Using Alien Tort Claims Act suits against multinational corporations as an immediate context for discussion, this article explores the emerging field of corporate social responsibility. The article argues for an understanding of concrete legal struggles as part of broader competing strategies for regulating corporate obligations to a multitude of stakeholders. By identifying and analyzing the positions of concrete actors who operate in the field, the main thesis of this article is that the field strongly tilts in the direction of voluntary and self-reliant models of corporate responsibility. The article identifies this process as consistent with the privatization of regulative structures in general and with extant modeling of corporate governance in particular, and points at the correlation between these trends and the interests of multinational corporations.

In their interactions with citizens, police officers are prohibited from (1) using unnecessary Force, (2) Abusing their authority, (3) speaking Discourteously, or (4) using Offensive language, all captured by the acronym FADO. However, acts of police misconduct are complex social phenomena that involve both following legal guidelines and responding to extralegal or mitigating circumstances. Using a factorial survey of police-civilian interactions that introduce various dimensions of FADO and surrounding circumstances, respondents are asked to rate from zero to ten the seriousness of police misconduct in an encounter. Findings show that respondents' judgments of the seriousness of misconduct consider both legal and extralegal dimensions. On the legal side of the ledger, officers' unnecessary use of force and use of offensive language significantly increase judgments of serious misconduct; on the extralegal side of the ledger, civilians' confrontational demeanor significantly reduces judgments of serious misconduct. The findings suggest that citizens expect officers to behave professionally, or by the book, but with a recognition that “street-level” discretion has a place in an officer's toolkit. Citizens' expectations that street-level discretion has its place is also demonstrated by findings for the dimension abuse of authority: Abuse or threatening behavior by officers is not a significant predictor of serious police misconduct. In addition, characteristics of the respondents explain propensities to observe different degrees of police misconduct. Controlling for the social status, political orientation, and prior experience of respondents with the police, we find that (1) blacks rate police misconduct significantly higher than their white counterparts, and (2) liberals rate police misconduct significantly higher than their conservative counterparts. Differences in judgments by blacks and whites and by liberals and conservatives concerning judgments of police misconduct have important implications for the legitimacy of police authority.

This article examines the determinants of judicial behavior in the context of transition. It tests two assumptions: first, that the judges with experience from the pretransition criminal justice system behave differently from the judges with no such experience; second, that minorities are discriminated against due to their dominant position in society before the transition and stereotypical attitudes after the transition. Using evidence from trial-level courts in Estonia, we find no statistically significant effects between case outcomes, the experience of the judge, and the ethnicity of the suspect.

How do differences in the implementation of regulation impact market behavior? I propose a theoretical framework to understand this impact as part of the process of embedding market participants through the institutionalization of legal consciousness within a field of action. I use this framework to understand the impact of the difference in the implementation of securities regulation in Ghana and Fiji. In Fiji, where the regulatory agency is more present and process-oriented, brokers operate with a greater orientation toward formal rules. In Ghana, where the regulatory agency is distant and auditing, brokers rely on explicit enforcement of floor-based norms. Conceiving of legal consciousness as an emergent feature of a field of social action advances the understanding of how legality is institutionalized, since the emergent structure shapes the orientations, behavior, and relations of actors within the field.

With dramatic changes in family life over the last several decades, child custody law has shifted from a maternal preference to a more egalitarian standard, the best interests of the child. Despite this change in the law, scholars have debated whether gender continues to play a role in the resolution of custody disputes. Drawing on feminist legal scholarship and sociolegal research on judges, I assess the current debates over gender and custody by examining the accounts of judges who frequently adjudicate custody cases. I conduct in-depth, face-to-face interviews with twenty-five trial court judges in Indiana and investigate judges' accounts about whether they continue to use the tender years doctrine in custody disputes, even though the custody statute is explicitly gender-neutral. Then, I assess several competing explanations of the variation across judges' accounts, including the judges' gender role attitudes, gender, age, and political party affiliation. In exploratory analyses, I also examine the contested custody rulings of a subset of nine judges to assess whether judges' accounts are congruent with their actual custody decisions. I discuss the implications of these findings in light of feminist legal scholarship as well as empirical research on child custody adjudication.

Amicus curiae participation is a staple of interest group activity in the U.S. Supreme Court. While a reasonably large body of scholarship has accumulated regarding the effectiveness of this method of participation, little attention has been paid to examining the reasons why amicus participation might increase litigation success. In this article, I test two separate, but not mutually exclusive, theories as to why amicus briefs may be effective. The first, the affected groups hypothesis, suggests amicus briefs are influential because they signal to the Court how many groups and individuals will be potentially affected by the decision. The second, the information hypothesis, proposes that amicus briefs are effective because they provide the Court with added information that buttresses the arguments of the direct parties. When subjected to empirical verification, the results indicate that not only does amicus participation increase litigation success, but also that this influence may be best explained by the information hypothesis.