This article presents the composite social context surrounding the “experiments” that were used to prove witchcraft accusations in early modern England. It demonstrates that legal proof was not imposed by elite legislators and judges, or fashioned in accordance with the voice of scientific experts, but was shaped through complex social dynamics in which the middling sort and petty gentry fulfilled a crucial role. Through this process, popular beliefs percolated into judicial proceedings. Members of influential provincial families were the social agents who reconstructed old supernatural methods of proof into innovative rational experiments, often replicating public displays of proof that helped bolster the criminal charges and provided a competing arena of evidence. The article claims that the judges' cooperation with these “experiments” might have been an endeavor by the official legal system to circumvent the threat posed by a popular grassroots alternative to the exclusive jurisdiction of the court system.

One of the most replicated findings of the procedural justice literature is that people who receive unfavorable outcomes are more likely to believe that the process was nonetheless legitimate if they thought that it was fair. Using interviews of 150 people compensated through the South African land restitution program, this article examines whether these findings apply in the transitional justice context where it is often unclear who the winners and losers are. The question explored is: When all outcomes are unfavorable or incomplete, how do people make fairness assessments? The central observation was that the ability of respondents and land restitution commission officials to sustain a conversation with each other had the greatest effect on whether respondents believed that the land restitution process was fair. The study also contributes to the existing literature by exploring the institutional arrangements and resources necessary to facilitate communication and to overcome any communication breakdowns encountered.

Drawing on movement framing, collective identity, and mobilization scholarship, this article examines the emergence and potential effects of framing “law as a calling” for the Christian Lawyering community. The article finds that the term should have strong resonance and salience in the broader Christian community. It also finds that because of its interpretive malleability, “law as a calling” has been discussed and actualized in three related, but distinct, ways. That is, “law as a calling” has been conceptualized as requiring Christian Lawyers to turn inward, turn outward by pursuing social justice, and turn outward as a culture warrior. The article argues that while the different interpretations of “law as a calling” address a range of needs required to mobilize potential and existing Christian L/lawyers, the different ideological factions of self‐identifying Christian Lawyers emphasize different understandings of “law as a calling.”

To apply for U Visa status, a temporary legal standing available to undocumented crime victims who assist law enforcement in investigations, immigrants must obtain validation of their experiences from police via a signed “certification” paper. This article investigates the challenges lawyers and immigrant crime victims face in translating and documenting victims' experiences into legal form. By analyzing interactions between Los Angeles attorneys and female undocumented immigrants, I explore how immigrant victims of violence prepare to approach police certifiers. Attorneys arbitrate between accounts of violence and immigrant‐police encounters and the legal cases they can develop, offering retrospective and prospective advice to immigrants about how to make effective pleas to police. Drawing attention to the devolutionary dynamics of an inclusive immigration policy, I show how nonfederal bureaucrats shape immigrants' eligibility for legalization remedies. In turn, I expose detrimental consequences of mixing street‐level administrative discretion with federal visa eligibility determinations.

The history of US immigration policy and practice reflects a series of attempts to address complex political demands and organizational tensions. Yet this complexity has rendered comprehensive immigration reform elusive in recent decades. When legislative action appears impossible, what other avenues are available to confront these challenges? During the first term of the Obama administration, prosecutorial discretion emerged as a key mechanism. This article draws on archival data and interviews with immigration attorneys, advocates, analysts, and policy makers to understand better how prosecutorial discretion is used in immigration policy and practice today, why it came to have such a central role, recent challenges to its use, and what these tensions suggests for sociolegal scholarship on immigration.

Since the 1980s, social movement scholars have investigated the dynamic of movement/countermovement interaction. Most of these studies posit movements as initiators, with countermovements reacting to their challenges. Yet sometimes a movement supports an agenda in response to a countermovement that engages in what we call “anticipatory countermobilization.” We interviewed ten leading LGBT activists to explore the hypothesis that the LGBT movement was brought to the fight for marriage equality by the anticipatory countermobilization of social conservatives who opposed same‐sex marriage before there was a realistic prospect that it would be recognized by the courts or political actors. Our findings reinforce the existing scholarship, but also go beyond it in emphasizing a triangular relationship among social movement organizations, countermovement organizations, and grassroots supporters of same‐sex marriage. More broadly, the evidence suggests the need for a more reciprocal understanding of the relations among movements, countermovements, and sociolegal change.

