This exploratory study is the first to examine how convicted felons view the jury process and their role in that process. Data derived from interviews with former and prospective felon-jurors in Maine, the only US jurisdiction that does not restrict a convicted felon's opportunity to serve as a juror, reveal that participants displayed an idealized view of jury service, stressing a commitment to serve conscientiously. Additionally, inclusion in the jury process affirmed their transitions from “offenders” to “nonoffenders.” In response, participants exhibited a sense of particularized self-worth, emphasizing that negative experiences with the criminal justice system make one a more effective juror. In sum, this study suggests that among convicted felons, inclusion in the jury process may prompt conformity with the “ideal juror” role, facilitate prosocial identity shifts by mitigating the “felon” label, and help former offenders to find personal value.

Unwelcome touching, groping, and kissing are illegal, but widely tolerated in public drinking settings. This contingency in the law's response means that patrons routinely negotiate the moral boundaries of nonconsensual sexual contact. We use 197 interviews with college-age individuals to examine the discursive strategies young people employ when negotiating those boundaries. We find that most interviewees have experiences with sexual aggression, do not categorize it as aggression, but advocate for stronger legal punishments against offenders. In accounting for this paradox, they draw on contradictory legal and cultural narratives that both normalize and condemn men's sexual aggression. We build on legal consciousness theories and gender theories by highlighting the complex ways that gender stereotypes enshrined in law are implicated in the construction of a social problem. We also contribute to the sociology of culture by explicating the often unconscious link between culture and action revealed in young people's narratives about sexual aggression.

This article seeks to understand how reported mediation rates in Chinese courts are produced and what they actually signify. It analyzes data obtained through prolonged fieldwork at a court in central China. The article finds that the court has directly responded to central level mediation incentives by enhancing its overall mediation rate. It has done so strategically by seeking the highest increase using the fullest discretion in the mediation incentive structure and seeking to optimize the highest rate at the lowest cost and risk to the court. This has undermined the objectives of the central level incentives toward mediation, while also drawing the courts' scarce resources away toward unnecessary mediation practices, in part far removed from the courtroom. The article concludes by drawing out broader theoretical conclusions about how information asymmetries, discretion, and goal displacement play out in hierarchical control structures of authoritarian courts.

Through the lens of lesbian and gay parenthood we ask how individuals who experience “legal status ambiguity”—that which emerges when legal fluctuations combine with divided attitudes, ignorance of the law, and autonomous institutional gatekeepers—exercise their legal rights and responsibilities. The results from thirty-one interviews with lesbian and gay parents in Oregon and their six adult children suggest that the state's fluctuating legal and social climates for lesbian and gay parenting between 1985 and 2013 presented significant challenges for two generations of same-sex parents. Although both cohorts created and utilized a range of legal and social mechanisms to assert their legal rights, they found these rights to be controlled as much by gatekeeper perspectives as by legal force. After the 2015 Obergefell ruling on marriage equality, lesbian and gay parenting status remains a site of ongoing legal and social contestation, providing insight into the risks and challenges of legal status ambiguity.

Domestic human rights trials are often conceptualized within the context of transition toward democracy. Yet, a recent cascade of trials in Turkey defies this argument. Between 2008 and 2015, Turkish courts oversaw fifteen trials examining individual criminal accountability for human rights violations carried out by the Turkish military during the conflict with the PKK in the 1990s. The cascade of trials has emerged and remained ongoing while the Turkish regime has become steadily more authoritarian. This article explains the emergence of these trials by the redistribution of power among elite actors, which created a window of opportunity allowing for ongoing legal mobilization to result in prosecutions. Drawing on original data from interviews conducted in Turkey between 2014–2015, this study demonstrates the importance of power redistribution for human rights during periods of democratic stagnation, while emphasizing the ability of trials to contribute to the contestation of hegemonic narratives.

This article explores how international ideals and practices of law enforcement come into conflict with national bureaucracies. Drawing on original interviews, the investigation demonstrates how the competition to define the role of international prosecution impacted career strategies as well as the actual administration of criminal law within the Danish Prosecution Service (DPS). The analysis shows that this competition is embodied in two competing groups of prosecutors situated in a wider national bureaucracy—itself subject to transformations that affect the very stakes of the contest to define the international. While the institutionalists build careers closely attuned to the systemic and increasingly lean-management-inspired requirements of the DPS, the dissident and consequently unsettled position of the activists leads them to craft alternative career strategies closely related to the emergence of new international fields of criminal law.

