This article studies law in action as it relates to organized lobster poaching in Canada. It examines the distinct pattern of relationships that constitutes poaching as a business enterprise and analyzes how “living law” operates as an ironic facilitative form for that which it tries to control. We argue that business poachers evade, avoid, and neutralize fishery laws and regulations by creatively using and manipulating the legal boundaries and organizational resources at their disposal. In effect, the law is an enabling structure for blue water illegality. We analyze business poaching activities as a type of workplace crime, and we account for regulatory failure in the lobster fishery.

This article documents and provides possible explanations for the degree of judicial activism in eight post-communist countries. We examined constitutional court cases for the three years following the initial adoption of a constitution in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and Slovakia. We found that contextual political factors, such as the extent to which the party system is fragmented and the extent to which the court enjoys popular trust and confidence (rather than the formal powers entrusted to the court by the constitution or the structure of the political system), contribute most to the degree of activism by constitutional courts.

This article tests the equal status contact hypothesis in the aftermath of desegregation in the Texas prison system. This study uses ten years of inmate-on-inmate assault data and compares the rates of violence among inmates racially integrated in a double cell versus inmates racially segregated in a double cell. The analysis revealed that violence between integrated inmates was not disproportionate to the level of violence between segregated inmates—in fact, it was lower. This article addresses the conditions under which positive racial group contact will likely be found in a prison setting and concludes with a discussion of implications.

Austin Sarat is widely known for work on cause lawyering, divorce lawyers, and white collar crime, and for influential arguments on behalf of integrating humanities topics and methods into empirical studies of law and society. Sarat is not, however, particularly known as a death penalty scholar, an intensive sub-field of socio-legal studies that has been dominated by scholars wholly captured by the compelling nature of the subject. A reader of Sarat's bibliography would have to go back to 1976 when Sarat, as a young political scientist, published research coauthored with an equally junior psychologist, Neil Vidmar, on how public opinion on the death penalty was affected by targeted education on particular aspects of the death penalty including empirical studies doubting its deterrent effects, and on other information designed to raise concerns about the justice of capital punishment (Sarat & Vidmar 1976). In terms of both its methodology and the logic of its inquiry, When the State Kills could hardly differ more from the Sarat and Vidmar study. Between the two, one can mark significant shifts in both the enterprise of socio-legal studies and the place of capital punishment in American political culture.

When I was a child, I had a book called The Chosen Baby. Originally written in 1939 by Valentina Wasson, the edition I was given had been revised and updated in 1950 (Wasson 1939). It is the book I, as an adoptee, was given to understand adoption— my origins. It is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who had everything they could ask for, except one thing—they needed a baby to make their happiness complete (Patton 2000).