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Revisiting the Concept of Voice: Expression of Grievances across the English and Welsh National Health Service Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-04-05 Linda Mulcahy
This article reexamines the notion of voice in law and society scholarship, which has focused on journeys to complaints and claims. Using the English and Welsh National Health Service as a case study, it argues that looking at the articulation of grievances through a large number of channels across a large service sector offers new opportunities to examine a range of different political logics underpinning
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How the Public Became the Caller: The Emergence of Reactive Policing, 1880–1970 Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-04-04 Jessica W. Gillooly, David Thacher
Why is the police role so broad in the United States today? Carceral state scholars have investigated how and why policymakers have treated so many social problems as policing problems, but they have not yet recognized the degree to which the call-for-service system has marginalized political control over police strategy. This Article traces the historical sources of this arrangement through extensive
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Patchwork Protection: The Politics of Prisoners’ Rights Accountability in the United States Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Heather Schoenfeld, Kimberly Rhoten, Michael C. Campbell
In recent years US prisons have failed to meet legally required minimum standards of care and protection of incarcerated people. Explanations for the failure to protect prisoners in the United States focus on the effects of the Prison Litigation Reform Act (PLRA) and lack of adequate external oversight. However, very little scholarship empirically examines how different systems of accountability for
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Don’t Call It a Failure: Systemic Risk Governance for Complex Financial Systems Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Giuliano G. Castellano
The probability that an event will avalanche into an impairment of essential services constitutes a “systemic risk.” Owing to the inherent complexities of modern societies, the outbreak of a novel disease or the failure of a financial institution can rapidly escalate into an impact significantly larger than the initial event. Through the lens of complex system theory, this article draws a parallel
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Credit Cars: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Auto Loans Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Nicholas Tucker Reyes, Spencer Headworth
Drawing on trade publications, contemporaneous newspaper stories, and other historical sources from the early twentieth-century United States, this article explains how installment plans overcame moral and business concerns to become the standard way people bought cars. Prominent figures in the automobile industry and financial institutions initially denounced the idea of selling cars on credit, and
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Anti-trafficking Chains: Analyzing the Impact of Transparency Legislation in the UK Construction Sector Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-02-14 Tamar Barkay, Jonathan Davies, Irene Pietropaoli, Hila Shamir
A recurring conundrum lies at the heart of current anti-trafficking law and policy. Despite enormous efforts by civil society organizations, corporations, and governments to reduce human trafficking in supply chains, and the introduction of legislation in various countries that requires corporations to take active actions in this field, there is wide agreement that, so far, the desired change has not
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Whistleblowing Decisions by Police Officers Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Justice Tankebe, Atul Fulzele
Police organizations are moral battlefields. Blowing the whistle on misconduct is one domain of moral contestation. Yet whistleblowing by police officers is important to ensure accountability, prevent threats to the rule of law, and avoid police capture by organized crime. In this study, we draw on a survey of 975 police officers in Himachal Pradesh, India, to investigate whistleblowing decisions and
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The Ability of Human Rights to Limit the State’s Power to Punish in Europe: Connecting Prison and Mental Health Policies through the Concept of “Transpolicies” Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Gaëtan Cliquennois, Sonja Snacken
While scholars have pointed out the factors determining the impediments to and efficacy of international human rights rules, poor attention has been paid to human rights violations relating to transfers between prison and psychiatric detention. There is a lack of intersection of policy spheres in this regard that should be remedied. Our contribution aims to challenge traditional sociolegal boundaries
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Transforming “Transformative Accommodation”: Palestinian-Muslim Women’s Maintenance Suits as a Case Study Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Wejdan Hleihel, Ido Shahar, Karin Carmit Yefet
“Transformative accommodation,” one of the most influential models proposed and debated in multiculturalist literature, is designed to strike a fine-tuned balance between minority community culture and the rights of its most vulnerable constituents. This article seeks to challenge the model’s theoretical premises and predictive normative outputs. Drawing on a novel empirical case study—the adjudication
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A Fair Process Matters: The Relationship between Public Participation and Constitutional Legitimacy Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Ran Hirschl, Alexander Hudson
Public participation is widely considered to be an indispensable part of contemporary constitution-making processes, largely because it is thought to create a sense of public ownership of the new constitution. However, as recent research has shown that public participation has little actual impact on the content of the constitution, this supposed link is puzzling. How can ineffective participation
