In light of the contemporary long-term care crisis, Sandra Levitsky's book Caring for Our Own examines why there has been no movement to secure state support for caregivers. Speaking to sociolegal and social movement audiences, Levitsky reveals how lack of collective identity, the power of family-based ideologies, and the separation of support organizations from political ones help to repress mobilization. In this essay I refract Levitsky's findings through the lens of organizational theory and medical sociology. I argue that the social problem of long-term care is caught in an institutional gap since it does not readily fall under the purview of either medicine or family. I also discuss the implications of lay caregivers' provision of sophisticated medical care for theories of professional jurisdictions and gatekeeping.

This article examines the conditions under which judiciaries become politicized under authoritarian regimes, focusing on the 2007–2009 lawyers’ movement of Pakistan. The prodemocracy movement arose after the sacking of the Supreme Court Chief Justice by General Musharraf, and was remarkably successful in removing Musharraf and restoring the sacked judges. Although the conventional wisdom is that such judiciaries are quiescent, I argue that judicial actors can play important roles in democratization, but only under certain conditions. In the case of Pakistan, civil society actors were vital in helping the judiciary become politicized and in linking the lawyers’ movement to the larger cause of democratization. I argue that, otherwise, the lawyers’ movement could not have headed the movement that eventually led to the restoration of democracy. Specifically, I argue that civil society played a crucial role, framing the movement as broad, national, and prodemocracy, which enabled it to overthrow the authoritarian regime.

This article examines constitutional innovation through the case study of the emergence of animal protection in Egypt's 2014 Constitution. Egypt's provision, which is a state obligation to provide al-rifq bi-l-hayawan (kindness to animals), was adopted in Article 45 as part of the country's second constitution following the 2011 revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak. Three aspects proved crucial to the adoption of the provision: a decision by animal protection activists to influence the constitutional process; the ability of citizens to convey their ideas to the constitutional drafters, albeit in a limited way; and, most importantly, the use of frame bridging. The activists and then the constitutional drafters presented the new cause of constitutional animal protection in terms of well-established areas of social, and constitutional, concern in the country, including Islamic law, women's rights, human rights, and the protection of the environment.

In Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (2014), Sandra Levitsky reveals how an enduring ideology of family responsibility and a decoupling of social support groups from organized advocacy constrains mass legal mobilization to address long-term elderly care in the United States. This essay argues that American families have entered an unsettled period linked to social inequality, young adult living arrangements, immigration, and institutional shifts related to LGBTQ families, workplace-family conflict, and the criminalization of elder abuse. These changes to the family may create the conditions for questioning the ideology of family responsibility and new possibilities for collective action with potentially contradictory meanings and lines of action, including politicization and legal mobilization.

This study explores the role of corporate lawyers in the construction and operation of a key area of the Brazilian economy over a thirty-year period. It looks at three periods in the history of the Brazilian telecoms sector: the fall of state monopoly; global restructuring, neoliberalism, and privatization; and the recent resurgence of state activism. In the first two periods, lawyers worked to facilitate privatization and to create a lightly regulated market for telecoms services that attracted foreign capital. Things changed, however, when the industry was faced with new industrial and social policies. In this period, lawyers oscillated between resisting government intrusion and negotiating engagement with regulators. This sequence of events encompasses changes in the field of state power, hierarchies in the legal profession, and core-periphery relations, which invite new syntheses of existing theoretical traditions about law, lawyers, and capitalist development in emerging economies.

Forty years ago, E. P. Thompson praised the English rule of law forged during the bloody and fractious eighteenth century, calling it not only “an unqualified human good,” but also a “cultural achievement of universal significance.” This article examines colonial rule-of-law development as another example of law and state building. Both have relevance for contemporary rule-of-law programming in the Global South where Thompson's “cultural achievement” has resisted fabrication by legal technicians. The problems faced today are not new, for colonial rulers also engaged with complex indigenous norms and forms and sought to balance universal principles with political control imperatives. Contra arguments about colonial “lawfare,” colonial rule of law often frustrated authoritarian tendencies while developing new forms of legal subjectivity and avenues for redress of grievances. Using data from the Indian province of Punjab, the article illustrates how historical case studies might aid contemporary rule-of-law programming in the Global South.

This article argues that Internet censorship is more fragile than is generally supposed and is, in fact, vulnerable to abrupt collapse. The volume and rapidity of online communication renders perfect policing of the Internet technologically impossible. Authoritarian governments are thus forced to rely on Internet users to police themselves in the form of self-censorship. This strategy has proven largely successful—legal ambiguity regarding what constitutes impermissible speech fosters norms of self-censorship. This reliance on self-censorship, however, renders these censorial systems susceptible to shocks. We set out a model that explains sudden breakdowns in Internet censorship that we term “cyberspeech cascades.” A cyberspeech cascade occurs when small expressions of online dissent produce large shifts in public perception regarding the acceptable limits of online expression that are, in fact, inaccurate. Online bandwagons of progressively more brazen speech proliferate into large-scale torrents of uncensored expression, triggering the temporary collapse of self-censorship norms online.

