How, in a context of growing critiques of financialization, can law contribute to protecting the legitimacy of finance? This paper argues that the assignment of responsibilities between individuals and organizations plays a decisive role, using the recent Libor scandal as an empirical illustration. To do so, the paper offers a Foucauldian framework, the differential management of financial illegalisms, dedicated to the study of illegalities in financial capitalism. The comparison of the legal treatment of two manipulations of Libor, this key benchmark in financial markets, reveals how mid-level traders have been the object of criminal prosecution, while law undervalued the role of top managers and organizations. To capture how differential management is performed in practice, I analyze precisely how the conflict-resolution devices (criminal trial vs. settlement) and the social categorizations prevailing in the two manipulations of Libor favor different forms of responsibility, individual or organizational. I conclude by exploring the implications of law's relationship to financial legitimacy.

The concept of critical mass has been invoked by social scientists and the Supreme Court in affirmative action decisions as a solution to problems related to underrepresentation of minority students in institutions of higher education. Little distinction is made by scholars between the Court's use of critical mass as a metaphor and its application in research as a mathematical concept. I use Agent-Based Modeling—a simulation technique in which systems are modeled through repetitive interaction of autonomous decision-making “agents” to observe the complex dynamics that emerge from interaction—to investigate the Supreme Court's conception of the relationship between student-body composition and student isolation and stereotyping. Findings demonstrate that the relationship between student body representation and the educational outcomes of interest as detailed by the Court, specifically minority students' feeling of isolation and majority students' retention of negative stereotypes, does not exhibit a specific threshold or tipping point as we would expect from a system that has a critical mass at which sudden and sustainable change in the state of the system occurs. Simulations of student interactions show there is not one definable threshold or critical mass of minority students that achieves educational goals of reducing either the isolation felt by minority students or the negative stereotypes held by majority students about their minority peers. Instead, greater minority representation is consistently associated with better outcomes for students in all contexts.

This study uses an intersectional approach to examine the “paradox” that disadvantaged victims often mobilize the police, despite their distrust and lack of confidence in the law. Data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (1994–2016) were analyzed using logistic regression to model the predicted probabilities of police notification by victims of crime. Economic disadvantage, as measured by family poverty and lack of a high school education, increased the probability that females reported their victimization to the police, but decreased the likelihood that males did so. Economically disadvantaged black females had the highest probability of reporting, while economically disadvantaged black and Hispanic males had the lowest. Examining the intersectional differences across social groups shows that reporting behavior is not just a function of one attribute but rather is a function of multiple identities and structural inequalities.

Existing literature regards flexibility and authority as key characteristics of informal justice. We further contend that the combination of the two is crucial for informal justice to be effective. We investigate the process of dispute resolution by a Chinese labor agency. Following the life cycles of a sample of 810 labor disputes, we find that this informal justice forum was efficient and effective, made possible by the combination of flexibility and authority. Flexibility means that the agency attracts certain types of cases that are usually screened out of the formal legal system and that agency officials use “informal,” hence flexible, techniques. Authority means that the administrative agency possesses additional powers over the disputants; hence, the disputants are under pressure to follow its suggestions and decisions. A comparative analysis of various cases of informal justice reinforces the importance of combining flexibility and authority. We further demonstrate that flexibility without authority is insufficient and that some informal justice forums are effective because they enjoy both.