We investigate Korean organizations' noncompliance with parental leave provisions. A survey of 1,750 organizations reveals that 19 percent are fully noncompliant (i.e., no policy in place) and 29 percent are partially noncompliant (i.e., acknowledged failure to implement policy). We examine whether organizational characteristics and conditions that predict responsiveness to US employment law are relevant in Korea and apply to a concrete parental leave requirement. Our results show that the predictors of full and partial noncompliance differ, suggesting different motives or processes among noncompliant organizations. Sector and size reduce the odds of full noncompliance but are unrelated to implementing parental leave policies. Having a human resources department predicts that only implementing adopted policies and gender traditionalism increase the likelihood of noncompliance. This is the first theoretically informed investigation of noncompliance with Korean parental leave laws and provides new evidence of the value of institutional perspectives on employment law beyond the US context.

Violent hazing has been a longstanding issue within African American, collegiate fraternities and sororities, otherwise known as black Greek‐letter organizations (BGLOs). This article investigates how and what hazing victims know about their hazing experiences. Additionally, the article examines how victims' knowledge of hazing may hold serious implications for tort defense doctrines like assumption of risk and comparative fault. Specifically, the authors conduct two studies—one quantitative and the other qualitative—to find that not only are BGLO pledges aware that their pledge experiences are likely to involve mental and physical hazing, but that they believe such experiences will likely continue throughout the entirety of their induction process. Moreover, appreciation for hazing experiences is often captured in the fraternal chants, greetings, and songs they learn or create, which together reflects some understanding of danger and risk. The authors contend that these elements of black “Greek” hazing culture may serve as evidence of assumption of risk or comparative fault.

For as long as there have been motion pictures, scenes of execution have appeared in American film. This article examines those scenes over the course of the twentieth century and suggests that spectatorship, and what it means to watch, is central to scenes of execution in film. We are interested less in the intentions and politics of a filmmaker and more in what those scenes offer viewers. We argue that three central motifs of spectatorship characterized death penalty films during the more than 100‐year period that we studied. First, viewers are often positioned as members of an audience and many scenes of execution are presented in a highly theatrical fashion and, as a result, the line between spectatorship and witnessing is blurred. Second, in many scenes of execution viewers are brought “backstage” and provided chilling, intimate views of the machinery of death, privileged views unavailable outside of film. The third motif shifts the positioning of the viewer such that we stand in the shoes of those who are to be executed. We conclude by asking whether and how scenes of execution in American film provoke in viewers an awareness of the political responsibility inherent in their identities as democratic citizens in a killing state.

This essay introduces a Law & Social Inquiry symposium on Kitty Calavita's book Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (2010) that features comments on the law and society enterprise by Jeannine Bell, Austin Sarat, and Christopher Tomlins. It briefly discusses the commentators' views of this enterprise as revealed in their essays and challenges points made by each of them. It goes on to discuss the book's suitability as a student‐oriented introduction to the field of law and society, filling a gap the commentators left open.

The last four decades of US housing policy have seen a shift from the federal allocation of affordable housing as a public good to the neoliberal model of private and for‐profit provision of affordable housing. This shift warrants a study of the link between the interests that now shape low‐income housing markets and the stability of the housing they provide. Nowhere are the effects of this shift more evident than in the homes of the 20 million Americans living in manufactured housing, which is installed largely on the private lands of for‐profit developers who can close mobile home parks and force residents to move themselves and their homes with as little as 30 days' notice. This ethnography of mass eviction in a Florida mobile home park examines state regulations intended to protect residents of closing parks and analyzes how private interests shape the implementation of these policies.

