Indian constitutional framers sought to tie their new state to ideas of modernity and liberalism by creating a government that would ensure citizens' rights while also creating the conditions for democratic citizenship. Balancing these two goals has been particularly challenging with regard to religion, as exemplified by the emergence of a peculiarly Indian understanding of secularism which requires the nonestablishment of religion but not the separation of religion and state. Supporters argue that this brand of secularism is best suited to the particular social and historical circumstances of independent India. This article suggests that the desire to separate religion and state is integral to any understanding of secularism and that, consequently, the Indian state neither is nor was meant to be secular. However, Indian secularists correctly identify the Indian state's distinctive approach to religion-state relations as appropriate to the Indian context and in keeping with India's constitutional goals.

Between May and July 2003, a shift in how the US public viewed the legality of consensual homosexual sex occurred. While in May the largest percentage of respondents to date supported decriminalizing such activity, that percentage dropped eleven points two months later. Similar declines in support were evident in the same period over a range of gay and lesbian rights claims. The ruling in Lawrence v. Texas (2003) decriminalizing homosexual sex is the obvious intervening event. To explain this pattern, coding of print and televised news coverage of the ruling throughout 2003 was undertaken. Coverage was not overtly negative in terms of antigay rhetoric or hostility toward the judiciary; rather, the dominant media frame focused on the implications of Lawrence for an entirely separate rights issue: marriage equality. This article examines the dynamic of frame “spillover,” or the idea that media focus on a distinct and not widely supported rights claim in a multifaceted rights agenda might depress support across the entire rights agenda. The findings call for further research, and they have implications for scholarship on public opinion, social movement framing, and ideational development and policy debate as studied within the broader field of American political development.

One of the most highly touted improvements in the criminal justice response to rape has been the wide-scale adoption of sexual assault nurse examiner (SANE) programs that provide specialized medical care and forensic evidence collection to victims. Though previous studies have emphasized the benefits of SANE programs in improving criminal case outcomes, this study illustrates how the post-rape forensic examination can also discourage reporting, investigation, and prosecution. Interviews with local rape care advocates across the United States show how the increasing emphasis on forensic evidence collected through rape kits may provide an opportunity to reflect and enact persistent law enforcement stereotypes toward sexual assault complainants. Unless police resistance to taking rape seriously is confronted and addressed, even well-intentioned policy reforms such as SANE programs may end up undermining—rather than enhancing—fair and thorough investigation of sexual assault allegations.

It is a truism that police in India generally lack legitimate authority and public trust. This lack is widely understood by scholars, policy analysts, and police practitioners as being rooted in the institution's colonial development as a means of oppression, and its alleged corruption and criminalization in the postcolonial period. The social facts of situational hyper-empowerment and the widespread decadence of police do much to explain their poor image and performance, but these explanations do not account for the fact that police in India are also structurally disempowered by cultural-political and legal-institutional claims to multiple and conflicting forms of authority that challenge and often overwhelm the authority of police. This structural disempowerment and its performances in everyday interactions between the police and the public constitute an ongoing social process of delegitimation of police authority in contemporary India. Following ethnographic analysis of this process of delegitimation, I explore the implications of focusing on police disempowerment for theorizations of the sources and capabilities of state legal authority more generally.

Drawing on original survey research, this study examines how lay Muslims in Malaysia understand foundational concepts in Islamic law. The survey finds a substantial disjuncture between popular legal consciousness and core epistemological commitments in Islamic legal theory. In its classic form, Islamic legal theory was marked by its commitment to pluralism and the centrality of human agency in Islamic jurisprudence. Yet in contemporary Malaysia, lay Muslims tend to understand Islamic law as being purely divine, with a single “correct” answer to any given question. The practical implications of these findings are demonstrated through examples of efforts by women's rights activists to reform family law provisions in Malaysia. The examples illustrate how popular misconceptions of Islamic law hinder the efforts of those working to reform family law codes while strengthening the hand of conservative actors wishing to maintain the status quo.

