Status-based theories of labor market inequality contend that, even when workers have identical qualifications and performance, employers evaluate them differently based on stereotypes about their status group. Gender and parenthood are status characteristics that affect decisions about hiring, pay, and promotion through stereotypes that mothers should not work, fathers should not take leave, and caregivers of either gender are less reliable, committed workers. We contend that family-leave laws mitigate these status effects by conveying a consensus that both men and women can legitimately combine work and family. An experiment testing this theory shows that, when the law is not salient, participants pay mothers (whether or not they take leave) and fathers who take leave less and rate them as less promotable than other identical workers. Participants also rate these employees as less competent, committed, and congenial than other identical workers. By contrast, when participants review family-leave laws before they evaluate employees, they treat mothers and caregivers no worse than other workers. Reviewing an organizational family-leave policy did not reduce the effects of stereotypes as much as reviewing formal law. These findings suggest that making law salient during workplace evaluations can reduce inequality through law’s expressive effects.

In the United States, rural economic marginalization and corresponding gaps in employment, affordable housing, health care, nutrition, and education put individuals at high risk for legal need. Yet many rural regions are “legal deserts” with few, if any, attorneys, and prevailing access-to-justice initiatives tend to neglect the unique challenges posed by rurality. The efforts of rural tribal and state court judges, though often overlooked in scholarship and policy, offer a compelling response to this inequitable access-to-justice context. Building on emergent work on “active judging,” or when judges step away from a traditional passive role to assist unrepresented parties, this manuscript explores how rural place and place attachments shape diverse judges’ interactions with litigants. It draws on mixed-methodological research across seven tribal and state courts in the upper Midwest to shed light on rural judges’ efforts, how these efforts are regarded by unrepresented parties, and to what extent a shared experience of rurality provides a meaningful form of “access.” In so doing, it offers a novel spatial intervention in scholarship on access to justice and active judging and contributes to more rurally relevant justice practices.

The proliferation of problem-solving courts reflects a growing recognition that traditional punitive institutions tend to perpetuate cycles of poverty. Problem-solving courts expand the types of knowledge and resources available to court actors to help them address clients’ basic needs, provide ongoing support, and reduce recidivism. But the same qualities that enable judicial flexibility and collaboration can also undermine court goals, affecting the ability of court actors to understand the needs of indigent clients and resolve outstanding legal issues. This article analyzes the role of a social action membership organization in establishing Detroit’s homeless court. Our findings document how the group’s involvement influenced the court in procedure and substance and created space for negotiations that foreground clients’ self-defined needs. Collaboration shaped how defense attorneys thought about the purpose of the court and what they advocated for when meeting with judges and prosecutors on topics such as court accessibility, client sense of safety, and (in)ability to pay. These findings suggest the importance of having those most affected involved in the earliest stages of court creation to access procedural representation. We also consider administrative barriers to establishing a homeless court model within district courts.

The Philippine Supreme Court is considered one of Asia’s most activist courts. During the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte (2016–22), however, concerns grew about its independence. This article investigates determinants of the Court’s behavior since the country’s return to democracy in 1987, with particular attention to “loyalty effects”—the likelihood that justices will vote for the government more often when the president who appointed them is in office. Drawing on a data set of seventy major political cases and sociobiographic profiles of the eighty-six justices who voted in them, we test for variables, including freshman effects and strategic defection toward the end of a presidential term. We find that early years on the bench are closely associated with a vote for the appointer’s administration, and the end of a presidential term is weakly associated with a vote against. Under the Duterte administration, voting preferences have been more aligned with the appointer, and factional alliances of justices appointed by different presidential administrations mirror political alignments. These results have practical implications for the fragile constitutional democracy in the Philippines and contribute to understanding of loyalty dynamics in less institutionalized judicial settings.

In this article, we examine how courts make decisions in religious exemption cases that implicate LGBT rights in a wide range of contexts including education, employment, and medical care. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis of 50 federal cases decided between 1990 and 2020, we demonstrate a shift in how anti-LGBT sentiment is expressed by parties bringing religion-based claims—from a broad condemnation of LGBT identity to a narrow condemnation of same-sex marriage—and find that courts are more likely to rule in favor of the latter. We show how courts construct competing understandings of harm and religious freedom depending on the context of the case and whether the setting is deemed public or private. Our analyses shed light on the shifting and competing meanings about religion, sexuality, and public life in the United States.

