During at least part of the post–World War II period, the constitutions of thirty-six states called for the popular election of the judges of the states’ highest courts. In practice, only slightly more than half of those judges (excluding strictly interim appointees) initially obtained their positions by election. This article examines the likelihood of initial election in actual practice, how it has varied over time, and various factors that might be related to election versus appointment (e.g., type of election, mandatory retirement). It concludes that state norms play a substantial role in determining patterns of actual selection.

Examining what we call “crimmigrating narratives,” we show that US immigration court criminalizes non-citizens, cements forms of social control, and dispenses punishment in a non-punitive legal setting. Building on theories of crimmigration and a sociology of narrative, we code, categorize, and describe third-party observations of detained immigration court hearings conducted in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, from July 2018 to June 2019. We identify and investigate structural factors of three key crimmigrating narratives in the courtroom: one based on threats (stories of the non-citizen’s criminal history and perceived danger to society), a second involving deservingness (stories of the non-citizen’s social ties, hardship, and belonging in the United States), and a third pertaining to their status as “impossible subjects” (stories rendering non-citizens “illegal,” categorically excludable, and contradictory to the law). Findings demonstrate that the courts’ prioritization of these three narratives disconnects detainees from their own socially organized experience and prevents them from fully engaging in the immigration court process. In closing, we discuss the potential implications of crimmigrating narratives for the US immigration legal system and non-citizen status.

How to better police mental illness is an evergreen component of criminal justice reform agendas. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has, like many departments, adopted specialized strategies designed to improve these encounters by tasking officers with both care and control responsibilities. These hybridized policing strategies are illustrative of a larger trend of managing social marginality through institutions that increasingly destabilize the penal/welfare state binary. This article draws from fieldwork with the LAPD to analyze how patrol officers construct the category of “mental illness” and deploy hybridized strategies. The analysis focuses on the inflection points that shape how a subject is categorized and the call’s disposal to understand how policing from the “murky middle” of state governance unfolds on the ground. Findings show how officers strategically invoke the pressure of time and the power of place to construct this category and deploy specialized resources when resolving trouble case, or “5149 and a half,” calls. Here, hybridized strategies function to manage social marginality through a governance of problem solving that appears uninterested in doing either care or control. The article concludes by reflecting on the project of hybridizing care and control to police mental illness specifically and social marginality more broadly.

We investigate whether inherent differences between the majority opinions of US Supreme Court justices result in certain justices being systematically more influential compared to their peers. We offer a theory in which lower court adoption of the Supreme Court’s precedents are influenced through justice opinion attributes, case characteristics, and circuit-level influences. To test the predictions, we examine the universe of responses by US Courts of Appeals to the signed majority opinions of individual justices by assembling a dataset of over 130,000 observations. We assess the interdependence of the mechanisms at work through a coarsened exact matching algorithm. We find that intricate tendencies in opinion writing disparately impact lower court attentiveness to the Supreme Court’s decisions. These findings offer new and important implications toward a richer understanding of the influence of individual justices on legal development and policy adoption in the American courts.

Over the past half-century, the US welfare and penal systems have become increasingly fused modes of poverty governance. At the center of the welfare-penal continuum sits probation, a form of community supervision that operates as a central hub, directing people to both services and incarceration. Drawing on interviews with 166 adults on probation in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2019, we argue that the coercive care of probation is structured by the broader project of controlling alcohol and drug use among the poor. Developing the concept of strong-arm sobriety, we show how the “criminal addict” trope undergirds the central processes of probation: treatment, testing, and revocation. We argue that strong-arm sobriety misreads structural precarity as the result, rather than the cause, of individuals’ choices. In doing so, strong-arm sobriety fails to address the circumstances that engender substance use and produces future subjects for coercive care.

This article studies relational contracts whose performance implicates the person of the promisor (as where the promisor is the promisee’s employee). We investigate whether people’s beliefs that their and others’ personalities are relatively malleable (or not) correlate with their tendency to engage in such long-term contracts. Our survey experiment shows that the more people believe that their own personality is intertemporally malleable the less they tend to make long-term commitments; by contrast, the more they believe that others’ personalities are malleable, the more they tend to engage in such commitments. Our findings imply that people’s intuitive tendencies to make long-term commitments align with those that underlie liberal contract law, which is careful about enforcing contracts that constrain the self-determination of contractors’ future selves.