Robert Kagan has been at the forefront of sociolegal research into regulation for more than thirty years. His work addresses in general the extent to which law fosters or impedes economic activity, and the conditions under which people and organizations both comply with the law and sometimes fail to comply with it. This article analyzes his contributions and suggests some questions for further inquiry prompted by Kagan's work. The survey takes as its starting point Kagan's books Regulatory Encounters (ed. with Axelrad 2000) and Shades of Green (with Gunningham and Thornton 2003), before going on to consider his more recent research, which probes in some detail into the impact of enforcement and the ideas of compliance and deterrence.

This article investigates how lawyers manage legal and bureaucratic uncertainties associated with humanitarian immigration law by examining their representation of undocumented crime victims petitioning for U Visa status. Immigration attorneys craft dual narratives to persuade adjudicators that their clients qualify for and deserve this new legal status, but representing migrants well creates moral dilemmas. I explore how lawyers elicit and script narratives of “clean” victimhood to demonstrate that their clients qualify for U Visa standing. Next I argue that attorneys construct narratives articulating migrants’ civic engagement to position their clients as contributing members of society who deserve legal status. The final section illustrates how the production of these narratives generates a range of professional and ethical dilemmas for lawyers. This examination of how law is developed within a confining legal framework that is at the same time not totally institutionalized extends the “law in action” paradigm, which has been animated primarily by analyses of how legal actors tailor the idiosyncratic details of discrete cases to match existing precedents.

This article proposes a processual theory of the legal profession. In contrast to the structural, interactional, and collective action approaches, this processual theory conceptualizes the legal profession as a social process that changes over space and time. The social process of the legal profession includes four components: (1) diagnostic struggles over professional expertise; (2) boundary work over professional jurisdictions; (3) migration across geographical areas and status hierarchies; and (4) exchange between professions and the state. Building on the processual theory and using China as a primary example, the author proposes a research agenda for studying lawyers and globalization that seeks to shift the focus of research from the legal elite to ordinary law practitioners, from global law firms to local law firms, and from advanced economies to emerging economies.

This article offers a way of thinking about colonial-era legal reform that departs from traditional narratives by highlighting the importance of legal ambiguity in state building projects. Following the establishment of “Native Administration” in the Sudan in the early 1920s, the British colonial government conferred expansive judicial and administrative powers on tribal sheikhs and nazirs (chiefs), while at the same time discouraging many attempts to formalize or standardize those powers, preferring instead that they remain informal and undefined. This policy, which I term “strategic ambiguity,” emerged out of a belief that tribal leaders would be more effective if they possessed maximum discretion and judicial flexibility, even though the result was a colonial government woefully ill-informed about much of its own judicial system. These findings point to a way of thinking about colonial-era legal reform in which governmental ignorance was actually productive of sovereignty, and not an obstacle to it.

Why have accounts of botched executions not played a larger role in the struggle to end capital punishment in the United States? In the twentieth century, when methods of execution became increasingly controlled and sterilized, botched executions would seem to have had real abolitionist potential. This article examines newspaper coverage of botched executions to determine and describe the way they were presented to the public and why they have contributed little to the abolitionist cause. Although botched executions reveal pain, violence, and inhumanity associated with state killing, newspaper coverage of these events neutralizes the impact of that revelation. Throughout the last century, newspapers presented botched executions as misfortunes rather than injustices. We identify three distinct modes by which newspaper coverage neutralized the impact of botched executions and presented them as misfortunes rather than as systemic injustices: (1) the dual narratives of sensationalism and recuperation in the early years of the twentieth century, (2) the decline of sensationalism and the rise of “professionalism” in the middle of the century, and (3) the emphasis on “balanced” reporting toward the end of the century.

This introduction to the symposium on Keith J. Bybee's All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not provides a brief synopsis of the book's main argument and identifies some of the unsettled questions generated by the author's innovative treatment of courtesy, hypocrisy, and law.

