The traditional rationale of federal diversity jurisdiction is to protect out-of-state parties from the risk of an appearance of state-court bias in favor of an in-state adversary. Yet a strikingly high percentage—more than 50 percent—of original domestic-diversity cases are filed by in-state plaintiffs. Why these in-state plaintiffs invoke diversity jurisdiction is a question that has largely been ignored in the literature. Drawing on docket data and an original dataset based on responses to a survey sent to more than twelve thousand attorneys who represented in-state plaintiffs in domestic-diversity cases, I find that these plaintiffs can be grouped into roughly three categories. The first category is composed of tort cases, filed by individual plaintiffs against corporate defendants, that are eligible for consolidation with an existing federal multi-district litigation. The second category is composed of in-state corporate plaintiffs represented by attorneys who tend to represent defendants in federal court and who invoke diversity jurisdiction primarily based on perceptions of advantages of federal procedure, efficiencies and conveniences of federal practice, and superior quality of federal court. The third category is composed of in-state plaintiffs represented by attorneys who tend to represent plaintiffs in state court and who invoke diversity jurisdiction to preempt the defendant’s likely removal of the case. My findings offer grounds for reforming diversity jurisdiction in more tailored and nuanced ways than have previously been proposed.

In 2011, the Internal Revenue Service reversed a previous regulation that excluded lactation supplies, including breast pumps, from medical care tax benefits. This policy change was met with joy by some working mothers. Often torn between family needs and workplace duties, these lactating employees struggled with trying to be a “good worker” and a “good mother.” They saw the new tax law as validation of their efforts to express milk at work and legitimation for the accommodations they required. They felt that even an area of law as technical and complex as tax law could recognize their commitment to combining breastfeeding and employment. However, the women recognized that the law only facilitated greater ability to lactate but not more time with their babies, which they greatly wanted. Indeed, this article asks if breast pumps and supplies would even be an issue for many women if the United States provided women with the more extensive maternity leave that workers in other developed countries receive.

This article explores the legal consciousness of legal gun owners in upstate New York using a qualitative, grounded theory approach. Respondents’ accounts reveal that their experiences cause them to respect and support the law in certain contexts but feel oppressed by it in other contexts. These perceptions stem from engagement with law, and especially the passage of the New York Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act of 2013, in which they see legal actors behaving in ways that violate their beliefs about how law is supposed to operate. Respondents believe themselves to be at a legal disadvantage due to distinctive features of New York politics, particularly the belief that New York City residents have an outsized role in statewide politics. These findings offer insights into how gun owners engage with the law and, more generally, into the conditions under which groups feel engaged with—or disconnected from—legal and political processes.

Chinese legal historians and Chinese Communist Party ideologues engage with historical materials in order to advance various ideological projects, including subversive ideological perspectives. At the same time, historical scholarship appeals to many Chinese legal scholars because it is not seen and experienced as being as ideologically sensitive a field as other branches of Chinese legal scholarship. Chinese legal historians themselves have acknowledged their ability to discuss controversial topics—their “historiographic license”—through legal historical research. This article describes Chinese legal scholars’ historiographic license through the tools of rhetorical theory. The subversive elements of Chinese legal historiography can be attributed to the use of figurative language, which conveys forbidden meanings through innocuous surface text. Figurative language allows Chinese legal scholars to subtly question ideological doctrines—which they may support in other social contexts—without having to negate these doctrines explicitly. Historiography arguably even offers Chinese legal scholars a means to question their own ideological beliefs.

This article enquires into colonial officials’ invocations of the “rule of law” and the persistence of racial difference in the modern British Empire. To unravel this contradiction, I examine the debates over the freedom of women during the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances in the directly ruled Crown Colonies of Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements (Singapore, Penang, and Malacca) between 1886 and 1890. Although the apparent purpose of these laws was the containment of venereal diseases, officials employed them to police prostitution and subject working-class, “native” women to medical surveillance. Despite the repeal of the Contagious Diseases ordinances across the empire, officials in both colonies continued to regulate prostitution in the name of native women’s freedom, invoking the rule of law. Through the historical ethnography of the rule of law, I demonstrate how the language of this ideal rendered an evocative frame of beneficence, legality, and protection against which officials articulated social difference in racialized, and intersectional, ways—what I call racialized legalities. In comparing the colonized in terms of racialized legalities, officials designed a differentiated sovereignty in determining the protections granted to native women. Expressing the cultural power of law, the rule of law was a constitutive myth.

