This article draws on law and society theories on the circulation of legal ideas to explain the instrumentalization of transitional justice in Colombia. Most scholarship explains transitional justice as a theoretical framework or as a set of instruments that helps redress mass violence. In contrast, this study reveals that the idea serves as a placeholder for different political actors to promote their respective interests. Drawing on over fifty interviews, the study suggests that the power of transitional justice lies in its malleability, which is both its strength and its weakness, as those with different political agendas can appropriate the idea in contradictory ways. The findings emphasize that understanding transitional justice requires a turn from abstract analyses that either take the idea for granted or try to define its meaning toward examining how people on the ground understand the idea, and how they translate those understandings into political action.

In this article we rethink the connection between prosecutorial experience and conviction psychology that undergirds much of the academic literature about wrongful convictions. The conviction psychology account of prosecutorial behavior asserts that prosecutorial susceptibility to cognitive biases deepens over time, thereby increasing the risk that prosecutors will become involved in wrongful convictions the longer they stay in the profession. Our interviews with more than 200 state prosecutors call into question the basis for this asserted correlation between prosecutorial experience and risk of misconduct. The prosecutors we met consistently reported that, all else equal, prosecutors tend to become more balanced, rather than more adversarial, over time. Hence, the prosecutors who present the greatest risk of producing a wrongful conviction are those who are either inexperienced or resistant to the normal maturation process. For this reason, we suggest that wrongful conviction researchers and database designers pay closer attention to the variables associated with prosecutorial experience and resistance that might affect the development of prosecutorial maturity and the consequent risk of wrongful convictions.

Based on Chinese constitutional analysis, political science, and law and society studies, we argue that work extending the application of popular constitutionalism to authoritarian states applies in Vietnam, as popular constitutionalism targets sites relevant to constitutional reform. We contend that popular constitutionalism located in authoritarian states requires three factors: a tradition of activism, space for reformist and pragmatic dialogue targeting constitutional change, and the political need for legitimacy. This article analyses activism in Vietnam, focusing on the lodging of Petition 72 with the Constitutional Amendment Drafting Commission in 2013, and the resulting responses. We conclude that this activism was pivotal in advocating for new constitutional norms, evidencing popular constitutionalism in Vietnam. The long history of Vietnamese scholar activism, the relative space for governance debates, and the political need for legitimacy made this possible. We also note that popular constitutionalism faces constraints in authoritarian states, which may shape its trajectory.

This article explains the development of international crime as a legal category. I argue that states' pursuit of political rights claims empowers international lawyers to develop new legal categories to grant states new tools to pursue their interests. At the same time, lawyers have a stake in defending the autonomy of law from politics, thus pushing for the development of legal norms and institutions that go beyond the original state intent. States' turn to law thus begets more law, expanding the legal and institutional tools to solve international problems while simultaneously enforcing a commitment to principles of legality. To demonstrate the plausibility of the theory, the article studies the construction of the concept of an international crime in the interwar period (1919–1939). In response to the Allies' attempt to prosecute the German Emperor, international lawyers sought the codification of international criminal law and drafted enforcement mechanisms. The interwar legal debate not only introduced international crime into the legal and political vocabulary, it also legitimized a new set of institutional responses to violations of international law, namely, international criminal prosecution.

Since 2013, a three-year entry bar (zapret na v'ezd) has been issued in Russia to migrants with a record of two or more administrative offenses. This article examines the sociolegal characteristics of zapret na v'ezd by situating it in a global, comparative perspective, vis-à-vis the legal developments in the areas of deportation and removal in the United States and the United Kingdom. This article argues that the Russian entry bar law experienced a shift, established by other migration-receiving jurisdictions, from controlling the migration process to controlling the social conduct of migrants, toward an increased reliance on deportability as a form of post-entry control of the migrant population. At a broader level, I aim to shed more light on the migration governance processes in Russia—the third largest destination of migrants worldwide—by moving away from the intellectually dead-end explanations that consider Russia as a deviant exception.