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Opening the Gender Box: Legibility Dilemmas and Gender Data Collection on U.S. State Government Forms Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-01-02 Ari Ezra Waldman
US states collect sex and gender data on official government forms to understand, identify, classify, and surveil populations. These forms’ gender boxes—sets of questions about sex, gender, and gender identity paired with a wide variety of answer options—can mean the difference between legibility and erasure or between surveillance and privacy. They also create classic disclosure and legibility dilemmas
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The Supreme Court and the Allocation of Burden: Truncating the Voting Rights Act Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-01-02 Warren Snead
The US Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder and subsequent legislative failures to restore the Voting Rights Act (VRA) have alerted scholars to the precarity of federal voting rights and the importance of the Supreme Court to its implementation. I argue, however, that the court has exercised outsized influence on the administration and development of the VRA long before Shelby County
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Uncertainty and Condemnation. An Experimental Study on Lay and Expert Intuitions Regarding the Object of Criminal Punishment Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2024-01-02 Piotr Bystranowski, Bartosz Janik, Maciej Próchnicki
The object of criminal punishment (what exactly an offender is punished for) is a central construct of criminal law theory, but it remains hard to identify in many contexts. This is especially relevant in the case of proxy crimes—offenses that criminalize behavior that does not seem wrongful per se but stands in for some other hard-to-prove wrongdoing. What is the object of punishment imposed on a
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Are You Talking to Me? How Ideological and Gender Characteristics Moderate the Effect of Legitimizing Rhetoric on SCOTUS Legitimacy Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Ryan J. Williams, Leah Christiani
Possessing neither purse nor sword, the unelected US Supreme Court relies on sustained public confidence in its institutional credibility to give force to its decisions. Previous research shows that Supreme Court justices are increasingly making public appearances to engage in a course of institutional maintenance to preserve its legitimacy. Amid a potential legitimacy crisis, justices seek to shore
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Exploring Litigation, Court Rulings, and Legal Mobilization in Response to Death and Suicide from Overwork: Implications for Labor Law Reform Policy Making in Japan Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Adrienne Sala
This article analyzes how litigation, court rulings, and legal mobilization have influenced law and policy making related to death from overwork (karōshi) and suicide from overwork (karōjisatsu) in Japan over the course of half a century. It highlights the gradual, but substantial, impact of litigation and court rulings on different levels of governmental measures. By taking a longer-term perspective
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Protecting the Rights of Children and Young People in Detention: Evaluating Credibility and Effectiveness of Human Rights Monitoring Bodies Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Bronwyn Naylor
The need to protect the rights of children and young people in detention is the subject of a recent United Nations study (Nowak 2019) and is highlighted by national and international controversies. This article examines the role of external monitoring in preventing the ill-treatment of children and young people in detention. Australia has until recently shown limited interest in protecting the rights
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(Re)constructing Prisoner Death Investigations: A Case Study of Suicide Investigations from England and Wales Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Philippa Tomczak, Kaitlyn Quinn, Catherine Traynor, Lucy Wainwright
Because states must rebut the presumption of responsibility, all prisoner deaths must be investigated. These investigations frequently illustrate the tip of an iceberg of rights abuses and systemic hazards but have largely escaped analysis in prison-monitoring scholarship. Focusing on suicides, we assemble some of the first evidence illustrating how the staff of the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman
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Streets, Suites, and States: John Hagan’s Contributions to the Study of Law, Power, and Inequality Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Ron Levi, Traci Burch, Robert L. Nelson
We start this special issue with two perspectives. First, that the sociological study of crime and law often intersects with the study of inequality, power, the state, and life chances. Second, that the study of crime and law are deeply interconnected—institutionally, politically, and culturally. Legal institutions build on normative ideas, organizations, careers, and power to govern, to criminalize
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Is White-Collar Crime White? Racialization in the National Press Coverage of White-Collar Crime from 1950 to 2010 Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Marina Zaloznaya, Alexandria Yakes, James Wo
While much is written about racialization of street criminals in the American media, racial dimensions of the media framing of white-collar crime remain underexplored. To address this issue, we analyze the coverage of bribery, electoral fraud, tax evasion, and insider trading in five national newspapers between 1950 and 2010. Drawing on John Hagan’s (2012) work, we trace the racialization of white-collar
