Most people in the United States believe that sexual harassment should be illegal and that enforcement is necessary. In spite of such widespread support for antiharassment regulations, sexual harassment policy training provokes backlash and has been shown to activate traditional gender stereotypes. Using in-depth interviews and participant observations of sexual harassment policy training sessions, this study uncovers the micro-level mechanisms that underlie ambivalence about the enforcement of sexual harassment law. I find that while the different locations of men and women in the status hierarchy lead to different manifestations of resistance, gender stereotypes are used to buttress perceptions that sexual harassment laws threaten norms of interaction and status positions that men and women have an interest in maintaining. The research has implications for understanding the role of law in social change, legal compliance, and the potential/limits of law for reducing inequality.

The following case study investigates the contract enforcement institutions that enable German customers to purchase software in Asia and Eastern Europe. The case study shows that nation-states are hardly able to generate a legal “shadow” for cross-border business relations. The same holds true for the so-called New Lex Mercatoria. Instead, economic actors create their own informal mechanisms. Relational contracts and reputational networks are nowadays far more effective due to developments in the field of information and communication technology. Overall, the importance of formal contract law in international trade is even smaller than is assumed by the classic theory of relational contracts.

Does law influence the legitimation of news? I examine legitimations offered during ethics debates about news stories in which private people are thrust into the media spotlight. When navigating the space between what can be published lawfully and what should be published, journalism organizations offer legitimations that vary in ways that reflect the hierarchy of legal frameworks for decision. According to field theory, the cultural capital of the juridical field is constitutive of status hierarchies in the journalism field, even though the First Amendment leaves journalism to structure itself. This structuring leads to two paradoxes. First, in the performance of negative legitimation, news organizations justify ethics violations by converting the minimum standard of lawful speech into claimsmaking about laudable speech. Second, in acts of displacing legitimation, reporters suggest that more publicity is the remedy for invading privacy, translating the valorization of speech rights over privacy rights into a puzzling norm.

Although Japanese defamation law has been a subject of legal interest for scholars and judges, their main focus was the defamation rules that appeared in cases publicized by legal reporters. The following study coded 232 defamation cases against the media that were decided in district courts in Japan, according to the type of database that reported the cases. Statistical results reveal that newspapers are more likely to report defamation cases than other databases because stories about defamation cases may satisfy readers' interest or because the newspaper might have been informed by plaintiffs who won their cases. The results also show that the professional status of the plaintiff is a predictor of the case outcome. Politicians and officials are less likely to win in defamation cases than are executives and criminals, and they received lower damages than athletes and entertainers.

Privacy codes aim at protecting individuals' interests in the treatment of data on themselves held by institutions. One can distinguish between procedural and strategic principles underlying these codes. The former aim at shaping treatment of personal information, once compiled within data systems; the latter aim at limiting and dispersing personal information from the start. A historical view of the workings of these two principles gives more reasons for optimism in the case of strategic measures. In contrast, procedural restrictions on access to personal information are evidently subject to erosion and reversal with changes in larger political climates.

This introduction to a symposium on Robert Gordon's classic article “Critical Legal Histories” (1984) suggests that the article should be read in the first instance as a response to the distinctive historical and jurisprudential currents of the 1980s, even as it also remains a work that continues to challenge legal historians working today, a generation later.

For more than twenty-five years, Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” has been savored by legal historians as one of the most incisive explanations available of what legal history can and should be. Gordon's essay, however, is of significance to the course of sociolegal studies in general. This commentary offers an appreciation, and a critique, of “Critical Legal Histories.” It explores Gordon's articulation of the central themes of critical legal studies, in particular his corrosion of functionalism and embrace of the indeterminacy thesis, and assesses the consequences for sociolegal and legal-historical analysis of the resultant stress on the contingency and complexity of social life.

This article traces the impact of Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” on scholars writing at the intersection of law and history. While Gordon's central claim about the constitutive character of the law has come to serve as a working assumption in the field, the case he made for the intellectual history of doctrine as articulated by legal mandarins has proven less influential in the twenty-five years since the article was published. Instead, legal historians have focused their attention on the interaction between official and lay forms of law-making with a decided emphasis on popular legal consciousness. For precisely this reason, the time may be ripe for reconsideration of mandarin materials, not only for what they have to tell us about the dynamics of cultural change, but also as sources of insight into basic puzzles of the human condition that have tended across time to be expressed in and through legal forms.

This commentary explores Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” from the perspective of the discipline of history. It argues that we are still stalled at the intellectual juncture that Gordon described so well twenty-five years ago because functionalism and the resulting problems that Gordon addresses in the area of sociolegal studies also pervade the discipline of history. The results reinforce the divide between sociolegal studies and other kinds of historical studies that tend to inhibit the conceptual transformation that Gordon advocates and to marginalize legal studies within the discipline of history.

The author responds to comments reappraising “Critical Legal Histories” (CLH) (1984). CLH critiqued “evolutionary functionalism,” the idea that law is a functional response to a typical modernizing process. CLH argued that “society” was partly constituted of legal elements and that law was too indeterminate to have reliably regular functional effects. CLH has been misinterpreted as calling for a return to internal histories of “mandarin” doctrine: all it said was that some doctrinal histories were valuable, without privileging them. This response clarifies that the relations of law to society and social change, and of high-level official law to everyday local law are distinct issues. CLH is mostly moot today, since social-legal historians have incorporated its insight that legal concepts are embedded in everyday social practice. But other fields have revived deterministic Whiggish accounts of progressive development and of law functional to it—to which CLH's critique still seems relevant.