This article provides the first sociolegal analysis of lesbian rights activism in Myanmar. It elucidates the processes through which a group of lesbian activists navigate sexual and gender norms that oppress lesbians as sexual minorities and as women while they use human rights discourse to carry out micromobilization work, organizing constituents and building up grassroots participation in Myanmar. It analyzes how the collective deployment of human rights encompasses resistance against social norms that pose organizing obstacles for activists and the negotiations of social relations to counter them. These micromobilization processes shape whether and how activists adopt human-rights-based strategies and tactics. Bringing together law and society scholarship and social movement studies, the article highlights the importance of understanding human rights mobilization by marginalized populations who face multiple, overlapping forms of oppression and contend with plural sources of power.

In many states, young people today can receive a “blended” combination of both a juvenile sanction and an adult criminal sentence. We ask what accounts for the rise of blended sentencing in juvenile justice and whether this trend parallels crime control developments in the adult criminal justice system. We use event history analysis to model state adoption of blended sentencing laws from 1985 to 2008, examining the relative influence of social, political, administrative, and economic factors. We find that states with high unemployment, greater prosecutorial discretion, and disproportionate rates of African American incarceration are most likely to pass blended sentencing provisions. This suggests that the turn toward blended sentencing largely parallels the punitive turn in adult sentencing and corrections—and that theory and research on adult punishment productively extends to developments in juvenile justice.

This article examines the concept of dignity takings, as developed by Bernadette Atuahene, and its applicability to the Israeli situation, focusing on takings from the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel. Although I find dignity takings a valuable concept, as it emphasizes the interconnections between land dispossession and the denial of human dignity, I offer some qualifications and suggestions. I then examine the applicability of the concept to the dispossession of Arabs/Palestinians in Israel through two case studies: one, a close reading of the (in)famous Ikrit villagers' dispossession; the other, an examination of the dispossession of Negev (southern Israel) Bedouin citizens of Israel, which takes place, not unlike terra nullius, simultaneously with a denial of this very taking. The article concludes that with some modifications, the concept of dignity taking applies to the situation of Arab/Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Among low‐income homebuyers, a contract for deed (CFD) has been a widely used but risky and informal mechanism for purchasing a home or lot. This article examines a series of major consumer protections adopted by the Texas Legislature from 1995 to 2005 and whether this legislation shaped the behavior of sellers who historically relied on CFDs in Texas colonias. Tracking changes in the use of CFDs between 1990 and 2010, we show that developers responded to the legislative reforms by shifting away from CFDs and into other forms of seller financing. At the same time, developers have adopted a series of workarounds to the legislation (presumably legal), leaving low‐income buyers vulnerable to rapid repossession by the developer. In contrast, the impact of the legislation on low‐income residents selling their homes has been minimal. These consumer‐to‐consumer transactions remain highly informal, with ongoing reliance on the now illegal, unrecorded CFD.

How are international law firms faring in China? Drawing on 2013 data, this article presents the first comprehensive overview of the field, including information about the global mix of players and variation in market niche. Three variables—years present in China, global strategy, and level of localization—help explain why some China practices grow bigger than others. Overall, however, there is a great deal of convergence on one business model: an outpost office with a median size of eleven lawyers responsible for under 5 percent of worldwide revenue. The common experience of stagnation following market entry illustrates the strength of hype, the constraints of partnership, and the persistent power of the Chinese state to shape the legal services market. At the same time, the rarity of market exit reflects perceptions that a China presence is a valuable symbol of global commitment and a worthwhile bet on future growth.

Scholarship on welfare privatization illustrates how the process often curtails and undermines public responsibility for the poor. In this article, I examine how recipients, policy makers, and judges participate in the legal process as a means of challenging and defending privatization. I look at cases of litigation initiated by public housing tenants between 1985 and 2012 to fight the demolition of their homes to explore the changing meaning of public responsibility within a shrinking public sector. My findings show that as legislative and administrative reforms steered courts toward a more flexible understanding of public responsibility, courts gave increasing attention to the economic hardships experienced by the state itself, while downplaying the plight of low-income tenants.