For decades, human rights organizations have exposed egregious abuses carried out by states across the globe. Yet, simultaneously, other national and transnational civil society actors have waged war on these human rights organizations to shield rights-abusive states from accountability. These assaults have increasingly resulted in the normative claims of human rights organizations being sidelined while rights-abusive laws and policies gain further ground. This article uses Israel as its primary case study to interrogate these civil society wars and their effects on human rights. Examining the work of Israeli and pro-Israeli civil society actors in bolstering apartheid and shielding the state from criticism, I highlight three strategies—native dispossession, lawfare, and advocacy—that civil society actors use to enable apartheid. I go on to show how these actors adopt liberal tactics to protect, reproduce, and facilitate apartheid and to attack human rights defenders. By way of conclusion, I argue that the dominant paradigm informing human rights NGOs needs to be modified and their remit needs to be extended to include civil society actors that contribute to the perpetuation of social wrongs.

Applying tools of linguistic anthropology to ethnographic research conducted in a California child welfare court, this article analyzes how commentary by attorneys and judges about the language practices of parents and other communicative practices normalized the dismissal of the voices of marginalized lay actors throughout their cases. This commentary is an example of what linguistic anthropologists describe as “metapragmatic discourse,” or the use of language to foreground language itself and what language can accomplish in social exchanges. I introduce the concept of “metapragmatic dismissals” to describe how attorneys and judges in the child welfare context positioned parents’ language practices and overall personhood as suspect, often before parents even entered the courtroom. I identify practices of silencing, voicing figures of disbelief, and the use of metapragmatic labels of “lies” and “excuses” as common forms of metapragmatic dismissals that are supported by norms of court procedure, standards of evidence, and institutionalized discretion. This concept provides new insights into legal experiences in child welfare courts and, more generally, offers a valuable analytical framework for scholars who study the intersection of law, language, and power.

Over the past decade, reform efforts in the area of collateral consequences of conviction have succeeded in emancipating themselves from standard discourses and dynamics in the US criminal legal reform space. This article draws on concepts and insights from the literature on penal transformation to explore the unique interplay of goals and values that have led to recent collateral consequences reforms. It identifies three major drivers of change that have had a significant impact, particularly, on softening occupational licensing restrictions for individuals with a criminal history and passing criminal record clearance legislation. First, advocates of the economic libertarian agenda joined forces with civil libertarian groups to reduce occupational licensing hurdles for criminal record holders. Second, an attitude promoting redemption and second chances through criminal record clearance reform has been championed, in particular, by the Christian right. Third, economic concerns by employers seeking to hire individuals with a criminal record have become more pronounced in tight labor markets, both pre- and post-pandemic. The analysis concludes that, although much remains to be done, ongoing reforms represent a significant reshaping of the collateral consequences landscape. A logic of unworthiness toward individuals with criminal records, however, remains hard to eradicate and can easily resurface in the current unstable phase of penal transition.

Research on the temporal dimensions of international migration focuses on how migrants experience time. This study instead turns attention to public interest lawyers, whose work plays a crucial role in ensuring favorable legal outcomes for immigrants, in order to consider time’s salience within the US asylum context. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with Los Angeles-based public interest asylum attorneys, this article argues that lawyers confront both weaponized efficiency and weaponized inefficiency in the course of representing asylum seekers. Advocates must rush to keep pace, on the one hand, as various state actors accelerate asylum processes and, on the other, find ways to advance clients’ interests even as state agencies selectively slow procedures to a standstill. These findings affirm that temporal contradictions define the US asylum system. Further, they demonstrate that lawyers experience these contradictions not as natural phenomena but, rather, as temporal violence: in a range of contexts, government action mobilizes time—whether actively or passively—in the service of migration control.

What influences the litigation agendas of LGBTQ legal impact organizations in the United States? These organizations are at the forefront of bringing rights claims before the courts, but capacity and resource limitations mean that they cannot litigate every issue important to their constituency. Drawing on dozens of interviews with movement actors and organizational documents, I find that the formation of litigation agendas in LGBTQ legal impact organizations resembles the dynamic models of policy agenda setting, with cause lawyers influenced by a confluence of commonly reoccurring elements of unequal influence. However, one element stood out in influencing litigation choices, above even donor and funding concerns: lawyer autonomy and individual preferences. My findings suggest greater agency of individual cause lawyers and contribute to our understanding of the relationship between legal organizations and social movements.

