Over the past three decades, the legal profession has experienced globalization, the rise of mega-law firms, and intensified competition. These transformations have been associated with declining career perspectives, the hyper-specialization of legal work, and increased levels of stress. We argue that the concept of alienation offers valuable insights into these changes by providing an original analysis of the objective and subjective experiences of early career lawyers at work. We elaborate a multidimensional typology that covers the content and retributions of legal work. By categorizing experiences of alienation along these two axes, we identify four ideal-types of alienation: powerlessness, purposelessness, time deprivation, and unfairness. Based on qualitative studies carried out in France and Switzerland, we illustrate how young lawyers differentially experience each type of alienation, according to gender, status, and firm size. We conclude by suggesting how these factors combine to produce long-terms effects, such as the high female attrition rates observed in the Swiss and French legal professions.

Work requirements backed by threats of incarceration offer a fertile but neglected site for sociolegal inquiry. These “carceral work mandates” confound familiar accounts of both the neoliberal state’s production of precarious work through deregulation and the penal state’s production of racialized exclusion from labor markets. In two illustrative contexts—child support enforcement and criminal legal debt—demands for work emerge as efforts to increase and then seize earnings from indigent debtors; an ability to pay is defined to include an ability to work. In a third, demands for work are imposed directly through probation, parole, and other community supervision. In each context, the carceral state regulates work outside of prison. It defines appropriate labor conditions through concepts of voluntary unemployment, and it enables employers to discipline or retaliate against workers by triggering state violence. Additionally, mandated work may be removed from employment law protections when the carceral context dominates its sociolegal meaning. Finally, the resulting vulnerable workforces can be used to displace or discipline other workers not personally subject to carceral work mandates. Analogies to welfare work requirements, workplace immigration enforcement, and prison labor illustrate these points. Implications are considered for theorizing contemporary racial political economy.

For more than a century, a partnership position in a large corporate law firm has almost universally been held out as the singular mark of success for those with a law degree. We find that despite significant transformations in the profession, including dramatic expansion in size and the opening of corporate law positions to women, minorities, and the graduates of lower-ranked schools, the powerful and prestigious positions of corporate law partners remain largely reserved for those with the most elite credentials and other characteristics—male, white, wife at home—that defined law firm partners before the great period of change. By examining the continuity and change in the sorting of legal elites, we find evidence that the experience of a position in a corporate law firm now bestows advantages even for those who do not make partner. What was once deemed a failure—not making partner—is now a source of valued capital that leads to careers in in-house positions, boutique firms, the federal government, and a host of nonequity partner positions. We draw on thirteen years of lawyers’ career histories from the After the JD study, using the techniques of sequence analysis and qualitative interviews.

China’s juvenile justice system has grown and changed substantially since the 1980s. While considerable research focuses on institutional treatment of juvenile delinquents, little attention has been paid to the diversion processes and measures that allow troubled juveniles to be directed away from the formal justice system. Through a comparison with juvenile justice in the United States, this article aims to investigate the development of the juvenile diversion framework in China. We argue that despite their similar efforts to divert juvenile delinquents from traditional court proceedings, in practice China’s diversionary arrangements diverge from those of their US counterparts. Unlike in the United States, Chinese juvenile diversion does not operate according to welfarist or restorative models. Rather, juvenile diversion in China is a managerialism-driven scheme that rests on two key pillars: institutional diversion, which imposes punishment and control on juvenile offenders pursuant to their level of offending and dangerousness, and noninstitutional diversion, which revolves around risk-based management and correction through community-level interventions. We conclude that China’s distinctive sociolegal culture and political priorities have shaped a practice that appears to be at odds with the officially advertised narratives of the state’s juvenile justice policy.