In the 1970s, LGBT students at fourteen US colleges and universities took their institutions to court after newly established gay student groups were denied official recognition. While the students suffered defeats along the way, by the end of the decade they had won the war for recognition. This article provides a broad overview of these cases, discusses their significance, and argues that we cannot understand the struggle for gay student group recognition without considering its relationship to the state regulation of sex. Advocates for gay student groups won most of their battles by responding to the claim that recognition would be tantamount to aiding and abetting criminal sexual activities. They did so by pursuing strategies of desexualization, which denied that gay student groups encouraged same-sex sex. The article explores these strategies by focusing on three 1976 Virginia cases, one about gay student group recognition, one about the criminalization of same-sex sex, and one about the application of the state’s sodomy law to an interracial threesome. The divergent outcomes help us understand the strategic effectiveness and political limitations of LGBT desexualization strategies.

Although women have made significant strides in the legal profession, female attorneys continue to earn far less than male attorneys. Relying on survey data from a large sample of full-time attorneys in Texas, we find a gender pay gap of thirty-five thousand dollars at the median that cannot be explained by differences in human capital or occupational segregation. We also provide evidence that the legal market especially disadvantages women who excel in law school. Whereas high academic achievement boosts male lawyers’ incomes substantially, it does not have the same effect on female lawyers’ incomes. High-achieving female lawyers earn less than high-achieving male lawyers across practice settings and earn less than their lower-achieving male counterparts in private practice. We conclude that discrimination in the legal profession operates partly by devaluing female attorneys’ human capital, such that sterling academic credentials and other traits that are valued in men are far less valued in women.

Explanations of altruism remain fragmented across disciplinary lines and focus heavily on phenomena such as philanthropy, the nonprofit sector, and volunteering outside the workplace. Yet numerous professions, including law, claim a duty of service that calls on their members to volunteer. Using a mixed methods approach that draws on thirty interviews and a survey of 845 lawyers, the authors develop an integrated framework on altruism to account for how volunteering takes place in the course of law practice. The analysis reveals psychological traits, collective norms, exchange relationships, and organizational dimensions that shape lawyers’ volunteering. In particular, a cultural norm endorsing volunteer efforts is a powerful driver of volunteering legal services. At the same time, organizational features, such as time constraints, condition cultural norms to hinder volunteering, while business opportunities for client recruitment condition cultural norms to foster volunteering. We conclude with directions for advancing our integrated approach to altruism in the context of lawyers’ professional service.

While scholars have considered the role of courts in authoritarian regimes generally, less attention has been paid to judicial-military relations. In this article I consider how courts are militarized and made subordinate and loyal to military rule. In military regimes, the courts are at risk of militarization and the process of rendering judges loyal to the military through practices such as career path socialization, selection, and restructuring of the courts. This raises an entry-exit dilemma for judges. The dilemma lies in the fact that if judges committed to civilian rule do not join the bench, they are potentially leaving the judiciary to military partisans with little prospect for reform. Yet joining the judiciary means the danger of being co-opted and adding legitimacy to the military regime or the risk of being forced out if politics shifts from civilian to military rule. Through a case study of judicial profiles in Myanmar, I explore how the loyalty of judges to the military depends on whether they are military insiders, military affiliates, civilian affiliates, or civilian outsiders. The case of Myanmar is a vivid reminder to scholars of judicial behavior that in military authoritarian regimes, judges face an entry-exit dilemma.

In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Celebrated as a victory for global lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, Taiwan’s 2019 law privileges marriage and biological parent-child ties as the foundation for LGBT family rights and (co-)parental recognition. This article contributes to sociolegal debates about the benefits and limitations of marriage equality by asking how restrictive legal approaches to legitimating LGBT parenthood may harm LGBT families, with consequences both for families ostensibly protected under the new laws and for those denied newly bestowed rights and protections. Drawing from legal and ethnographic research on Taiwan’s same-sex marriage law and the family formation strategies of Taiwanese LGBT parents, we interrogate how marriage equality interacts with related legal domains and prevailing stigmas of illegitimacy, adoption, and homosexuality in Taiwan. Encoded in, and reproduced through, the substance and implementation of law, these stigmas narrow the scope of legal rights and foster potentially discriminatory forms of recognition. The article shows how progressive laws may reduce LGBT family stigma for some, while also creating new stigma interactions that devalue diverse forms of LGBT parenthood.