This article draws on the insights offered by Francesca Polletta, Calvin Morrill, and Elizabeth Chiarello in their comments on my book, Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (2014) to further specify the conditions that unleash the emancipatory potential of law. I argue that much of law's emancipatory power lies in its capacity to “construct anew”—to demonstrate new solutions to social problems by connecting the familiar with the strange. Drawing on the case of child care, I find that laws do not automatically provide the cultural resources to construct new claims for state intervention, but that existing laws—and the symbols, narratives, and norms that we associate with them—serve as grist for the political imagination and can be transposed to new contexts or institutions. In the absence of cultural resources in one institution (such as work), advocates can use legal discourse to strategically shift responsibility for a social problem to a new institution (such as education), opening up possibilities for new models, organizational actors, constituencies, and frames.

Exploiting a range of archival materials, we argue that state-level variation in judicial backlash to Brown was as much the result of strategic choices by southern political elites as it was the ingrained prejudices of the region's white voters. Presenting case studies of massive resistance in Mississippi, Louisiana, Virginia, and Arkansas, we show that elite agency profoundly shaped the patchwork development of grassroots resistance to integration across the South. These findings challenge the prevailing view that backlash to Brown signaled the unequivocal triumph of racial conservatives. Rather, we argue that the region's response offered individual members of the southern elite significant autonomy to direct massive resistance in their home states. We also argue that southern lawmakers were responsible for the South's embrace of popular constitutionalism post-Brown, and thus that it may not have been “popular” at all. We conclude that studies of judicial backlash would do well to reevaluate the assumption that backlash is necessarily a grassroots phenomenon.

This essay on Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention, Mary Bilder's revisionist account (2016) of James Madison's Notes on the Constitutional Convention argues that her central thesis, which is that Madison substantially revised the Notes long after the Convention adjourned, is groundbreaking but will have no effect on constitutional law. Madison's Hand is groundbreaking because the book yields many powerful insights into the deliberations of the Convention and into the evolution of Madison's thought. Nevertheless, constitutional practice in the Supreme Court and among elite lawyers is so divorced from the Notes that even a dramatic shift in their interpretation will not disturb the evolution of judicial doctrine applying the text written in 1787.

Research on jury deliberations has largely focused on the implications of deliberations for criminal defendants' outcomes. In contrast, this article considers jurors' outcomes by integrating subjective experience into the study of deliberations. We examine whether jurors' feelings that they had enough time to express themselves vary by jurors' gender, race, or education. Drawing on status characteristics theory and a survey of more than 3,000 real-world jurors, we find that the majority of jurors feel that they had enough time to express themselves. However, blacks and Hispanics, and especially blacks and Hispanics with less education, are less likely to feel so. Jurors' verdict preferences do not account for these findings. Our findings have implications for status characteristics theory and for legal cynicism among members of lower-status social groups.

Using a unique data set comprised of original research of both the corporate Web sites of the Big Four—PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY—and their affiliated law firms, as well as archival material from the legal and accountancy press, this article documents the rise and transformation of the Big Four legal service lines since the enactment of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. Moreover, it demonstrates that there are good reasons to believe that these sophisticated players will be even more successful in penetrating the corporate legal services market in the decades to come, as that market increasingly matures in a direction that favors the integration of law into a wider category of business solutions that these globally integrated multidisciplinary practices now champion. We conclude with some preliminary observations about the implications of the reemergence of the Big Four legal networks for the legal profession.

Character plays a crucial role in US law. This article explores flaws in how moral character requirements determine who can work in licensed occupations, who can practice law, and who can immigrate to the United States or become a citizen. Section I summarizes psychological research on character, which raises questions about a central legal premise that individuals have a settled disposition capable of accurately predicting their behavior independent of situational influences. Section II examines the role of moral character as an employment credential. Almost a third of the workforce is covered by licensing laws that typically require proof of good character and often unjustly penalize the seventy million Americans with criminal records. Section III examines the idiosyncratic and inconsistent application of moral character requirements for lawyers. Section IV focuses on similar flaws in immigration contexts. Section V identifies reform strategies to improve the fairness of character-related decisions in the law.

Urban police officers concentrate much attention on individuals who experience various forms of inequality. Some police tactics that address the socially marginal garner public concern, especially when violence occurs. Solutions to such police-community tensions are elusive, in part because police cannot meaningfully reduce inequality. Yet there are better and worse ways to police the impoverished, and we use this article to contrast three general approaches: aggressive patrol, coercive benevolence, and officer-assisted harm reduction. We contrast their operating logics and their implications for police practice and tactics. We find great merit in officer-assisted harm reduction, which is a nascent effort. Pioneered in Seattle, it helps to reorient police culture and practice and enables efforts to address some of the challenges facing many impoverished individuals. Although its widespread adoption will not eliminate police-community tension in poor communities, it is superior to other alternatives, and thus deserves replication.

A decade after celebrating Morocco's 2004 family law as a social revolution, women's groups became dismayed by the persistence of minor marriage, polygyny, and marriage guardianship. Conventional explanations for why statutory law reform often fails to produce intended outcomes depart from the concept of the homogeneous state, pointing to insufficient enforcement mechanisms and cultural resistance to the new law within society. Arguing against this conceptualization, this article adopts the state-in-society approach. It compares how two types of street-level bureaucrats and secular and Islamist women's groups have engaged with the 2004 law. It finds that different groups have emphasized and rejected different categories and norms of the law. Street-level bureaucrats' interpretations have sometimes overlapped with those of civil society actors. The state is therefore not enforcing one normative order against cultural resistance from society; instead, different state actors are themselves actively involved in the production and preservation of multiple normativities.