This article combines Monahan and Walker's classification of social facts, social authority, and social frameworks with political-institutionalism's view of law and science as competing institutional logics to explain how, and with what consequences, employment discrimination law and industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology became co-produced. When social science is incorporated into enforcement of legislative law as social authority—rationale for judicial rule making—law's institutional logic of relying on precedent and reasoning by analogy ensures that social science will have ongoing influence on law's development. By helping set research agendas and providing new professional opportunities, institutionalized legal doctrine shapes social science knowledge. But because of differences in institutional logic, wherein legal cumulation is backward looking whereas scientific cumulation is forward looking, co-production of law and science may produce institutional mismatch between legal doctrine and scientific knowledge.

In opinions addressing whether graduate students, medical residents, and disabled workers in nonstandard work arrangements are employees under the National Labor Relations Act, I analyze partisan differences in how National Labor Relations Board members, under the previous two US presidents, confronted the contradictory permeation of wage-labor into relatively noncommodified relationships. I argue that Republicans mediated the contradictions by interpreting indicia of employer property rights as status authority. They constructed employment as a contractual relationship consummated through exchange relations and demarcated a nonmarket social sphere in which to locate the relationships before them. This construction suppressed the class dimension of employment and the connection between relations of production and relations in production (Burawoy 1979). Democrats mediated the contradictions by recognizing them in part and arguing that the workers were engaged in commodity production. They proposed the Act as a means for workers to negotiate “differentiated ties” (Zelizer 2005) in nonstandard employment.

Despite its rampant presence, judicial corruption in China has often been regarded as the idiosyncratically deviant behavior of a few black sheep eluding prescribed judicial conduct. This entrenched assumption has both discouraged in-depth investigation of the phenomenon of judicial corruption and inhibited proper understanding of the functioning of China's courts. This article, based on an empirically grounded examination of the processing of court rulings tainted by corruption, showed that judicial corruption in China is an institutionalized activity systemically inherent in the particular decision-making mechanism guided by the Chinese Communist Party's instrumental rule-by-law ideal. In investigating what has contributed to the institutionalization of judicial corruption, the interplay between law and party politics in China's courts was also examined. The findings, therefore, also shed light on behind-the-courtroom judicial activities and on the enduring perplexity of the gap between the law in the book and the law in action.

Many recent studies of “regime politics” argue that judicial review is ultimately used to promote the interests of the dominant governing regime. I explore this claim by evaluating whether the invalidation of federal laws by the US Supreme Court fits the empirical expectations of the regime politics approach. I find that the Court frequently invalidates statutes when (1) the ideology of the Court diverges from that of the sitting elected branches (suggesting that the Court does not fear sanctions or nonimplementation), and (2) the ideology of the sitting elected branches converges with that of the elected branches that enacted the statute (suggesting that the Court is defying the sitting elected branches). My findings suggest that the Court does not primarily use judicial review to promote the interests of the dominant governing regime.

Through an analysis of an inquiry into the death of an Aboriginal man in custody, I argue that the contemporary colonial relationship between white settlers and those whom they have dispossessed is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. In Part One, Redemption, I begin with the inquiry's conclusion that Frank Paul was intrinsically vulnerable. In Part Two, Memorializing, I unravel Frank Paul's story, showing the imprinting of colonial power on his body. In Part Three, Cleansing, I show that the Aboriginal body must be repeatedly evicted from the civilized spaces of the settler. In Part Four, Abandonment, when the cleansing ritual proves lethal, death is declared comprehensible, given the body's incompatibility with modern life. In Part Five, Death Worlds, I suggest that the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, Canada where Frank Paul lived is maintained as a death world where humans are reduced to the status of the living dead. Throughout, I argue that Frank Paul must be understood and remembered as an Aboriginal man whose body bore the imprint of an ongoing colonialism.

International law provides nations with a common definition of a refugee, yet the processes by which countries determine who should be granted refugee status look strikingly different, even across nations with many institutional, cultural, geographical, and political similarities. This article compares the refugee status determination regimes of three popular asylum seeker destinations—the United States, Canada, and Australia. Despite these nations' similar border control policies, asylum seekers crossing their borders access three very different systems. These differences have less to do with political debates over admission and border control policy than with the level of insulation the administrative decision-making agency enjoys from political interference and judicial review. Bureaucratic justice is conceptualized and organized differently in different states, and so states vary in how they draw the line between refugee and nonrefugee.

This article centers on Branded Woman v. Unknown, an unusual 1889 trial that gave birth to the “ordinarily accepted significance” of Burmese tattoos. What began as a snippet of gossip from a colonial village became a scandal involving the highest echelon of Britain's metropolis. I explain why this dynamic of escalation occurred and how colonial officials in Burma utilized a courtroom to transform tenuous fictions of tattooing into a seemingly coherent fact about Burma. My argument that this process—shaped through cues from a fragmented audience of peers (rather than a single audience of subordinates)—represents the production of an elite public transcript highlights how colonial scandals worked as eventful moments for an always precarious state to reconfigure its claim to power by prompting local agents to enact expressions of certainty. It further carries implications for scholarship on symbolic state power and the construction of legal facts and public knowledge.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans founded a new court system, the Nizamiye courts, as part of an empire-wide ambitious project of judicial and administrative reform, which involved legal transplantation from the French model. The institutional evolution of these courts was completed with elaborate legislation introduced in 1879. This article explores British consular and diplomatic accounts dispatched in the immediate aftermath of the 1879 reforms in an attempt to assess the value of these reports for understanding the passage of Ottoman law to modernity. Comparison of British accounts with relevant Ottoman sources and recent research reveals that British consuls and diplomats produced distorted representations of Ottoman judicial reform, exhibiting lack of faith in the effectiveness of these reforms. Misrepresentation resulted from ignorance about the nature of reformed Ottoman law, prejudice, and concerns about the effect of these reforms on the ability of British consuls to interfere with Ottoman court proceedings.

What can judicial architecture tell us about how courts function? In this essay, I examine Legal Architecture: Justice, Due Process, and the Place of Law (2011) by Linda Mulcahy and Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (2011) by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis. I argue that both books develop an understanding of judicial architecture as a socially contingent form of communication. I relate this expressive theory of architecture to older arguments about design and construction articulated by poet and novelist Victor Hugo and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I also briefly explore the connections between this developing “jurisprudence of what's real” and more conventional forms of law-and-courts scholarship.

This essay develops an understated argument in Stuart Scheingold's The Political Novel (2010), namely, how narratives of estrangement serve to empower re-imagination without reinforcing the false promises of modernism. I argue that Scheingold's earlier work in The Politics of Rights and on cause lawyering provides guidance for understanding the character of empowerment to which Scheingold points in his latest work. In addition, I examine three film narratives that treat the “mournful legacy of the twentieth century”—Pan's Labyrinth, Life Is Beautiful, and Everything Is Illuminated. Emergent in these narratives, I suggest, is a way that storytellers point to empowerment by highlighting the largely overwhelming constraints that limit the agency promised by modernism and the strategic, though contingent, choices characters make to confront and cope with their own estrangement.