This article exposes the political dimension of welfare fraud by investigating—in the context of the Israeli welfare reform of 2003—how forty-nine Israeli women who live on welfare justify welfare fraud. I find that women's justifications cannot be fully explained by traditional noncompliance theories that view welfare fraud as an individual, private, criminal activity that solely reflects on the fraudster's moral character or desperate need. Instead, women's justifications for welfare fraud are better understood as a sociopolitical struggle for inclusion and deservedness—as a political act that reflects an alternative concept of citizenship with respect to women's unpaid care work.

This article reviews three books on labor law written by Christopher Tomlins. They are, in order of publication, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (1985); Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (1993); and Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (2010). Tomlins has been an influential figure in the movement known as “critical legal studies” and has helped shape a new approach to the field of labor history, labor law, and the study of US workers. Over the span of twenty-five years, Tomlins's research has been central to evolving theories of law and social interaction and has continuing relevance to more recent scholarly developments such as the field of “cultural cognition” studies.

This essay reviews some of the more striking findings in Tom Baker and Sean J. Griffith's Ensuring Corporate Misconduct: How Liability Insurance Undermines Shareholder Litigation (2010), particularly concerning the tension between two competing narratives of shareholder litigation—one stressing the important deterrent effect of such litigation, the other viewing such litigation as abusive plaintiff opportunism. The essay then introduces commentaries on the book by Carol Heimer and Jodi Short, which follow.

This essay evaluates Baker and Griffith's book, Ensuring Corporate Misconduct, as a contribution to the social science literatures on regulation and governance, risk, and insurance. Previous social science work on insurance often took an “insurance on the ground” perspective comparing how insurance actually works with the theory of insurance and scrutinizing the actions of insurers as well as the actions of their policyholders. In line with this perspective, Baker and Griffith find that directors and officers (D&O) insurers do not actually charge premiums that vary with risk or monitor the actions of the officers and directors covered by the insurance. Because insurers and governments share governance tasks (a point Baker makes elsewhere), insurers' failures in fact amount to “failed governance” of the corporate world.

In the introduction to the new Oxford History of the Laws of England 1820–1914, the authors suggest that their task is to tell the “history of the law itself.” This review essay examines what can be learned from a history told from law's internal point of view rather than through the perspectives of other disciplines, such as economics or philosophy. It considers whether and how the common law responded to industrialization and laissez-faire ideology, the influence of salient philosophical movements—such as utilitarianism—on statutory change, and how all history is an exercise in ideology. In considering the public sphere, it suggests that this work should form the inspiration for further inquiry.

In the twentieth century, the antinomy of freedom and coercion served as the dominant paradigm for understanding issues of crime and punishment. Roscoe Pound in Criminal Justice in America (1930) and Herbert Packer in The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (1968) described a tension between the values of individual liberty and general security to explain the problems with the justice system and the public's disagreements over their solution. Historians of twentieth-century criminal law have also adopted this framework to explain causation and change. This essay argues that an antinomic perspective of criminal justice history, while useful, has obscured important historical questions. A focus on social changes, such as the transformations that the automobile brought about in the commission of crimes and police practices, instead of on contrasting values, offers a different account of how proceduralism became inextricably tied to notions of American freedom in the twentieth century. This approach also historicizes the “paradigm of antinomies” and shows how people in the past, like Pound and Packer, mobilized dualistic thinking, which shaped a criminal legal culture based on an antagonism—both real and perceived—between citizens and law enforcement.

In All Judges Are Political—Except When They Are Not: Acceptable Hypocrisies and the Rule of Law (2010), Keith Bybee considers the hypocrisy of modern law—that is, the widespread view that judges are both principled and partisan—by drawing an analogy with courtesy. Both law and courtesy contain and manage the diverse and potentially divisive interests that would, were they not contained, disrupt social life. In this essay I extend this argument by considering whether the relationship between law and courtesy is more than merely analogical. I suggest that both systems are aspects of larger historical developments out of which emerged the modern subject and the modern state, creating a social world made up of apparently bounded individuals and institutions. As such, law and courtesy do more than conceal and contain interests and subjectivity; they produce the unruly, partisan subjects they are designed to manage.