Incorporating behavioral insights into regulation is plausibly the most significant development in regulatory theory and practice in recent years. Behaviorally informed regulation encourages self-benefiting and socially desirable behaviors with little intrusion on autonomy. Drawing on new empirical findings, this article puts forward the hitherto overlooked possibility of employing the deadline effect as a regulatory tool. Deadlines serve as an antidote to procrastination and forgetfulness. Many empirical and experimental studies have examined the use of deadlines in marketing. This study explores the possible use of deadlines by legal policy makers. It describes two survey experiments, a randomized field experiment and a natural experiment, which suggest that deadlines may encourage self-benefiting and socially desirable behaviors, and that relaxing deadlines may discourage less desirable behavior. The article discusses the practical and normative aspects of using deadlines as a regulatory means, compared to alternative tools, such as default rules and required choices.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the interdisciplinary cooperation and interaction between American legal realists and anthropologists during the interwar period. Using scholarly publications and manuscripts as its sources, it argues that despite the lack of recognition in earlier studies, there were transfers of important methodological and substantive influences that were crucial to the creation of legal anthropology as it is known today, as well as the whole field of law and society studies. Writers of the era like Karl N. Llewellyn, E. Adamson Hoebel, Felix S. Cohen, Franz Boas, and Bronislaw Malinowski utilized interdisciplinary influences to criticize scholarly formalism as well as social and political conservatism, seeking to replace conceptual structures with scientific facts gained from studies.

This study argues that rights discourse influences heterosexual public opinion in Washington State. We tested this through a survey experiment conducted in the 2011 Washington Poll. We broke interviewees into three groups, with each group exposed to a different frame: a pro–lesbian and gay equal rights frame, an anti–lesbian and gay special rights frame, and a control or no frame. Immediately following the treatment, we asked interviewees if they agreed with a pro–lesbian and gay policy: changing state antidiscrimination law to encompass those who identify as lesbian and gay. Overall, this study concludes that a special rights frame dampens support among some while an equal rights frame has no effect. Respondents who indicated that they were against same-sex marriage even more strongly opposed altering antidiscrimination policy to include sexual orientation when confronted with an equal rights frame than when confronted with the special rights frame or no frame at all.

In the terms of Erving Goffman's classic role-distancing analysis, newly admitted law students often aspire to an “embraced” lawyer role that directly expresses their personal and political values. Empirical research has suggested that during law school these students are instructed in an amoral and apolitical vision of professionalism. The literature has paid less attention to how students internally experience these norms within their continual processes of self-construction. This article takes an exploratory micro-dynamic look at professional identity formation drawing on longitudinal interviews and identity mapping with three student cohorts. Over the course of their legal education, students bound for large corporate law firms tended to report increasing professional role distancing. In contrast, students who pursued jobs in the public-interest sector tended to sustain a more proximate conception of professional identity, overlapping with racial, gender, political, and other centrally constitutive roles. The article concludes with normative and theoretical implications.

This essay draws on four recent studies of elections to state supreme courts in the United States to probe widely perceived changes in the scale and content of electoral campaigns for seats on state supreme courts.1 Evidence from these studies and other sources indicates that changes have indeed occurred, though they are more limited than most commentaries suggest. These changes stem most directly from trends in state supreme court policy that have attracted interest-group activity, especially from the business community. Like their extent, the effects of change in supreme court campaigns have been meaningful although exaggerated by many observers. What we have learned about changes in supreme court elections has implications for choices among selection systems, but those implications are mixed and complex.

In Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, Gary Gerstle offers an ambitious account of American legal development from our nation's founding up to the present day. In many ways, Gerstle's account is in keeping with the long scholarly tradition of linking legal liberalism with changes in American law and politics. However, Liberty and Coercion also calls to mind critical legal scholarship, most notably Duncan Kennedy's “The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries” and the idea of the fundamental contradiction. After reconstructing Kennedy's central claims, I highlight how they actually undermine Liberty and Coercion and jeopardize the larger legal liberal tradition.