For a long time the Netherlands has been internationally known for its tolerant and humane environment for first‐ and second‐generation migrants. However, as in many European countries, over the past few decades the political debate on immigration has gradually grown more negative. Links between crime, security, migration, and integration have become more established, resulting in a series of policy and legislative reforms targeting migrants in the country. These developments seem to fit into the broader trend for which scholars have coined the term crimmigration, the intersection of crime control and immigration control. In this article, using crimmigration as a sensitizing concept, we seek to gain insight into the governance of migration and crime in Netherlands.

In the summer of 2006, Hazleton, Pennsylvania passed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act (IIRA). In this article, the politics that emerged in that law's wake are used as a case study to identify the rhetorical tools that justify and help achieve White dominance in local struggles over immigration in the United States. In tracing three successive waves of post‐IIRA activism, what legal scholar Thomas Ross has termed White innocence/Black abstraction—a racial narrative that absolves Whites of wrongdoing and obfuscates minority suffering—is shown to be a central theme in the discourse of Hazleton's White majority. This colorblind rhetoric is used to make exclusionary legislation appear justifiable and to curtail the efforts of immigrant rights activists. By bringing Ross's insights into a new substantive context (i.e., immigration) and outside the confines of formal law (i.e., legal mobilizations rather than judicial opinions), this article demonstrates the centrality of innocence/abstraction in on‐the‐ground efforts to defend existing social arrangements.

National immigration policy meets the realities of unauthorized immigration at the local level, often in ways undesired by residents, as exemplified by the dramatic rise of local anti‐immigrant legislation in US states and municipalities. Scholars have studied why some states and municipalities, but not others, engage in immigration policy making. Such research is not designed, however, to evaluate how the basic structure of US government facilitates and shapes local protest. To probe that issue, we compare Chiapas, Mexico and Arizona, USA, both peripheral areas significantly affected by unauthorized immigration and national policies designed to control it. We find that the open texture of US federalism facilitates local activism, while Mexico's more centralized government does not. Activists within both states are similar, however, in deploying law creatively to critique national policy, a reminder of the growing worldwide significance of legal pluralism and legal consciousness in the politics of protest.

In the construction of immigration status categories in law and social practice, the power of the nation‐state to define migrants’ status is pervasive but far from absolute. In this article, I examine the conditioned legality known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in US immigration law through a discussion of legal structures, historical frames, local discourses, and Salvadoran migrants’ lived experiences with liminal legality in rural Arkansas in the first decade of the twenty‐first century. I argue that migration policy, though fraught with ambiguity and contradiction (see Coutin 2007; Coutin and Yngvesson 2008), functions both to reproduce and to mask the benefits to the nation‐state from the ambiguous inclusion and simultaneous exclusion of migrant workers. In spite of the efficacious ways immigration policies discipline and constrain, within these limits migrants, legal practitioners, and others respond as critical agents to the policy structures shaping their lives.

To apply for U Visa status, a temporary legal standing available to undocumented crime victims who assist law enforcement in investigations, immigrants must obtain validation of their experiences from police via a signed “certification” paper. This article investigates the challenges lawyers and immigrant crime victims face in translating and documenting victims' experiences into legal form. By analyzing interactions between Los Angeles attorneys and female undocumented immigrants, I explore how immigrant victims of violence prepare to approach police certifiers. Attorneys arbitrate between accounts of violence and immigrant‐police encounters and the legal cases they can develop, offering retrospective and prospective advice to immigrants about how to make effective pleas to police. Drawing attention to the devolutionary dynamics of an inclusive immigration policy, I show how nonfederal bureaucrats shape immigrants' eligibility for legalization remedies. In turn, I expose detrimental consequences of mixing street‐level administrative discretion with federal visa eligibility determinations.

The history of US immigration policy and practice reflects a series of attempts to address complex political demands and organizational tensions. Yet this complexity has rendered comprehensive immigration reform elusive in recent decades. When legislative action appears impossible, what other avenues are available to confront these challenges? During the first term of the Obama administration, prosecutorial discretion emerged as a key mechanism. This article draws on archival data and interviews with immigration attorneys, advocates, analysts, and policy makers to understand better how prosecutorial discretion is used in immigration policy and practice today, why it came to have such a central role, recent challenges to its use, and what these tensions suggests for sociolegal scholarship on immigration.

For as long as there have been motion pictures, scenes of execution have appeared in American film. This article examines those scenes over the course of the twentieth century and suggests that spectatorship, and what it means to watch, is central to scenes of execution in film. We are interested less in the intentions and politics of a filmmaker and more in what those scenes offer viewers. We argue that three central motifs of spectatorship characterized death penalty films during the more than 100‐year period that we studied. First, viewers are often positioned as members of an audience and many scenes of execution are presented in a highly theatrical fashion and, as a result, the line between spectatorship and witnessing is blurred. Second, in many scenes of execution viewers are brought “backstage” and provided chilling, intimate views of the machinery of death, privileged views unavailable outside of film. The third motif shifts the positioning of the viewer such that we stand in the shoes of those who are to be executed. We conclude by asking whether and how scenes of execution in American film provoke in viewers an awareness of the political responsibility inherent in their identities as democratic citizens in a killing state.

Previous sociolegal research has neglected how the work of corporate security agents is enabled and constrained by legal knowledges. This article explores how legal knowledges shape the work of municipal corporate security (MCS) agents in Canadian cities. MCS offices are a new development in municipal governments. By drawing on analysis of freedom of information requests and interviews with MCS managers and staff, we investigate how legal knowledges shape MCS practices in Canadian cities, with a focus on trespass law, licensing law, litigation, labor law, privacy law, and workplace violence legislation that converge in MCS offices. MCS agents must interpret, translate, and apply these laws in their municipal jurisdiction or urban problem space to confront the defining element of the urban milieu—nuisance—but also to mitigate the risks. Interpretation and use of numerous laws by MCS staff constitute a distinctively urban way of governing through legal knowledge.

There has been a fair amount of recent scholarly attention to the role and influence of law clerks at the Supreme Court of the United States. This new wave of systematic research began when Todd C. Peppers (2006) published Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Law Clerk at almost exactly the same time as Artemus Ward and David L. Weiden's (2006) Sorcerers' Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the United States Supreme Court. Then Peppers and Ward (2012) teamed up to produce an edited volume, In Chambers: Stories of Supreme Court Law Clerks and Their Justices, in which each chapter focuses on the relationship of a specific justice and his or her clerks. Together these three works raise interesting questions about how one properly studies the role and power of law clerks at the US Supreme Court. How does one measure the influence of these temporary assistants to the justices? Should sociolegal scholars trust them to help us understand the approaches and behavior of the justices today or in the past or do they have an unrealistic and inflated view of their own contributions? This essay offers a broad overview of what scholars and journalists currently know about the role of clerks at the Supreme Court.

New work on colonial legal regimes suggests new pathways for scholarship on legal regimes, legal consciousness, judicial personnel, and the Atlantic world. Malick Ghachem's recent book, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (2012), introduces scholars to one legal regime—that of the French plantation colony of Saint‐Domingue—to show how enslaved and free people continually negotiated the terms of master sovereignty and manumission. This debate lasted from Saint‐Domingue's establishment as a slave society in the seventeenth century to its revolution in the 1790s, which overthrew the slave regime and culminated in independence in 1804 as the republic of Haiti.