Drawing on empirical data and property theory, this article explores the property structure of a “free school” and the work property performs there. At Summerhill, we can see a tension between two property registers. On the one hand, the founder and present members stress the importance of individual ownership; at the same time the school's property regime involves property-limitation rules, a dispersal of rights, collective forms of property, and cross-cutting, pluralized sites of institutional recognition. In exploring how this tension is manifested through property's work, the article focuses on property's contribution to a variegated social life at the school, analyzed in terms of personal, civic, and boundary relations. With belonging treated as the central component of property rather than exclusion or control, ways of understanding what constitutes property and how it works shift.

Do the attempts of modern states to foster tax compliance reflect wider attributes of modernity? This article analyzes the history of the creation of a tax compliance culture in Israel of the 1950s and the various practices, techniques, and discourses that were deployed by the state to create model taxpaying citizens. It shows how the specific history of tax compliance can be understood as part of a wider phenomenon: the desire of modern states to create self-policing, normalized subjects. By interpreting the history of tax compliance critically, as part of the attempt of the state to control its citizens, the article suggests a new way of understanding the history of twentieth-century tax compliance generally and more specifically the history of judicial attempts to tackle tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Despite the historical transformation of executions in the United States into cloistered, bureaucratic affairs, two past practices have persisted in modern executions: the opportunities for the condemned to request a special last meal and to make a speech to those assembled to witness the execution. The retention of these practices and the communication of their contents by the state and the media to the public reinforce a conception of those executed as autonomous actors, endowed with agency and individuality. Through these practices, the state and the media reflect and strengthen the oxymoronic construction of offenders in contemporary discourses as self-made monsters who are intrinsically different by choice. Presenting offenders in this way may ultimately maintain the emotional satisfaction needed to sustain the death penalty. Arguments are supported by published last meal requests and final statements in the state of Texas.

Research on crime victims and their experiences with the criminal justice system suggests that victims’ rights (e.g., victim impact statements) and victims’ services (e.g., crime victims’ compensation, counseling) have not significantly improved victims’ satisfaction with the criminal justice system or their recovery from the crime. Thus, we appear to know little about how to satisfy and assist victims of crime. This study uses the symbolic interactionist perspective to examine victims’ experiences with law enforcement workers (e.g., detectives, counselors) with a focus on people who have lost a loved one to murder (“bereaved victims”). The data come from in-depth interviews with thirty-two bereaved victims, seven law enforcement workers, and three crime victims’ advocates in Union County (pseudonym). Bereaved victims define the victim role differently from law enforcement workers, creating two main points of conflict with workers: (1) a conflict over their deceased loved one's body, and (2) a conflict over the flow of information in the case. Bereaved victims’ frustrations over these conflicts created problems for their recovery. Bereaved victims’ efforts to see their deceased loved one's body, guide detectives’ investigation, and learn information about the murder and the investigation took a back seat to detectives’ interests in protecting the integrity of the investigation and building a strong case for the prosecution. Policy implications are discussed.

Islamic law changed radically in the last century and a half. It was codified and limited to the domain of personal and family law in almost all majority and minority Muslim states. The argument of this article is that this remarkable change in Islamic law began in the colonial state. Islamic law, as it functions within postcolonial Muslim states, is a product of negotiations between colonial and local elites over law, religion, culture, ethnicity, and the identity of the Muslim subject. In the case of colonial Malaya, this resulted in a codified, institutionalized legal system within a colonial state, which was critical in constructing Malay ethnic and religious identities and interpretations of Islam that prevail today.

We consider the contributions made by Robert H. Bork's Coercing Virtue (2003) and Anne-Marie Slaughter's A New World Order (2004) to the ongoing debate over the citation of foreign law in United States courts. While empirically minded sociolegal scholars might be tempted to dismiss these books as mere op-eds, that would be a mistake. Taken with the spate of other recent work, they supply the makings of an agenda for rigorous research devoted to understanding the exchange of law among nations.

In two recent books, Linda McClain, The Place of Families: Fostering Capacity, Equality, and Responsibility (2006), and James Q. Wilson, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families (2002), lay out the respective positions in the opposing family values that divide the United States. Wilson maintains that family well-being rests on the foundation of a strong cultural commitment to marriage, while McClain articulates liberal feminist values that require equality within and among families. This article maintains that delayed childbearing, not marriage or equality, holds the key to the new middle-class morality and discusses the prospects for family law pragmatism in an era of values polarization.

Laura Kalman's Yale Law School and the Sixties (2005) provides a particularly detailed and attractive portrait of the activist students at the school in these years. There is a real risk that nostalgia for the Sixties will cause law students today to be measured by this past time, even though today's students are significantly different in their response to the law school experience. Reasons for this difference can be found by looking at changes in the social meaning of undergraduate education and at the differences in economic circumstances between then and now—the warm and comforting economic circumstances of the Fifties and Sixties versus the unforgiving economic circumstances that students face today.