Parole boards possess the notable power to grant release from prison, oftentimes well short of an incarcerated person’s legally allowable length of sentence. Although the exercise of that power is, at least in part, governed by law, extralegal considerations likely play an influential part in decisions to grant release. Indeed, the analysis offered here of parole board hearings in Washington State reveals, in particular, the work that board members perform to reinforce the moral significance of past criminality. In parole hearings, board members find ample opportunities to morally condemn the index offenses that petitioners have perpetrated and to express skepticism about narratives of petitioner change. Instead of helping petitioners ease the burden of being profaned for their past acts, board members often act to reinforce the mark of a criminal record. These realities underscore the significant work necessary to shift attitudes toward those convicted of crimes, and expose the cultural challenges that attempts to reduce incarceration more generally are likely to face, especially in the United States.

This article explores the plasticity of rights by examining how the US government promised and revoked naturalization rights and military benefits from Filipino colonial soldiers who served on behalf of the United States in World War II. Rarely have legal scholars of the US military, citizenship, and the welfare state addressed the rights of colonial subjects. Drawing on data collected from six libraries and archives, the Congressional Record, and oral histories, I document how key actors in the US government dismantled the rights of Filipino soldiers. I find that colonialism, war, and a rapidly changing geopolitical situation—forthcoming Philippine independence—allowed members of the US Congress and the administrator of Veterans Affairs to dismantle rights. By arguing that the Philippines was not a colony, that colonial subjects were not entitled to equal treatment, and that Filipino veterans were not US military, members of the US executive and legislative branches casually eroded rights. US state actors thus were able to claim that Filipino veterans’ rights were merely cumbersome and expensive foreign aid. This case suggests that rights are more malleable during times of state transition.

Rights constitutionalism faces a global crisis of legitimacy, and recent years have seen a surge in scholarship on the crisis. The vast majority of analyses focus on broad structural factors and processes. This article takes a different approach: sociological and bottom up. I use qualitative discourse analysis to examine how social actors in Israel justified their antagonism toward rights constitutionalism in three cases where judicial intervention for human rights encountered exceptional public opposition and political backlash. The analysis reveals that social actors used discourses of belonging—both liberal and non-liberal—to challenge rights constitutionalism as a constraint on democratic politics, when they perceived rights protection as conflicting with or undervaluing boundaries of collective identity. Based on these findings, I introduce a new concept—the challenge of belonging—that expresses the normative tension between individual rights and collective belonging. By highlighting the ethical dimension of social opposition to rights constitutionalism, the sociological approach allows a nuanced understanding of such opposition. The challenge of belonging can account for mixed attitudes in the same polity and even in the same social group on rights-oriented judicial intervention, and it points to a common normative thread linking attacks on liberal constitutionalism in vastly different sociopolitical settings.

Myanmar’s citizenship law is stratified by ethnic membership, but, on the books, it is gender neutral. Much attention has therefore focused on ethnic discrimination codified in the law. But individuals whose ethnic identities should provide them with a legitimate claim to citizenship continue to face barriers. Why is this the case? This article examines the additional obstacles that women face legitimating their ethno-national membership and conferring citizenship on their children, despite the gender neutrality of the citizenship law. I argue that the patriarchal structure of evidentiary documentation and patrilineal understandings of ethnic membership transmission shared by village leaders operating as key gatekeepers influence which parent’s claim—father’s or mother’s—to taingyintha (Indigenous or national ethnicity) membership can strengthen or weaken an individual’s chances of obtaining citizenship. The ethno-national identity of women is not evaluated equally to that of men, challenging women’s ability to capitalize on their taingyintha identity for citizenship purposes and contributing to the reproduction of statelessness across generations. I focus on this intersection of gender and ethnicity in establishing ethno-national membership and citizenship across variation in regional geopolitical environments to expand socio-legal knowledge on how formal and informal discrimination together exacerbate inequalities beyond the letter of the law.

This article examines the role of industry in implementing and interpreting the international legal norm of human rights due diligence. Our study focuses on a multi-industry association called the Responsible Minerals Initiative (RMI), which has assumed a leading role in implementing conflict minerals legislation and interpreting the norm of human rights due diligence in mineral supply chains. Drawing on interviews with RMI staff, corporate representatives, and independent members of the RMI’s governance committees, we analyze the RMI’s risk assessment tools that facilitate corporate compliance with global mineral supply chain regulations. We demonstrate that these technocratic tools mask the underlying corporate interests that control how human rights due diligence is being interpreted and implemented on the ground. We then argue that global supply chains are being “governed at a distance” through these technical practices whereby companies divest themselves of responsibility to their suppliers. Supply chain governance at a distance is therefore transforming the norm of human rights due diligence from an instrument of corporate accountability to a tool of corporate legitimacy.