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California Civil Asset Forfeiture and the Policing of Minority Residents Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Jared Joseph, Bill McCarthy
In Who Are the Criminals?, John Hagan argues that legislators use “crisis framing” to influence how the general public thinks about crime. President Ronald Reagan used reports of a drug use epidemic fueled by organized crime as part of his crisis framing. In 1984, he signed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act (CCCA) as part of his “war on drugs.” The CCCA allowed law enforcement to use civil asset
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Rethinking Inclusion: Ideal Minorities, Inclusion Cultures, and Identity Capitals in the Legal Profession Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen
Using preliminary observations from three parallel projects that employ a range of methods (network and content analysis, surveys, focus groups, and interviews), this article traces the experience of navigating different kinds of identity as useful capital within the legal profession. Identity is not the first kind of non-economic capital to influence professional navigation, but it is distinct in
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Revolving Doors: Social Dimensions of Law Firm Culture and Pathways out of Firms Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Fiona M. Kay
A growing body of research suggests that contemporary law firms face challenges with the retention of legal talent—especially women and racialized lawyers. Yet, we know little about the conditions that prompt lawyers to leave law firms or where they go after leaving. This article builds on the scholarship of John Hagan, emphasizing the role of social capital in law firm culture, and work by Emmanuel
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Darfur Model, Rwanda, and the ICTR: John Hagan’s Sociology of Genocide Continued Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Joachim J. Savelsberg, Brooke B. Chambers
Core contributions from John Hagan’s scholarship on genocide are at stake in this article. First, this article examines, for the Rwandan genocide, the applicability of Hagan and Wenona Rymond-Richmond’s multi-level causal model of genocide, developed in Darfur and the Crime of Genocide. Asking how causal factors and processes highlighted in that model play out in scholarship on the Rwandan genocide
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Genocide: Theories of Participation and Opportunities for Intervention Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Aliza Luft
This essay evaluates the current United Nations approach to preventing and punishing genocide by considering micro-level research on behavioral variation in genocide and proposing two ideas for intervention. The first idea extends the theory that economic inequality explains people’s decisions to kill or not kill in genocide and suggests specific economic remedies to intervene in ongoing violence.
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Children of War Resisters: Intergenerational Transmission of Activism, Political Orientation, Injustice Frames, and Law Resistance Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Wenona Rymond-Richmond
American Vietnam War resisters participated in one of the largest politically motivated emigrations in US history. John Hagan provided the most comprehensive study of American war resisters living in Canada in his award-winning book Northern Passage. Hagan documented how law resistance intersected with social movement participation and sustained activism. In this article, I extend Hagan’s life course
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Toward a Sociology of International Law: John Hagan and Beyond Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Jens Meierhenrich
Socio-legal scholars these days devote themselves routinely to the study of international law. It was not always thus. In the late twentieth century, no more than a handful of law-and-society scholars asked themselves how international law worked. Even fewer ventured into the field. John Hagan was one of those who did and the first sociologist to study empirically—and rigorously—what we now call international
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The Failed Idea of Judicial Restraint: A Brief Intellectual History Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-21 Susan D. Carle
This essay examines the intellectual history of the idea of judicial restraint, starting with the early debates among the US Constitution’s founding generation. In the late nineteenth century, law professor James Bradley Thayer championed the concept and passed it on to his students and others, including Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, who modified and
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Mercy and the Construction of Social Control: A Four-Site Analysis of Clemency Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Veronica L. Horowitz
Executive clemency is a discretionary power to grant legal mercy and is rarely given. Using data from contemporary clemency hearings in four states, I explore how state actors use commutation hearings as sites to exert social control and communicate hegemonic ideology. Clemency board members use hearings as sites to communicate the behaviors and attitudes they desire from applicants, aiming to generate
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Exclusion from Within: Noncitizens and the Rise of Discriminatory Licensing Laws Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-09 Allison Brownell Tirres
In the United States in the early twentieth century, state and local laws discriminating on the basis of alienage proliferated. Progressive reformers, nativist groups, state legislatures, and city councils sought new methods for restricting noncitizen access to the workplace and the marketplace. As this article demonstrates, the primary vehicle they utilized was state and local licensing laws. Licensing
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Aspirational Laws in Action: A Field Experiment Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Ben Depoorter, Stephan Tontrup