Unlike other housing courts, Chicago’s building court is characterized by leniency. The mostly low-income property owners who appear in building court often receive extensions to remedy building code violations or even dismissals of their violations. This article shows that, paradoxically, the consequences of these lenient outcomes are punitive for building court defendants, replicating the kinds of detrimental outcomes that harsher legal enforcement can produce. Building on conceptual apparatus from socio-legal studies, I identify two mechanisms—property markers and hassle of leniency—through which building court entrenches or even exacerbates housing precarity for low-income homeowners and small-time landlords. I argue that without additional support for low-income defendants, even well-intentioned leniency on the part of municipal officials and legal actors reinforces economic inequities in the housing market.

The concept of adminigration provides a much-needed lens in theorizing immigration enforcement, citizenship, and urban geographies. We define adminigration as the governance of immigrant community members through city-level policies and programs, whether or not these explicitly focus on immigrants. Our focus on adminigration involves three theoretical interventions: (1) bridging literature on immigrant bureaucratic incorporation and crimmigration to situate city-level administrative practices within immigration policymaking; (2) a focus on how localized definitions of membership, as enacted by cities, produce citizenship, legality, and illegality, and (3) the argument that these practices play out in space, resulting in variegated urban landscapes that are better characterized as a network than a level. We develop these points through a review of the literature on bureaucratic incorporation, crimmigration, citizenship, and the spatialization of immigration policymaking. To illustrate the utility of this framework, we conclude with a case study of adminigration in a California city that we call “Mayville.”

Much of the social and economic inequality that sexual harassment perpetuates is created in the workplace. But research has not always acknowledged the fluid and changing nature of workspaces. This article argues that irregular workspaces and activities—bars and other social drinking sites at which yingchou (business drinking activities) take place, team building, and the WeChat social media platform—are significant sites of sexual harassment in China. These irregular workplaces play a significant role in working life in China, and their informality has made them prone to sexual harassment in the context of deeply entrenched gender norms and vertical power hierarchy.

Theories of vigilantism frequently locate its cause in the ineffectiveness of the state legal system. The state legal system does not work for some, so they take the law into their own hands. Even in communities where vigilantism is prevalent, however, only certain harms are met with vigilantism. Why are some harms met with violence while others are not? To explore this question, I draw on nine months of fieldwork in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a nation with a largely ineffective state legal system and the presence of vigilantism. Yet vigilante remedies are largely reserved for harms attributed to witchcraft, and typically only particularly serious witchcraft harms. In this article I draw on the concept of legal consciousness to understand why people might turn to vigilantism in response to witchcraft. I develop two themes of legal consciousness—a disconnect in harm naming and different logics of justice—that help explain dynamics vigilantism. My research thus contributes to the scholarship on both vigilantism and legal consciousness.

This article examines the development of international human rights standards and oversight mechanisms directed at addressing the negative effects of imprisonment. We identify this as the rules-based prison-regulation project, widely endorsed by international organizations and legal scholars. However, with a focus on the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, we argue that this project has inherent limitations, as it is based on (a) a reductive understanding of carceral harms and (b) a rule-centric ontology of prisons. By challenging these foundations, we explore whether the project exemplifies “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011), where the pursuit of improved prison regulation could inadvertently hinder societal flourishing. We argue that the continuous search for new and better prison standards may perpetuate rather than alleviate the problems associated with imprisonment unless accompanied by explicit strategies for countering prison growth and dramatically reducing prisoner numbers, for building the democratic power of prisoners and communities targeted by imprisonment, and continual linkages between prison conditions and the wider political-economic institution of imprisonment. We conclude that engaging with prisons as sites of relational power in practice must underlie any quest to reduce the harms of imprisonment.