Scholars studying wrongful convictions have long examined their causes and the ways in which to prevent them and are increasingly interested in exonerees’ post-prison reentry processes. However, research on the experience of incarceration as a result of wrongful conviction is scarce. This article draws on in-depth interviews with eleven exonerees across three states (Illinois, Texas, and New York) to theorize how multiple facets of innocence (personal, relational, and institutional) shape the ways in which former prisoners have navigated their wrongful incarceration: learning to prove their innocence. For many wrongfully convicted inmates, acquiring legal knowledge and mobilizing post-conviction law—specifically, actual innocence jurisprudence—plays a central role in their daily lives given the onerous legal work it takes to prove their factual innocence. I advance what Kathryne M. Young has termed second-order legal consciousness, which prioritizes the social processes that create legal consciousness, as a framework to illuminate how wrongfully convicted inmates constructed legality when pursuing legal exoneration in prison. This article offers new insights into the relational nature of law to show how marginalized groups like prisoners mobilize law when pursuing their rights and allows us to theorize innocence in contexts where the state and society writ large have ascribed a person’s legal guilt.

This article examines how social capital affects the resolution of disputes by focusing on English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, sometimes described as “Wikipedia’s Supreme Court.” Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, the article contends that the Arbitration Committee not only examines the merits of the claims made by the disputants, but also and more crucially considers the position of each disputant within the community of editors in its decision-making process. In doing so, the Arbitration Committee does not simply decide or arbitrate disputes but seeks to attenuate their impact on Wikipedia’s social fabric. This data allows us to revisit sociological debates on the role of social capital, by revealing the ways in which well-connected individuals employ it strategically in order to obfuscate their noncompliance with norms, thus leading to what I call “dispute cancellation.”

This article presents a legal history of US citizenship in Guam. I argue that members of Guam’s Congress mobilizing for US citizenship in the 1930s and in the immediate aftermath of World War II offer a powerful and instructive example of popular constitutionalism, or the interactive, extrajudicial process that generates constitutional meaning. Guamanians made constitutional claims to US naval leaders and lawmakers, arguing that colonized people living in the US empire should be US citizens despite ambiguous Supreme Court precedents in the Insular Cases, congressional inaction, and naval obstruction. Guamanians interpreted the Constitution in a way that pressured and influenced naval leaders to support and US lawmakers to ultimately enact legislation that extended citizenship to Guam. This legal history demonstrates the complexity of popular constitutionalism within the context of US empire. By claiming that they should be considered US citizens after the United States formally annexed Guam after the Spanish-American War, Guamanians drew on the Constitution to demand equality, dignity, and full inclusion in the US polity for colonized people. US naval leaders and lawmakers turned this egalitarian reading of the Constitution to their own strategic advantage, however, deploying it as a valuable piece of Cold War propaganda. This article thus provides a useful example of the ideological indeterminacy of popular constitutionalism. The Constitution can be interpreted by marginalized populations to demand equality and inclusion. But the Constitution can also be interpreted by the military and congressional leaders of a global empire to maintain systems of power, oppression, and subordination.

Contracts are the underpinning of functional business, governmental, organizational, and inter-personal relations across the developed world. It is a methodological advance for contractual research scholars to transform qualitative contractual information into quantitative data to analyze if, how, and why the law is reflected and reproduced in contracts—potentially explaining the continuation or amelioration of social injustices—and/or if contractual content informs human behavior or vice versa. However, efforts to “quantitize” contracts and statistically study them are scattered across subfields without much methodological guidance. The linguistic complexity of many legal contacts, paired with few repositories, makes their comparative quantitative analysis challenging. Prior attempts to quantitatively analyze contracts often lack shared systematic methods for measuring specified textual content, transforming this information into a quantitative format, or statistically analyzing the produced data set. This article presents the power and promise of transforming legal contracts and other similar documents into quantitative data for analysis, reviews the research to date that does so in different ways, and then provides concrete guiding steps and an illustrative example of how to transform contractual content into quantitative data that are valid, reliable, and reproducible, increasing the quality of the data produced and supporting the important socio-legal conclusions that can be derived from their analysis.

