereignty. While existing work tends to treat colorblind racism and settler colonialism as analytically distinct, these findings shed light on the linkages between the two. They also marshal empirical analysis to illustrate how the embeddedness of settler colonialism and racism in the law enables broad claims to and defense of whiteness as property.

Quantifying the causal effects of race is one of the more controversial and consequential endeavors to have emerged from the causal revolution in the social sciences. The predominant view within the causal inference literature defines the effect of race as the effect of race perception and commonly equates this effect with “disparate treatment” racial discrimination. If these concepts are indeed equivalent, the stakes of these studies are incredibly high as they stand to establish or discredit claims of discrimination in courts, policymaking circles and public opinion. This paper interrogates the assumptions upon which this enterprise has been built. We ask: what is a perception of race, a perception of, exactly? Drawing on a rich tradition of work in critical race theory and social psychology on racial cognition, we argue that perception of race and perception of other decision-relevant features of an action situation are often co-constituted; hence, efforts to distinguish and separate these effects from each other are theoretically misguided. We conclude that empirical studies of discrimination must turn to defining what constitutes just treatment in light of the social differences that define race.