This study analyzes prison admission and crime data to assess whether the penal system’s response to crime has continued to intensify since mass incarceration’s peak and whether the increasing use of prison in nonurban areas helps explain this trend. The findings show that penal intensity has continued to escalate despite falling crime rates and widespread efforts to reduce prison populations. Further, the justice system’s response to crime is most vigorous in nonurban, and especially rural, counties, where more felony arrests for all types of offenses result in a prison sentence. Although not new, this geographic difference has grown in recent years. While penal intensity thus varies notably within states, case outcomes also vary markedly across states. Comparative case studies of dynamics in a highly punitive state (Kentucky) and a less punitive state (Washington) show how formal law interacts with local dynamics not only by creating “statutory hammers” that are utilized by zealous prosecutors and judges but also by limiting the impact of aggressive prosecutorial practices on prison sentences.

The catastrophic failure of the prison system in the United States has prompted a shift in criminal punishment system rhetoric and policy toward reform. Numerous programs and initiatives facilitate reentry for the hundreds of thousands of individuals coming out of prison every year, but these and other reforms remain problematic. They do little to improve the social and material conditions of those attempting to reintegrate. By failing to question the social, historical, political, and economic conditions of criminal system problems, they reproduce the oppressive social conditions that they are intended to address. This article diagnoses several major issues with conventional reform efforts in rehabilitation and reentry scholarship and praxis and argues that what is needed is not further attempts to improve these reforms but, rather, an approach that considers these problems through an abolitionist lens. An abolitionist frame, I suggest, is particularly useful in articulating suggestions for change. I apply an abolitionist analysis to an examination of reentry, illustrating how abolitionism helps to diagnose problematic reentry reforms and how an abolitionist approach to reentry can address these issues in a more effective, profound, and enduring way.

This article examines why deportation and imprisonment for immigration offenses rose under presidential administrations that claimed to favor more “humane” approaches to immigration enforcement. I examine the politics of enforcement discretion on the US-Mexico border during the administrations of Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and Barack Obama (2009–17). Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I argue that the Clinton and Obama administrations took a punitive humanitarian approach to enforcement discretion aimed at punishing “illegal immigration” at the border while protecting “legal immigrants” with long-standing ties to the United States from deportation. The findings show that such an approach extended crime control to US-Mexico border enforcement. This blend of humanitarian and punitive approaches systematized criminal enforcement priorities and expanded the discretion of border agents to deport and imprison. Just as other scholars have shown how liberal reform contributed to the rise of the carceral state, this article shows how immigration policies that blended humanitarianism and security punished the very people such policies were designed to protect.

The state plays a key role in shaping worker precarity, and employers are key actors in mediating this process. While employers sometimes may act as willing extensions of the deportation machinery, they are also subjects of the immigration state. In this article, we highlight the impact of state-employer dynamics on migrant workers with Temporary Protected Status (TPS). These workers have only provisional permission to live and work in the United States, but are not tied to any single employer. Even though they are privileged over unauthorized workers and employer-sponsored guest workers, TPS holders experience their own brand of state-induced precarity. Their employers risk civil or criminal liability if they are not in compliance with work authorization requirements and must repeatedly navigate an unpredictable and confusing immigration bureaucracy. Drawing on interviews with 121 low-wage TPS workers and two dozen of their advocates in the New York City metropolitan area, our findings reveal that the intertwined coercive and bureaucratic arms of the immigration state together make hiring TPS workers a more risky and costly proposition for employers, thereby exacerbating the job insecurity that TPS workers already face due to an at-will employment regime that offers few protections against firing.

In 2014, the provincial government unveiled a new courthouse in Thunder Bay, Ontario, featuring a conference area designed to emulate an Anishinaabe roundhouse. The “Aboriginal Conference Settlement Suite” epitomizes efforts to support Indigenous justice within the criminal justice system. However, despite similar efforts in the past, the circumstances of Indigenous peoples in Canada have not improved. This ongoing commitment to legal solutions is emblematic of mainstream views of law as a problem-solving instrument. Notwithstanding awareness of its failings, law reformers remain dedicated to using law as a tool for social change. Employing a case study method focusing on the new courthouse, I challenge a prevailing wisdom that law reform outputs are manageable and in our control. I argue that similar to a courthouse, which is a concrete, physical structure as well as a symbol of justice, so too is the legal instrument both material and metaphorical, with concrete outcomes and symbolic forms. While treating law as a literal tool may give law reformers a longed-for sense of mastery, this approach belies law’s diffuse constitutive power and the various paradoxes in reformers’ actions. Accepting law’s dual nature is essential for candid and accurate assessments about the possibilities and limits of change through law.

