This ethnographic article explores the manner in which the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), a grassroots organization made up of homeless and low‐income Skid Row residents, generates video evidence for use in lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). For marginalized communities fighting police abuse, the 1992 acquittal of four LAPD officers charged with the beating of Rodney King demonstrated that even the most “obvious” and condemning video evidence is subject to reinterpretation and reframing by skilled legal professionals. In response, LACAN has developed interactional filming strategies designed to constrain officers' ability to offer alternative explanations, while alleviating disparities in court‐recognized authority. In the tradition of legal consciousness scholarship, this article “de‐centers” the law by shifting emphasis from formal judicial decisions in the courtroom to citizen groups in their own communities, as they learn to use legal norms and conventions in social justice campaigns.

Scholarship on law and social movements has focused attention primarily on the United States, and secondarily on countries that share the Anglo‐American legal tradition. The politics of law and social movements in other national legal contexts remains underexamined. The analysis in this article contrasts legal mobilizations for immigrant rights in France and the United States, and explores the relations between national fields of power and legal practices. I trace the institutionalization of immigrant rights legal organizations in each country and argue that the divergent organizational forms and litigation strategies adopted by professionalized movement organizations reflect the dynamics of the nationally distinct fields of power relations within which law reform has been conducted. My analysis links the material and symbolic resources available to law reformers to the relative authority of private and public juridical actors in each state.

The article presents findings from a qualitative study of how Russians deal with neighbors who have leaked water onto them. In the Russian context, this is neither an uncommon nor a small problem. Building on US‐based studies of neighborhood relations, the article lays out three alternative strategies: avoidance, self‐help, and third‐party intervention. The Russian participants lived in close proximity to one another and had little opportunity for exit. The study documents a strong preference for self‐help, confirming the potency of the relational distance hypothesis for Russia. In contrast to their US counterparts, the Russian participants' lack of exit did not give rise to more intense and prolonged disputes. The findings suggest that there is a strong informal norm in favor of neighbors resolving disputes among themselves and that the residents who share common entryways (pod”ezdy) work out the parameters of acceptable behavior over time. These informal norms shape Russians' legal consciousness.

This article examines the compelling enigma of how the introduction of a new international law, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC), helped stimulate labor cooperation and collaboration in the 1990s. It offers a theory of legal transnationalism—defined as processes by which international laws and legal mechanisms facilitate social movement building at the transnational level—that explains how nascent international legal institutions and mechanisms can help develop collective interests, build social movements, and, ultimately, stimulate cross‐border collaboration and cooperation. It identifies three primary dimensions of legal transnationalism that explain how international laws stimulate and constrain movement building through: (1) formation of collective identity and interests (constitutive effects), (2) facilitation of collective action (mobilization effects), and (3) adjudication and enforcement (redress effects).

This article investigates how activists involved in both sides of the street politics of abortion simultaneously create, are constrained by, and use law when recounting a period of conflict that resulted in litigation. The activists‐turned‐litigants' construction of legality is explored by identifying and analyzing patterns of inclusion, absence, amendment, and type of law (i.e., state or extrastate) in and across the stories they tell. It is found that even though there are multiple reasons to expect all of these activists to resist or amend the state's conception of law, their narratives ultimately reproduce state law's legitimacy and power. The activists' stories also illustrate that legal consciousness is contextually and experientially based and is therefore subject to change. This finding has implications for legal mobilization as well as for the nature of legal consciousness.

An ethnographic study of four Midwest mental health courts was focused on how case managers influence the judicial response to offender noncompliance. Mental health courts, which bear little resemblance to traditional work group models, are staffed by teams of legal and social service professionals working collaboratively toward reducing recidivism and community reintegration for high‐risk offenders. Few studies, however, have explored how treatment providers practice their trade in this new court organization. I investigate how case management professionals, working at the intersections of the social welfare and criminal justice systems, leverage courtroom decision making that results in greater leniency or enhanced punishment. The findings suggest that mental‐health‐court case managers act as boundary spanners in terms of their strategic use of resources to facilitate treatment goals. I conclude that case managers act as “double agents” challenging the state to advocate for clemency while enforcing client rules to uphold the integrity of the court.

This essay reviews two recent works in political science on the American conservative legal movement: Steven M. Teles's The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (2008) and Ann Southworth's Lawyers of the Right: Professionalizing the Conservative Coalition (2008). It examines these books in the context of a larger debate over the variables that best explain constitutional change in general and the recent “conservative counterrevolution” in Supreme Court jurisprudence in particular. It shows how these studies build on the scholarship of Charles Epp, who argued in The Rights Revolution (1998) that serious constitutional change requires not only the right cast of characters on the court, but also a strong “support structure” in the legal profession and civil society. Finally, it draws on the author's own research on the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy to illustrate some important avenues for further inquiry.

This essay examines recent scholarship on the legal history of sexuality in the United States. It focuses on Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Modern America (2009) and Marc Stein's Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe (2010). It also reviews recent work on the history of marriage, including Sarah Barringer Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) and George Chauncey's Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (2004), and the history of military law Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold‐War Court Martial (2005), by Elizabeth Lutes Hillman. The essay argues that this scholarship is significant because it offers a different view of sex and power than the one derived from the early writing of Michel Foucault. “Queer legal history” treats the liberalism of the 1960s‐1970s as sexually discriminatory as well as liberatory. It underlines the exclusions that were part of public policy under the federal G.I. Bill and the New Deal welfare state.