What is the value of surrogate labor and risks, and how is it negotiated by participants as they contract within an unsettled baby market? This article presents novel data on compensation, fee, and bodily autonomy provisions formalized in surrogacy contracts, and the experiences of actors embedded in exchange relations, as they emerge in a contested reproductive market. It combines content analysis of a sample of thirty surrogacy contracts with 115 semi-structured interviews conducted in twenty states across the United States of parties to these agreements, attorneys who draft them, counselors, and agencies that coordinate matches between intended parents and surrogates. It analyzes the value of services and medical risks, such as loss of a uterus, selective abortion, and “carrier incapacity,” as they are encoded into agreements within an ambiguous field. Surrogacy is presented as an interactive social process involving law, markets, medicine, and a variety of cultural norms surrounding gender, motherhood, and work. Contracts have actual and symbolic power, legitimating transactions despite moral anxieties. Compensation transforms pregnancy into a job while helping participants make sense of the market and their “womb work” given normative flux. Contracts are deployed by professionals without informed policies that could enhance power and reduce potential inequalities.

Most scholarship addressing implementation gaps of violence against women (VAW) laws focuses on countries with high levels of violence in the lives of women—accompanied by weak policing and judicial responses. These studies tend to argue that the most egregious forms of political or social violence explain this gap. However, there has been little attention to countries with lower levels of gender-based violence and relatively responsive state institutions. We analyze the application of VAW laws in Costa Rica, with a focus on the impact of adjacent laws, or laws that are seemingly unrelated to VAW laws but are applied in tandem with and often in conflict with VAW laws. Based on a decade of fieldwork in Costa Rica, we argue that adjacent laws on land, labor, and immigration can be leveraged in ways that undermine the interpretation and implementation of VAW laws. These failures constitute legal violence: the normalized but cumulatively injurious effects of laws that can result in various forms of violence. While legal violence causes implementation gaps in almost every country, our case study reveals that the underlying sociolegal system upon which these laws rest contributes to a significant gap between VAW laws and practice.

To enhance the welfare of smallholder farmers, development agencies increasingly promote “value chain agriculture” where farmers partner with more powerful entities, such as corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to create new sources of economic value. Via a qualitative study of how small farmers negotiate with the buyers of retail and agribusiness corporations in India, this article explores why the promise of value creation can appear so elusive on the ground. It makes two primary contributions. For global value chain scholars, it illustrates how studying value chains “below” the level of the firm illuminates complex ways in which new pathways for economic development are constrained by actually existing local economies—and how these local economies, rather than easily replaced, shape what counts as a source of value for small farmers. For negotiation scholars, it illustrates how, in some contexts, an equitable distribution of risk and social relationships may need to precede anything we call value creation.

Through the mid-twentieth century, jurisprudents considered sociological jurisprudence to be one of the most influential theories of law in the United States. By end of the century, however, it had virtually disappeared. The publication of Roger Cotterrell’s Sociological Jurisprudence: Juristic Thought and Social Inquiry (2018) provides an occasion to examine what this theory of law was about, why it disappeared, and its prospects for revival. The topics covered in this essay are the circumstances surrounding the origin of sociological jurisprudence, the tenets of sociological jurisprudence, the successes of sociological jurisprudence, its relationship with sociology of law, its relationship with legal realism, its place in contemporary jurisprudence, and finally, the need to keep jurisprudence open.

American rights discourse makes it difficult to generate responsibilities for the well-being of the communities within which human personhood is formed. Gregory S. Alexander’s Property and Human Flourishing (2018) focuses on the obligations that property owners owe to the communities in which they are embedded. Drawing on a communitarian ontology—as opposed to atomist ontology—and writing in the spirit of Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and thinkers of the liberalism of flourishing, Alexander endorses human flourishing as the central ideal of the good life, and argues that ownership of property is justified insofar as it facilitates the opportunity of persons to live flourishing lives.

The second edition of Santi Romano’s book, The Legal Order, now appearing in its first English translation (2017), is a pioneer text of legal pluralism. Its interest lies in its extreme radicalism and in the fact that, although it is written by a lawyer, its argument has many important political implications and addresses core conceptual issues in contemporary sociolegal studies of legal pluralism. The social and political context of Romano’s book in early twentieth-century Italy is far from being solely of historical interest. Issues that surrounded his juristic thinking in its time resonate with important political and social issues of today.