The global sex panic around sex work and trafficking has fostered prostitution law reform worldwide. While the normative status of sex work remains deeply contested, abolitionists and sex work advocates alike display an unwavering faith in the power of criminal law; for abolitionists, strictly enforced criminal laws can eliminate sex markets, whereas for sex work advocates, decriminalization can empower sex workers. I problematize both narratives by delineating the political economy and legal ethnography of Sonagachi, one of India's largest red-light areas. I show how within Sonagachi there exist highly internally differentiated groups of stakeholders, including sex workers, who, variously endowed by a plural rule network—consisting of formal legal rules, informal social norms, and market structures—routinely enter into bargains in the shadow of the criminal law whose outcomes cannot be determined a priori. I highlight the complex relationship between criminal law and sex markets by analyzing the distributional effects of criminalizing customers on Sonagachi's sex industry.

Group-specific family laws are said to provide women fewer rights and impede policy change. India's family law systems specific to religious groups underwent important gender-equalizing changes over the last generation. The changes in the laws of the religious minorities were unexpected, as conservative elites had considerable indirect influence over these laws. Policy elites changed minority law only if they found credible justification for change in group laws, group norms, and group initiatives, not only in constitutional rights and transnational human rights law. Muslim alimony and divorce laws were changed on this basis, giving women more rights without abandoning cultural accommodation. Legal mobilization and the outlook of policy makers—specifically their approach to regulating family life, their understanding of group norms, and their normative vision of family life—shaped the major changes in Indian Muslim law. More gender-equalizing legal changes are possible based on the same sources.

As the pace of legal harmonization in developing East Asian states increases to comply with international trading treaties, a disjunction is forming between legislative expectations and everyday business practices. Evidence considered in this article suggests that Vietnam is no exception. State control over public discourse favors the interests of business elites, while small-scale entrepreneurs struggle to make their views known. Lawmakers exposed to this asymmetric discourse rarely adjust global legal rules to suit the transactional requirements of small-scale entrepreneurs. As a consequence, the largely imported commercial legislative framework is increasingly reflecting the interests of business elites. The article concludes that for the state to develop a more inclusive regulatory regime, it needs to relax its control over public deliberation and give small-scale entrepreneurs more opportunities to convey local precepts and practices to lawmakers.

This article examines the instrumental and constitutive effects of California Assembly Bill 540. The law grants undocumented immigrant students an exemption from out-of-state tuition, thereby making some forms of higher education more accessible. Despite the narrow actionable aspects of the law, it unintentionally legitimizes this disenfranchised group. This longitudinal study of undocumented immigrant youth consists of in-depth interviews before, shortly after, and four years after the passage of the law. The findings demonstrate that AB 540 immediately relieved stigma and later provided a socially acceptable identity that, within a legal consciousness informed by meritocracy, empowered these students to mobilize the law in a number of unforeseen ways. The case strongly suggests that it is possible for unintended constitutive functions to have more transformative effects on the daily lives of targeted beneficiaries than the intended instrumental objectives of law.

This essay reviews the arguments and impacts of the classic work, The Process Is the Punishment by Malcolm Feeley, originally published in 1979 and republished with a new foreword and preface in 1992. This essay examines how the book has been used in sociolegal research since 1979 by empirically tracing its citation in published work. I also examine missed opportunities where The Process Is the Punishment could still expand its impact in the literature, as well as reviewing the major arguments and criticisms of the book.

This essay reviews the recent volume edited by Ronald Kahn and Ken I. Kersch, The Supreme Court and American Political Development (2006), as well as the broader literature by law scholars interested in American Political Development (APD). The Law and APD literature has advanced our knowledge about courts by placing attention on the importance of executive and legislative actors, and by providing political context to our understanding of judicial decision making. But this knowledge would be more powerful if it would embrace the broader APD field's orientation toward the importance of state and institutional autonomy for understanding politics and political change. Law and APD scholars could go further in examining the ways in which courts and judges act institutionally, and how the legal branch as an institution impacts American politics and state-building. In doing so, Law and APD scholars would contribute not only to our understanding of judicial decision making but also to our understanding of the place and importance of courts in American politics.

This essay provides an overview of actor-network theory (ANT) and its potential interest for sociolegal scholars. It focuses on Bruno Latour's 2002 ethnography of La fabrique du droit: une ethnographie du Conseil d’État [The factory of law: an ethnography of the Conseil d’État] (2002b), which provides an analysis of the workings of the French Conseil d’État. The essay seeks to introduce non-French-reading sociolegal researchers to this work and draws out methodological and theoretical implications for research on legal institutions, legal knowledge, and bureaucracies.

In How the Indians Lost Their Land, Law and Power on the Frontier (2005), Stuart Banner weaves together a perceptive interpretation of the historical record, with a novel economic analysis of conflicts, to create a sophisticated narrative of the process by which European colonists took control of the lands that now comprise the United States. Banner's view of expropriation falls somewhere between the parsimony of an economic model and the richness of a traditional historical account. It forms part of a growing trend to focus on finding positive facts about the taking of Indian lands, as opposed to making normative judgments.