This article explores how private organizations influence the content and meaning of consumer protection legislation. I examine why California forced consumers to use a private dispute resolution system that affords consumers fewer rights, while Vermont adopted a state‐run disputing structure that affords consumers greater rights. Drawing from historical and new institutional theories, I analyze twenty‐five years of legislative history, as well as interviews with drafters of the California and Vermont laws, to show how automobile manufacturers weakened the impact of a powerful California consumer warranty law by creating dispute resolution venues. As these structures became institutionalized in the lemon law field, manufacturers reshaped the meaning of legislation. Unlike California, the political alliances in Vermont and a different developmental path led to a state‐run dispute resolution structure. I conclude that how social reform laws are designed and how businesses influence social reform legislation can increase or decrease the achievement of a statute's social reform goals.

As the Global North experiences a real or manufactured crisis in asylum, deterrence has become the central plank in border control policies. Following a resurgence of boat arrivals and faced with serious overcrowding in detention centers and a spate of drownings, the Australian government returned to the use of offshore detention for asylum seekers. In this article, the official media releases of the major political parties from the period surrounding the reopening of detention facilities on Nauru and Papua New Guinea are subject to systematic discourse analysis. This reveals a range of deterrence scripts that we have labeled “neoliberal deterrence,” “classical deterrence,” and an “ethic of care.” The resuscitation of the deterrence script in this second incarnation of Australian offshore processing arguably reveals increasingly nuanced and combative elements. The article details how these scripts make an important contribution to global immigration governance, which is presently incapable of thinking beyond deterrence in its various forms.

One of the sharpest critiques of law and society scholarship in recent years has come from scholars who maintain that law and society scholarship fails to address the issue of race appropriately. This essay considers several critiques of law and society scholars' engagement with issues of race and uses them to evaluate Kitty Calavita's exploration of race in Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (2010). The essay advocates the use of “race as process” as a mode of analysis that will allow for greater explanatory power to law and society scholarship when it touches on racial issues.

In Failing Law Schools (2010), Brian Tamanaha recommends that law schools respond to the current economic crisis in the legal profession by reducing support for faculty research and developing two‐year degree programs. But these ideas respond only to a short‐term problem that will probably be solved by the closure of marginal institutions. The real challenge lies in the powerful long‐term trends that animate social change, particularly the shift to a knowledge‐based economy and the demand for social justice through expanded public services. These trends demand that law schools transform their educational programs to reflect the regulatory, transactional, and interdisciplinary nature of modern legal practice.

Previous sociolegal research has neglected how the work of corporate security agents is enabled and constrained by legal knowledges. This article explores how legal knowledges shape the work of municipal corporate security (MCS) agents in Canadian cities. MCS offices are a new development in municipal governments. By drawing on analysis of freedom of information requests and interviews with MCS managers and staff, we investigate how legal knowledges shape MCS practices in Canadian cities, with a focus on trespass law, licensing law, litigation, labor law, privacy law, and workplace violence legislation that converge in MCS offices. MCS agents must interpret, translate, and apply these laws in their municipal jurisdiction or urban problem space to confront the defining element of the urban milieu—nuisance—but also to mitigate the risks. Interpretation and use of numerous laws by MCS staff constitute a distinctively urban way of governing through legal knowledge.

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)—namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites only. Mack focuses especially on the tensions of this role in courtrooms, where African American lawyers were necessarily called upon to act as the equals of white judges, opposing counsel, and witnesses. Mack's thesis, focused on the contradictions and tensions embodied in the performance of a racially loaded identity, reflects the influence of postmodern identity performance theory as articulated by Judith Butler and others. Mack and others belong to a new generation of civil rights history scholars who are asking new questions about contested identities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This essay offers an evaluation of this new direction for civil rights scholarship, focusing especially on its implicit normative orientation and what it contributes to the decade‐old debate over how to conceive of agency in social movement scholarship.

Kitty Calavita's Invitation to Law & Society: An Introduction to the Study of Real Law (2010) offers a broad and useful overview of the intellectual accomplishments of law and society scholars and a self‐confident assertion that they perform an invaluable service by focusing on “real law,” that is, law in action rather than law on the books. This essay argues that the field is more fragmented than Calavita notes and that law and society research is neither engaged with a common set of questions nor organized around a single central insight or an agreed‐upon paradigm. Moreover, this essay raises questions about Calavita's claims about “real” law and suggests that we complement law and society's traditional focus by examining the varied performances of law, whether in texts or in the world beyond those texts.