In the course of urbanization in the People's Republic of China, tens of millions of citizens have experienced expropriations of collectively owned land, expropriations of privately owned buildings, and evictions from urban land in state ownership. Summarily characterizing these measures as takings, I argue, first, that some takings observed have denied evictees dignity, understood as respect for their intrinsic moral worth and moral autonomy, in addition to dispossessing them of their land and homes. Second, in dignity takings, monetary compensation and resettlement schemes may fail to reflect the harm done to evictees by framing disputes over takings as (forced) economic bargains. Third, some victims unable to seek redress through judicial avenues have been driven into extrajudicial protest and resistance. In some cases, resistance can be restorative of dignity, but where repressive state responses to resistance prevent this potential from being realized, the injustice of dignity takings can be further aggravated.

In 2013, the Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort began spraying artificial snow made from reclaimed wastewater on Arizona's highest peak, a place the Hopi people call Nuvatukya'ovi, “Snow-on-top-of-it.” As one of the Hopis' most sacred places, the home of the katsinam and the southwestern boundary marker of their aboriginal territory, the Hopi have fought for decades to stop development of the ski resort, which today sits on US Forest Service land. Viewing the history of this dispute through the lens of Atuahene's notion of a “dignity taking,” this article argues that despite never having been relocated, the indignities that the Hopi have suffered by US dispossessions of much of their aboriginal territory are the product of a series of bureaucratic sleights of hand that only bear the mark of legality if one ignores history and denies the enduring right to self-determination and sovereignty that Hopi have continuously claimed with regard to the totality of their aboriginal land.

Does the rule of law guarantee peace and democracy, as so many people in the development and governance field believe? What are the historical and sociocultural conditions that shape the way rule of law mechanisms work in practice? Mark Massoud's monograph tracing the changing dimensions of the rule of law in Sudan from its colonial period to the present offers an important perspective on these questions, casting doubt on the simple argument that the rule of law produces democracy and peace. Instead, he shows how colonial and authoritarian rulers used the rule of law to consolidate power and legitimate their rule. In Law's Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan, Massoud develops the concept of legal politics, arguing that the way the rule of law works varies with the political system in which it is embedded. He concludes that the forms of legal politics that reinforce the power and authority of legal institutions are more likely to sustain an authoritarian state than to bring democratic rule. His analysis is a valuable caution to those who promote the rule of law as the salvation for all. Taking a sociolegal perspective, he shows how it works in practice.

The last several decades have seen a proliferation of specialized courts, including within the family court system, that deviate from the adversarial model, and that rely on therapeutic jurisprudence and other problem-solving techniques. Whether and how traditional family courts can incorporate the best practices of these specialized courts is a largely understudied area. Drawing from ethnographic observations of a traditional urban family court, this study finds that some judges are able to transform nontherapeutic courtrooms into therapeutic ones despite obstacles. These “against the grain” actors, who act contrary to the institution's dominant norms and practices, demonstrate how therapeutic jurisprudence and other problem-solving techniques can be utilized in traditional courtrooms.

Based on participation observations and interviews with petitioners and petition officials in Chinese courts, this article analyzes how the petitioning discourse is organized and how it influences the dispute resolution process. It finds that the discourses between the petitioners and the petition officials are mismatched. The petitioners fight to frame their disputes in legal terms, while the petition officials use a “channeling discourse” to divert the petitioners to legal or extralegal institutions. The two types of discourse barely confront each other; nor are the substantive issues seriously debated. Since being channeled into other institutions does not resolve their disputes, petitioners start calling their petitioning experiences as injurious, blaming officials, and making new claims. Disputes are thus reproduced. The research sheds light on the petitioners’ legal consciousness and the operation of the petition system in China, and explores the contextual reasons why the phenomenon of mismatched discourses occurs in China.

This essay is a response to Mark Massoud's Law's Fragile State, and through comparative inquiry argues that highly contextualized analysis of courts is critical to gaining an understanding of judicial decision making and judicial empowerment. As Massoud demonstrates, focusing on the legal complex is a particularly worthwhile endeavor in fragile states. Although we may understand the sociology of the legal profession, we do not fully understand how professional networks, career paths, and identities truly impact the institutional pathways of the courts and the legal system as a whole.