This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deployed a series of evolving discursive strategies aimed at establishing themselves as professionals long before more formal, field-wide efforts to professionalize criminal justice. These strategies allowed Eastern's administrators to establish their professional status without traditional status markers of national networks, college degrees, or special training, which emerged later. Beyond illustrating a new pathway to professionalization, examining criminal justice professionalization at this early stage illuminates the early prison's precarious position and the internecine warfare among actors competing to control its meaning.

Legitimacy is said to be comprised of two underlying constructs: obligation to obey and moral alignment. However, legitimacy studies are mainly derived from contexts where the legal system has evolved naturally and is said to reflect the values of society. There is a paucity of research measuring public perceptions of legitimacy in postcolonial settings such as Hong Kong where the legal system was initially transplanted and many of its values may not reflect those of the local population. Procedural justice has been asserted to be a primary antecedent by which legal authorities improve their legitimacy and moral alignment. This study examines whether procedural justice is positively associated with legitimacy and moral alignment with the courts. Moreover, this study tests whether legitimacy is positively associated with cooperation with the courts. Using a random survey of the Hong Kong general population, both questions are answered in the affirmative. Implications are discussed.

The notion that families should care for their own seems straightforward in its meaning. I suggest that it may not be. Building on the argument advanced in Sandra Levitsky's Caring for Our Own, and especially its focus on the discursive shaping of rights consciousness, I draw attention to three discourses that may be responsible for how the caregivers quoted in the book understand family responsibility. One is an American discourse about the limits of government; one is a therapeutic discourse that is enacted in the support groups from which the book's respondents mainly come; and one is a nativist discourse that pits the American-born against newcomers. I argue that these discourses inflect the meaning of family responsibility in distinctive ways.

In light of the contemporary long-term care crisis, Sandra Levitsky's book Caring for Our Own examines why there has been no movement to secure state support for caregivers. Speaking to sociolegal and social movement audiences, Levitsky reveals how lack of collective identity, the power of family-based ideologies, and the separation of support organizations from political ones help to repress mobilization. In this essay I refract Levitsky's findings through the lens of organizational theory and medical sociology. I argue that the social problem of long-term care is caught in an institutional gap since it does not readily fall under the purview of either medicine or family. I also discuss the implications of lay caregivers' provision of sophisticated medical care for theories of professional jurisdictions and gatekeeping.

In Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (2014), Sandra Levitsky reveals how an enduring ideology of family responsibility and a decoupling of social support groups from organized advocacy constrains mass legal mobilization to address long-term elderly care in the United States. This essay argues that American families have entered an unsettled period linked to social inequality, young adult living arrangements, immigration, and institutional shifts related to LGBTQ families, workplace-family conflict, and the criminalization of elder abuse. These changes to the family may create the conditions for questioning the ideology of family responsibility and new possibilities for collective action with potentially contradictory meanings and lines of action, including politicization and legal mobilization.

This article draws on the insights offered by Francesca Polletta, Calvin Morrill, and Elizabeth Chiarello in their comments on my book, Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (2014) to further specify the conditions that unleash the emancipatory potential of law. I argue that much of law's emancipatory power lies in its capacity to “construct anew”—to demonstrate new solutions to social problems by connecting the familiar with the strange. Drawing on the case of child care, I find that laws do not automatically provide the cultural resources to construct new claims for state intervention, but that existing laws—and the symbols, narratives, and norms that we associate with them—serve as grist for the political imagination and can be transposed to new contexts or institutions. In the absence of cultural resources in one institution (such as work), advocates can use legal discourse to strategically shift responsibility for a social problem to a new institution (such as education), opening up possibilities for new models, organizational actors, constituencies, and frames.

This essay on Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention, Mary Bilder's revisionist account (2016) of James Madison's Notes on the Constitutional Convention argues that her central thesis, which is that Madison substantially revised the Notes long after the Convention adjourned, is groundbreaking but will have no effect on constitutional law. Madison's Hand is groundbreaking because the book yields many powerful insights into the deliberations of the Convention and into the evolution of Madison's thought. Nevertheless, constitutional practice in the Supreme Court and among elite lawyers is so divorced from the Notes that even a dramatic shift in their interpretation will not disturb the evolution of judicial doctrine applying the text written in 1787.