This article examines aspirational laws in a randomized field experiment. We analyze the impact of an unenforced public smoking ban on individual behavior and attitudes. The findings indicate that aspirational laws, like public smoking bans, can make rights holders sensitive to behavior that violates their rights, irrespective of the material consequences of infringements and their personal views about
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Legal Strategies at the Governance Precipice: Transnational Lawyers in the European Union’s Sovereign Debt Crisis (2010–2012) Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Nicholas Haagensen
How do transnational lawyers valorize their expertise in a political and economic crisis? This article argues that knowing how transnational lawyers valorize their expertise is critical to understanding how transnational law evolves and affects society, especially when existing legal frameworks prove to be inadequate and novel practices must pave new paths. Using the acute phase of the Eurozone crisis
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Many Shades of Success: Bottom-up Indicators of Individual Success in Community Courts Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Hadar Dancig-Rosenberg, Tali Gal
This study challenges the conventional approach to the appropriate indicators of individual success in community courts (CCs) by exploring the different meanings that CC professionals ascribe to the term “success.” CCs conduct a non-adversarial process in which team members collaborate to provide a comprehensive rehabilitative intervention for recidivist participants. We conducted fifty-three in-depth
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The Cruel Optimism of International Prison Regulation: Prison Ontologies and Carceral Harms Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Tom Kemp, Philippa Tomczak
This article examines the development of international human rights standards and oversight mechanisms directed at addressing the negative effects of imprisonment. We identify this as the rules-based prison-regulation project, widely endorsed by international organizations and legal scholars. However, with a focus on the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, we argue
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Legal Consciousness and Vigilantism: Seeking Justice for Witchcraft Harms in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-10-09 Holly Dunn
Theories of vigilantism frequently locate its cause in the ineffectiveness of the state legal system. The state legal system does not work for some, so they take the law into their own hands. Even in communities where vigilantism is prevalent, however, only certain harms are met with vigilantism. Why are some harms met with violence while others are not? To explore this question, I draw on nine months
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Adminigration: City-Level Governance of Immigrant Community Members Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Susan Bibler Coutin, Walter J. Nicholls
The concept of adminigration provides a much-needed lens in theorizing immigration enforcement, citizenship, and urban geographies. We define adminigration as the governance of immigrant community members through city-level policies and programs, whether or not these explicitly focus on immigrants. Our focus on adminigration involves three theoretical interventions: (1) bridging literature on immigrant
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Property Markers and the Hassle of Leniency: Building Code Enforcement in the Courtroom Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Robin Bartram
Unlike other housing courts, Chicago’s building court is characterized by leniency. The mostly low-income property owners who appear in building court often receive extensions to remedy building code violations or even dismissals of their violations. This article shows that, paradoxically, the consequences of these lenient outcomes are punitive for building court defendants, replicating the kinds of
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How UN Counter-Terrorism Sanctions Are Made Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Anton Moiseienko
Gavin Sullivan’s encounter with UN counter-terrorism sanctions began in 2010. Then, as a practicing human rights lawyer, he a wrote a report on the subject, which resulted in him being in touch with several Tunisian men in France who found themselves on a sanctions list: This experience of working closely with listed individuals on these cases helped me see first-hand how unjust this regime of preemptive
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Understanding the Litigation Priorities of Legal Impact Organizations Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 David L. Trowbridge
What influences the litigation agendas of LGBTQ legal impact organizations in the United States? These organizations are at the forefront of bringing rights claims before the courts, but capacity and resource limitations mean that they cannot litigate every issue important to their constituency. Drawing on dozens of interviews with movement actors and organizational documents, I find that the formation
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US Asylum Lawyering and Temporal Violence Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-09-04 Catherine L. Crooke
Research on the temporal dimensions of international migration focuses on how migrants experience time. This study instead turns attention to public interest lawyers, whose work plays a crucial role in ensuring favorable legal outcomes for immigrants, in order to consider time’s salience within the US asylum context. Based on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork with Los Angeles-based public interest
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Reshaping Goals and Values in Times of Penal Transition: The Dynamics of Penal Change in the Collateral Consequences Reform Space Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-29 Alessandro Corda