A hybrid regime court faces a legitimacy paradox: an activist court risks attracting backlash from the incumbent, whereas a deferential court may undermine public trust. The Hong Kong courts, at least in the twenty or so years following handover, provide an example of courts successfully navigating the legitimacy paradox despite the conflicting expectations from political actors. This article draws on the experiences of the Hong Kong courts to better understand the legitimacy paradox. It identifies three tools that Hong Kong courts have used to maneuver through the paradox, namely (1) the differential treatment of cases according to political stakes; (2) the use of comparative jurisprudence; and (3) the commitment to procedural justice. Studying these techniques may provide relevant insights to courts in similarly constrained political environments as to how judicial legitimacy can be earned. The article also reflects on the institutional future of Hong Kong courts in light of the increasing polarization of Hong Kong society as a result of the anti-extradition bill protests and signs of greater interference from Mainland China.

Trademark law protects distinctive signs of products against unauthorized uses. It is a legal tool to enhance market efficiency by conveying information about the origin of goods to consumers. Trademarks are also carriers of cultural information about the manufacturers, their products, and their message to the consumers. Thus, trademarks provide an unexpected reflection on society. This article explores the history of trademark law in Mandate Palestine, from the enactment of the first law to the end of the mandate (1922–48) in three cumulative avenues. First, a legal history analysis is provided, which seeks to understand why the British imposed trademark law at the time and manner they chose and how it was received by the local communities. Second, an empirical study of trademark data is given that reveals why the original trademark registry did not survive and how it was reconstructed for the current study. Trademark data offer an understudied and rich resource indicating economic changes and the reception of the law. Third, a semiotic analysis is provided that examines the trademarks themselves, focusing on local trademarks. Nationality is the common thread in these inquiries. The research reveals the differential reception of the British trademark law, with the Jewish population embracing it and the Arab-Palestinian population being much less receptive to it. The Jewish traders often used trademarks to convey national Zionist messages.

The prominence of lawyers in the politics of modern state building has been recognized in both historical and theoretical scholarship. In Latin America, however, legal professionals were largely displaced from public governance by the mid-twentieth century. Using Chile as a case study, I argue that, beginning in the 1930s, the rise of the administrative state diminished the authority of elite lawyers who previously enjoyed a quasi-monopoly on statecraft. In addition to the emergence of professional competitors, lawyers lost political influence for two reasons: (1) a growing divergence between political and legal careers for law graduates and (2) internal and external constraints on the bar and the judiciary that limited the ability of legal actors to influence the political process. As a result, during a period when lawyers gained political sway in much of the world, their authority in public affairs dwindled in Chile.

Preemption is one of the most important legal doctrines for today’s progressives to understand because of its power to constrain progressive policymaking and social movement lawyering at the state and local level. By examining the detailed history of a decades-long campaign by the labor and environmental movements to improve working conditions in an industry at the heart of the global supply chain, Scott L. Cummings’s Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America’s Port (2018) provides a case study about the doctrine and impacts of preemption. The study also inspires lawyers and activists alike to reexamine core questions of factual relevance, representation and voice, and precedent.

The temporality of resistance is one of interregna. Resistance wins, loses, and draws, while old and new power relations continuously rise and fall, being entrenched and resurrected as they are contested and usurped. Just as power radiates from all over, from the state, law, other social institutions, and relationships, resistance is diffused across yet vested in individuals and groups, moving in solidarity through interconnected pasts, presents, and futures. “Interregna” thus resonates with contemporary theories about the multisited nature of power, but expands the scope of attention to temporal heterogeneity. It sees resistance as a great host crossing lands, seas, and times. Protests in this political moment are connected by their fury and determination to overcome injustice, as well as by histories and memories to struggles that came before. “Interregna” also keeps us alert to unknown wrongs that lie ahead, and the need to fight ceaselessly for progressive justice. Understanding resistance as interregna, we sharpen our appreciation for law and power, and the manner by which we study legal mobilization, legal consciousness, and social change.