Through an examination of legislative debate and court opinions, this article illustrates that the French understanding of public order policing as a bulwark of freedom and national sovereignty deeply informed the development of (and contestation surrounding) the 2010 ban on all facial coverings in public. This ban notably includes the burqa or niqab, garments worn by a small minority of Muslim women in France. This article has two aims. The first is to expand on the sociolegal argument about the contested nature of rights protections and constitutional constraints on legislative authority by highlighting how a nation's legal culture can profoundly shape that contestation. The second aim of this article is to show, through a technique called legal archaeology, how longstanding French views on rights confront current European‐inspired alternative views that would give more weight to individualistic protections against state action than has traditionally been the case in France.

The aims of retributive or nonutilitarian sentencing are said to conflict with parole as part of a determinate sentencing framework. In this article, we claim that a nonutilitarian approach to punishment does not necessarily conflict with parole. In particular, by adopting core elements of Duff's framework of communicative sentencing, we argue that parole inherently holds a communicative meaning in the form of retributive whisper and can thus be reconciled with a nonutilitarian approach to punishment. In addition, we explore a way to enhance the communicative potential in the parole process and suggest that by recognizing and further incorporating the inherent communicative message in parole we can increase or maximize the board's communicative potential. Finally, we discuss some benefits that can emerge from adapting a communicative sentencing framework to the parole process.

The implementation of criminal law involves formal law enforcement, education, and public outreach aimed at preventing criminal activity and providing services for victims. Historically, quantitative research on global trends has focused on a single policy dimension, potentially masking the unique factors that affect the diffusion of each policy dimension independently. Using an ordered‐probit model to analyze new human trafficking policy data on national prosecution, prevention, and victim‐protection efforts, we find that global ties and domestic interest groups matter more where international law is less defined. Although prosecution, mandated by the Trafficking Protocol, was relatively impervious to global ties and domestic interest groups, both trafficking prevention and victim protection were associated with these factors. Our findings also suggest that fear of repercussions is not a major driver of state actions to combat trafficking—neither ratification of the protocol nor levels of US aid were associated with greater implementation of antitrafficking measures.

Debates over whether transnational and international legal institutions are fair, effective, or legitimate responses to corruption of local public officials have an important empirical dimension. We use case studies to examine whether foreign legal institutions serve as fair, effective, and legitimate complements to local anticorruption institutions. We refer to this set of claims as the “institutional complementarity theory.” The first case study centers on proceedings concerning bribes paid by subsidiaries of Siemens AG, a German company, to obtain and retain a contract to provide national identity cards for the Argentine government. The second case study examines events stemming from overbilling in the construction of a courthouse in Brazil. Analysis of these cases suggests that the institutional complementary theory is credible. At the same time, the findings suggest that local institutions have greater potential, and foreign institutions have more limited potential, than the theory assumes.

Scholars are increasingly interested in exploring ways to strengthen the rule of law in authoritarian states—especially when deeper political reforms are not attainable. The article contributes to this discussion by revisiting the story of the emergence of the so‐called socialist legality in the communist states of Eastern Europe. Using the historical record from Poland, the author demonstrates a previously unnoticed, yet pivotal, role of legal professionals in facilitating socialist legality's rise to prominence. Using the lenses of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, the article chronicles the evolving dynamic between the legal profession, the authoritarian regime, and society. These observations challenge conventional explanations of the emergence of the rule of law in nondemocratic conditions.

Rapid changes in family life over the last forty years have led to substantial alterations in family law policy; specifically, most states now endorse joint custody arrangements for divorcing families. However, we know little about how lower court judges have embraced or resisted this change. We conducted in‐depth interviews with judges in twenty‐five Indiana jurisdictions in 1998 and 2011. Our findings suggest that judges' views of joint custody dramatically changed. Judges in Wave II indicated a strong preference for joint custody—a theme that was relatively absent in Wave I. The observed change in judicial preferences did not seem to be related to judicial replacement, gender, age, or political party affiliation. Although our conclusions are exploratory, we speculate that shifts in judicial views may be related to changing public mores of parenthood and, relatedly, Indiana's adoption of Parenting Time Guidelines in 2001.

In 2001, Portugal decriminalized the acquisition, possession, and use of small quantities of all psychoactive drugs. The significance of this legislation has been misunderstood. Decriminalization did not trigger dramatic changes in drug‐related behavior because, as an analysis of Portugal's predecriminalization laws and practices reveals, the reforms were more modest than suggested by the media attention they received. Portugal illustrates the shortcomings of before‐and‐after analysis because, as is often the case, the de jure legal change largely codified de facto practices. In the years before the law's passage, less than 1 percent of those incarcerated for a drug offense had been convicted of use. Surprisingly, the change in law regarding use appears associated with a marked reduction in drug trafficker sanctioning. While the number of arrests for trafficking changed little, the number of individuals convicted and imprisoned for trafficking since 2001 has fallen nearly 50 percent.

Ari Byren's Violence in Roman Egypt: A Study in Legal Interpretation (2013) effectively inserts itself into two complementary fields of inquiry and discussion within the field of classical studies. First, it offers a detailed treatment of the social history of small communities in Roman Egypt, providing an important contribution to the study of violence in antiquity—a topic that has gained interest in recent years. Second, it is an extended meditation on the place of violence within a society and law's role in defining and eliminating it.

This essay reflects on how Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013), a study of second‐century Roman Egypt, contributes to the study of law and on how legal culture in ancient Egypt relates to law and legal cultures in other times and places. From the perspective of social history, this essay focuses on the connections between the victims of violence who seek redress in local courts in Egypt and more contemporary work on the legacy of slavery in colonial Ghana and the United States. This comparison reveals how law becomes a vehicle for the marginalized to repair and reconstruct their personhood.

This essay examines the linguistic anthropological themes emergent in Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). Viewing law as a discourse, it explores how language is constitutive of law and is the primary modality of acting upon, and enacting the world(s) that it shapes, giving meaning to the lives of people who engage each other in and through it. Violence petitions in second‐century Egypt are a fundamental mode of sense making and problem solving, calling on legal authorities to interpret claims of iniuria, or legal battery, into a language that they understand and remedy. In doing so, law changes the discourse of violence, specifically, and social life, more broadly.

This comment considers Ari Bryen's Violence in Roman Egypt (2013) from sociological and sociolegal perspectives. Although Bryen is a historian, and his site of inquiry is second‐century Roman Egypt, he turns to contemporary sociologists and law and society scholars to highlight the interplay between law and the social world in the construction of violence. In doing so, he finds a new way to analyze the role of law as a cultural resource for nonelites to make sense of their social world but also to change it (albeit with limits) through law.

In this brief comment, I respond to symposium reviewers of my book Violence in Roman Egypt (2013). I consider the insights each provides from their respective discipline, and identify connections across those disciplines as well. More broadly, I comment on the theoretical purchase and unique challenges of law and society scholarship.

This essay reviews Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume I: Structures of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume II: Rights and Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). It defends developmental approaches in the study of US constitutional law. It explains how law has been studied in political science, illustrating how political development became part of the story. It outlines how American political development approaches work when applied to law, noting how studying law transforms these approaches. It notes the insights produced through the blending of American political development and constitutional law, explaining how these insights provide more leverage for understanding the role of courts as democratic institutions. The essay closes by discussing the promising directions these approaches suggest, defending their value beyond political science.