Over the past decade, reform efforts in the area of collateral consequences of conviction have succeeded in emancipating themselves from standard discourses and dynamics in the US criminal legal reform space. This article draws on concepts and insights from the literature on penal transformation to explore the unique interplay of goals and values that have led to recent collateral consequences reforms
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Legal Disagreement Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Kevin E. Davis, Alfredo Guerra Guevara
Individuals within the same jurisdiction often have different perceptions of the legal system, a phenomenon we call legal disagreement. Cross-country analyses of legal institutions generally ignore this kind of within-country variation. This article defines the concept of legal disagreement, identifies its potential causes and consequences, and shows that it can be measured using data from cross-country
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Constitutionalism with Adjectives: Conceptual Innovation in the Comparative Study of Law Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Diana Kapiszewski, Deborah Groen, Katja Newman
The latter half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century witnessed a global wave of constitution writing. Scholarly examination of these new charters found that most embodied liberalism and democracy. Additional study, however, found that textual convergence among these “higher law constitutions” belied important heterogeneity in constitutionalism—that is, in the principles underlying
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Justice in the Vernacular: An Anthropological Critique of Commensuration Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Mark Goodale
This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables
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Measuring Up: A Dialogical Model for Assuring a Reparative Process Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Lisa J. Laplante, Ana María Reyes
International law obliges governments to assure adequate and effective reparations for human rights violations. To date, most evaluations of such programs focus on outcomes while overlooking the process of how the state engaged victims, or not, in the determination of what they needed to feel repaired. A consensus now points toward the need to better involve beneficiaries in reparations programs in
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The Paradox of Justice: From Transitional to Everyday Justice Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Peter Dixon, Pamina Firchow, Fiorella Vera-Adrianzén
Transitional justice lacks a coherent framework for articulating the relationship between distributive and corrective justice. Academic debates remain largely normative, focused on whether and how transitional justice should distinguish itself from the realm of the social, economic, and cultural. Where there is a bridge between legal logics and lived realities, it generally happens through victims’
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Reimagining Public Safety: Defining “Community” in Participatory Research Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Naomi Levy, Amy E. Lerman, Peter Dixon
In the context of a national movement to defund police departments, many American cities are starting to reimagine public safety, as activists demand new practices that maintain safety while minimizing harm, as well as ensuring accountability when harms occur. Drawing on Everyday Peace Indicators methodologies, we argue that “community-centered” measurement, combined with researcher-practitioner partnerships
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Reparations, But for What? Presenting a New Approach to Coding Reparations Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-22 Claire Greenstein
Reparations payments are commonly measured as either paid versus not paid, or present versus absent. I argue that this approach causes researchers to overlook systematic variation in the types of abuses that governments include in their reparations commitments. This article makes the case for revising quantitative reparations indicators to reflect the fact that governments often promise and/or pay
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Giving and Taking Voice: Metapragmatic Dismissals of Parents in Child Welfare Court Cases Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Jessica López-Espino
Applying tools of linguistic anthropology to ethnographic research conducted in a California child welfare court, this article analyzes how commentary by attorneys and judges about the language practices of parents and other communicative practices normalized the dismissal of the voices of marginalized lay actors throughout their cases. This commentary is an example of what linguistic anthropologists
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From the “Legal Culture of Slavery” to Black Legal Culture: Reimagining the Implications and Meanings of Black Litigiousness in Slavery and Freedom Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Myisha S. Eatmon
This review essay considers Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross’s Becoming Free, Becoming Black (2020); Laura F. Edwards’s The People and Their Peace (2009); Ariela J. Gross’s Double Character ([2000] 2006); Martha S. Jones’s Birthright Citizens (2018); Kelly M. Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott (2017); and Kimberly M. Welch’s Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (2018), arguing that
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Judging Genocide: Emotional Labor During Transitional Justice Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, Evelyn Gertz, Christopher Uggen
Despite the proliferation of transitional justice, scholars have rarely researched the emotional toll on those who implement transitional justice mechanisms. This article accordingly examines the emotion management techniques employed by eighty-five judges who served in Rwanda’s post-genocide gacaca courts. Most of the intrapersonal and interpersonal emotion management strategies we find are gendered