In the course of reviewing Jed Shugerman's The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America and Bruce Ackerman's The Civil Rights Revolution, we argue for a reassessment of the way that scholars think about popular constitutionalism. In particular, we urge scholars to resist the tendency to create a dichotomy between judicial interpretation of law and a set of nonjudicial venues in which popular constitutionalism supposedly takes place. Popular constitutionalism is temporally and contextually bound, reflected in different forms and forums at different times in US political history and always dependent on the interactions between these institutions. By implication, this suggest that judges, rather than serving as obstacles to popular understandings of law, can and have used various forms of democratic authorization to strike down legislation violating both state and federal constitutions, thus bridging judicial review and popular constitutionalism with explicit support from the citizenry.

Racially restrictive covenants—subdivision rules or neighborhood agreements that “run with the land” to bar sales of rentals by minority members—were common and legally enforceable in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. In spite of their demeaning character, these racial covenants took away opportunities from excluded minorities, rather than things, and thus they amounted to something less than the dramatic “dignity takings” that Bernadette Atuahene (2014) describes in her new book on dignity takings in South Africa. In this article, I explore some significant ways in which racially restrictive covenants differed from dignity takings as Atuahene defines them, as well as the shadowy similarities between racial covenants and Atuahene's dignity takings; I focus here on the dimensions of dehumanization, state involvement, and property takings. I conclude with a discussion of remedies, particularly considering measures that restore dignity through both public policies and private actions.

This essay reviews three books within the southern history literature on the white moderate's response to the civil rights movement; Kevin Kruse's White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), Matthew Lassiter's The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006), and Jason Sokol's There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (2006). I examine how white moderates impacted the struggle for African American civil rights, and explore how this dynamic can help us understand the trajectory of the current debate over gay rights in the United States. I argue that while the US public ultimately came to support equal rights for African Americans, and has grown more tolerant of gay rights recently, they have been willing to do so only when these rights claims are framed as benefiting “deserving” segments of these populations. This shows that rights are, to some extent, contingent resources, available primarily to those citizens who fit certain ideal types, and suggests that those individuals who are unwilling (or unable) to live up to this ideal may ultimately fail to benefit from these movements.

Two significant writings, one by Douglas Hay and the other by E. P. Thompson, appeared in 1976. Both sought to explain relationships between law and social (specifically, ruling‐class) power in a manner that avoided treating law either simply as a coercive instrument of class domination (“vulgar Marxism”), or as a good for all “(liberal legalism”). They overlapped and each was influenced by the other, but they differed significantly, in substance, in tone, and in admirers. Mark Massoud sensibly and thoughtfully draws inspiration from both. This article queries, however, whether his account of the role and rule of law in Sudan manages to resolve a significant tension between Hay and Thompson. This results in a certain ambivalence in the telling, a sometimes anguished oscillation between two interpretive modes, perhaps sensibilities, represented by Hay and Thompson, each of which can lead in different directions.

The looting and systematic deprivation of the property rights of the Jewish population in the Netherlands and France during the years of occupation brought about a deprivation of dignity, since these measures were intended to hit these people in their capacities as legal subjects, destroying their abilities to take part in economic and social life. In the immediate postwar period, the restitution of property rights in both countries was closely connected and limited to an abstract conception of dignity restoration, understood as the renewed recognition of the dispossessed owners as free and equal citizen before the law. In the late 1990s, a new phase in the restoration of property rights took place on a much more collective and political level. In this second round of restitution, dignity restoration was directly connected with an explicit recognition of the particular, concrete suffering of the groups of victims involved.

The prosecution of child sex abuse in cases involving very young children presents difficult problems for the justice system. Ross Cheit's book The Witch‐Hunt Narrative: Politics, Psychology, and the Sexual Abuse of Children (2014) addresses these problems in the context of the 1980s cases involving daycare centers. While the conventional conclusion drawn from these cases is that young children are not credible witnesses, Cheit's examination of the trial records in these cases reveals credible evidence of abuse in many, as well as evidence of injustice attributable to untrained and/or overenthusiastic interviewers. Cheit's examination of this litigation provides an opportunity to evaluate the legal system's treatment of child witnesses in sex abuse cases, as well as to discuss the appropriate use of social scientific evidence in litigation, the impact of mass media accounts on public policy, and the respective merits of criminal versus civil lawsuits in child sex abuse cases.