How do transnational lawyers valorize their expertise in a political and economic crisis? This article argues that knowing how transnational lawyers valorize their expertise is critical to understanding how transnational law evolves and affects society, especially when existing legal frameworks prove to be inadequate and novel practices must pave new paths. Using the acute phase of the Eurozone crisis between 2010 and 2012 as an empirical case, I examine how European Union (EU) legal agents constructed a framework that accommodated the uncertainty of governing a crisis while also mediating the contentious politics between EU Member States. The analysis shows that as intergovernmental bargaining dominates Eurozone crisis governance, EU legal advisors intervene to reconcile these bargains with the EU legal order using novel practices that simultaneously valorize their legal expertise. These practices in effect engender a high degree of interdependence and interconnection between the EU legal order and several intergovernmental arrangements—especially the European Stability Mechanism—leading to the creation of a unique form of EU governance: semi-intergovernmentalism. This article contributes to debates on legal globalization by empirically examining how transnational legal agents valorize their expertise through strategies directed at defending their autonomy while protecting the normative coherence of their transnational legal order: the EU.

This article examines aspirational laws in a randomized field experiment. We analyze the impact of an unenforced public smoking ban on individual behavior and attitudes. The findings indicate that aspirational laws, like public smoking bans, can make rights holders sensitive to behavior that violates their rights, irrespective of the material consequences of infringements and their personal views about the law. The results present a mixed position in the debate between rights-based social movement lawyering and critics of hollow rights. On the one hand, aspirational laws can create unforeseen social frictions when rights are declared, but their implementation and enforcement are ineffective. On the other hand, aspirational laws may also have self-fulfilling potential. Due to the adverse experience of rule breaking, rights holders may seek enforcement and compliance even if the law fails to influence public beliefs.

In the United States in the early twentieth century, state and local laws discriminating on the basis of alienage proliferated. Progressive reformers, nativist groups, state legislatures, and city councils sought new methods for restricting noncitizen access to the workplace and the marketplace. As this article demonstrates, the primary vehicle they utilized was state and local licensing laws. Licensing proved to be a powerful tool of exclusion; by 1930, citizenship-based licensing restrictions were present in every state and most major cities. Noncitizens challenged some of these laws, pushing for greater protection of their constitutional rights. The resulting court contests over exclusionary licensing laws led to the creation of a new branch of legal doctrine, one that redefined the relationship between noncitizens and state power. This article highlights the significant and underappreciated role played by state and local laws in shaping the immigrant experience in the Progressive Era. It furthers our understanding of the licensing power and illuminates a pivotal moment in the development of immigrant rights. Today, noncitizens are still excluded from a range of economic activities due to licensing restrictions. This article explores the roots and the spread of this little understood – and still consequential – technique of exclusion.

Executive clemency is a discretionary power to grant legal mercy and is rarely given. Using data from contemporary clemency hearings in four states, I explore how state actors use commutation hearings as sites to exert social control and communicate hegemonic ideology. Clemency board members use hearings as sites to communicate the behaviors and attitudes they desire from applicants, aiming to generate compliance and consent. These state actors use the ritual of the clemency process and the hope afforded by the possibility of legal mercy as tools to motivate desired behaviors and beliefs among those in prison both explicitly and implicitly in these hearings. Such behaviors and beliefs, accordingly, are those that serve to reinforce the control and power of the state.

Because states must rebut the presumption of responsibility, all prisoner deaths must be investigated. These investigations frequently illustrate the tip of an iceberg of rights abuses and systemic hazards but have largely escaped analysis in prison-monitoring scholarship. Focusing on suicides, we assemble some of the first evidence illustrating how the staff of the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, who investigate prisoner deaths in England and Wales, seek to prevent further deaths. Ombudsman investigations are widely regarded as ineffective, yet there are competing constructions regarding why this is and what could be done to improve outcomes. As a result of organizational norms and constraints, ombudsman staff have offered narrow accounts of prisoner suicides, focusing on the failure of frontline staff to comply with prison policies. By contrast, prison staff and coroners have focused on systemic hazards or “accidents waiting to happen,” including imprisoning people with severe mental illness, illegal drugs, unsafe facilities, and inadequate staffing. These differing constructions lock penal actors into an unproductive cycle of blame shifting that contributes to high suicide numbers. We reconceptualize prisoner deaths as occurring at the intersection of systemic hazards, organizational contexts, and individual errors. We hope that this reconceptualization facilitates broader investigations that are more likely to prevent prisoner deaths.