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Between Human Rights and Civil Society: The Case of Israel’s Apartheid Enablers Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Neve Gordon
For decades, human rights organizations have exposed egregious abuses carried out by states across the globe. Yet, simultaneously, other national and transnational civil society actors have waged war on these human rights organizations to shield rights-abusive states from accountability. These assaults have increasingly resulted in the normative claims of human rights organizations being sidelined
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With the Law or against the Law? A Qualitative Analysis of the Development and Outcomes of Legal Consciousness among Law-Abiding Firearms Owners Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Zachary Miner
This article explores the legal consciousness of legal gun owners in upstate New York using a qualitative, grounded theory approach. Respondents’ accounts reveal that their experiences cause them to respect and support the law in certain contexts but feel oppressed by it in other contexts. These perceptions stem from engagement with law, and especially the passage of the New York Secure Ammunition
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Taxation, Lactation, and Validation: The Symbolic Power of Tax Law to Legitimize Breast Milk Expression Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Elizabeth A. Hoffmann
In 2011, the Internal Revenue Service reversed a previous regulation that excluded lactation supplies, including breast pumps, from medical care tax benefits. This policy change was met with joy by some working mothers. Often torn between family needs and workplace duties, these lactating employees struggled with trying to be a “good worker” and a “good mother.” They saw the new tax law as validation
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Why Do In-State Plaintiffs Invoke Diversity Jurisdiction? Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Scott Dodson
The traditional rationale of federal diversity jurisdiction is to protect out-of-state parties from the risk of an appearance of state-court bias in favor of an in-state adversary. Yet a strikingly high percentage—more than 50 percent—of original domestic-diversity cases are filed by in-state plaintiffs. Why these in-state plaintiffs invoke diversity jurisdiction is a question that has largely been
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Signing CEDAW and Women’s Rights: Human Rights Treaty Signature and Legal Mobilization Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Audrey L. Comstock
Can commitment to international human rights law promote human rights when the commitment is not yet legally binding? I argue that treaty signature can be used by non-governmental organizations and other rights actors to mobilize around rights standards and hold states accountable in the lead up to binding treaty ratification. Using the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
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Misrecognitions of Victimhood: Discretionary Power of Street-level Bureaucrats in Humanitarian Visas Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-06-26 Ryan Goehrung, Rachel Castellano
Humanitarian visas provide one of few potential pathways to citizenship for foreign nationals victimized within the United States and are an important aspect of immigration law. Yet one form of humanitarian visas—T nonimmigrant status (T visa)—has received scant attention in the socio-legal studies literature. “T visas” were designed to aid survivors of human trafficking and, though the US government
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Unlawful Intimacy: The Criminalization of Interracial Relationships in Progressive-Era Chicago Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-06-23 Kate Markey
This article shows how Progressive-Era state actors in Chicago employed open-ended, low-level criminal charges directed at regulating the moral health of the community to criminalize interracial relationships—even though interracial marriage had been legal in Illinois since 1870. Capacious legal definitions of offenses like vagrancy, disorderly conduct, adultery, and fornication allowed police officers
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I Come before You a Changed Man: “Insight,” Compliance, and Refurbishing Penal Practice in California Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Isaac Dalke
In 2008 the California Supreme Court forced the state’s parole board to change how it justifies the decision to keep a person in prison. This article combines computational and interpretive analysis of 9,842 hearing transcripts to show how, to achieve compliance with the court, parole board commissioners refurbished an old rehabilitative way of talking about incarceration found in a set of secondary
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The Logic of NIMBYism: Class, Race, and Stigma in the Making of California’s Legal Cannabis Market Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-05-22 Ekaterina (Katya) Moiseeva
This article explores how not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) sentiments affect the implementation of new cannabis laws in California cities. Despite increasing legality and growing social tolerance, the actual status of cannabis remains controversial. Large segments of the population and local authorities remain uncomfortable with the use of cannabis and resist allowing cannabis facilities in their communities
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Popular Constitutionalism in the US Empire: The Legal History of US Citizenship in Guam Law & Social Inquiry (IF 1.396) Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Ross Dardani
This article presents a legal history of US citizenship in Guam. I argue that members of Guam’s Congress mobilizing for US citizenship in the 1930s and in the immediate aftermath of World War II offer a powerful and instructive example of popular constitutionalism, or the interactive, extrajudicial process that generates constitutional meaning. Guamanians made constitutional claims to US naval leaders