This study examines legal opportunity in China after the recent “law-based governance” reforms, including those that have professionalized the judiciary, established NGOs’ public interest standing, and expanded legal aid coverage. Based on in-depth interviews, it finds that despite the generally tightening political control over the social sector, the reforms have helped some law-related NGOs expand their litigation practice, social and legislative influence, and domestic funding sources. At the same time, these changes have had considerable cooptation effects by aligning these NGOs’ interests with the state’s and channeling their activities into state-sanctioned institutional processes. The findings suggest that states can effectively utilize a dualist strategy that combines restrictive and supportive approaches to public participation in the legal process. It thus sheds light on the progression of legality within various political and institutional contexts.

This article explores how not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiments affect the implementation of new cannabis laws in California cities. Despite increasing legality and growing social tolerance, the actual status of cannabis remains controversial. Large segments of the population and local authorities remain uncomfortable with the use of cannabis and resist allowing cannabis facilities in their communities. I employ statistical analysis to understand why some jurisdictions move toward more permissive cannabis policies and others do not. The results show that, on average, socially and economically prosperous cities express higher support for cannabis legalization, but cannabis businesses are more likely to receive permits in cities that are socially and economically distressed. The disparity between demand (white middle-class communities) and supply (poor Hispanic communities) demonstrates that stereotypes generated by the war on drugs have not disappeared after the passage of new cannabis laws and continue to perpetuate the marginalization of disadvantaged individuals and places.

In this article, we: (1) advance a theory for how courts should respond to highly political disputes about jurisdictional authority, and (2) assess whether courts can achieve this ideal. Our theory draws from normative realism to argue that courts should push conflict back into the political realm whenever possible—facilitating free and fair dialogue by outlining rules and principles to guide negotiations, while also rejecting zero-sum outcomes when enforcing jurisdictional powers and related rights. We favor this approach because it can generate legitimacy for the legal and political systems by recognizing the judiciary’s limited democratic standing in structural disputes. To ground this argument in actual practice, we assess how the Supreme Court of Canada has managed two streams of highly political jurisprudence related to jurisdictional authority—federalism and Aboriginal rights cases. We show that the Court has increasingly relied on this approach of facilitating dialogue in both areas. While we argue that this approach is particularly well suited to federalism cases, our analysis uncovers negative outcomes in Indigenous case law. The Court’s approach often fails to strongly enforce the constitutional rights of Indigenous peoples, demonstrating that its facilitator role does not adequality account for the power imbalances between the state and Indigenous peoples.

In 2008 the California Supreme Court forced the state’s parole board to change how it justifies the decision to keep a person in prison. This article combines computational and interpretive analysis of 9,842 hearing transcripts to show how, to achieve compliance with the court, parole board commissioners refurbished an old rehabilitative way of talking about incarceration found in a set of secondary hearing procedures and placed it at the center of decisions. The article considers the consequences of this shift for inequality in incarceration in California. More broadly, it makes the case for focusing on the relationship between administrators and those who can directly intervene in their practices in the name of compliance to understand bureaucratic penal change.

International criminal law (ICL) is premised upon the principle of individual criminal responsibility—the idea that individual persons, rather than states or other entities, bear criminal responsibility for mass atrocities. This principle has been operationalized in practice through the development of various legal theories, technically known as “modes of liability,” that delineate individual contributions to collective forms of violence. However, the modes of liability have been interpreted and applied differently across international courts and tribunals. Crucially, the International Criminal Court has construed those modes in a significantly more restrained manner than previous international tribunals, essentially limiting the set of situations in which a person could be found guilty of an international crime. This article contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on international criminal justice by exploring the social construction of different conceptualizations of the modes of liability in ICL and their transformations over time. Specifically, the framework focuses on the promotion and contestation of ideas among various actors participating in the international criminal justice field and the power dynamics that govern the field. This is a key issue for ICL and global justice because it demarcates the legal boundaries of “guilt” and “accountability” for international crimes.

This article shows how Progressive-Era state actors in Chicago employed open-ended, low-level criminal charges directed at regulating the moral health of the community to criminalize interracial relationships—even though interracial marriage had been legal in Illinois since 1870. Capacious legal definitions of offenses like vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication allowed police officers and judges to delineate moral and immoral relationships along racial lines. Using newspaper articles, writing from contemporary social reformers, and court reports, this article reconstructs the treatment of interracial couples in the Chicago legal system to show how discretion in criminal law can reinforce racial hierarchy. I offer three historical arguments: first, that individual arrests and prosecutions of interracial couples labeled lawful, interracial relationships as a form of unlawful “vice,” second, that large-scale raids on spaces for interracial socialization reinforced the criminality of interracial intimacy in a segregated city, and third, that singling out interracial couples allowed the state to exercise control through intrusive forms of punishment like probation and institutionalization.