The 1876 British Cruelty to Animals Act introduced an unprecedented administrative system to supervise any experiment “calculated to give pain” to a living animal. The act, which was in force for a hundred years, established a tight system of control over animal experimentation, including a small, but vigorous, inspectorate. This article explores the relations between bureaucracy and the production of knowledge through the correspondences, memos, and notes taken by two principal inspectors under the act. The inspectors belonged to the worlds of both law and science. Coming from within the scientific profession, their close ties to medical social circles not only evoked critique but also helped them fulfill their tasks and gain access to research laboratories. Archival records examined here for the first time show that, although the inspectors downplayed animals’ pain in physiological laboratories, the inspectorate played an important role in shaping the experimental space and practice, thus facilitating the production of “ethical scientific facts.” The inspectors’ work modeled the new legal regime of animal experimentation regulation, making them indispensable agents in the act’s coproduction of knowledge and public order.

The right to privacy has long been regarded as a liberal progressive principle, one that guarantees gender-based equality and liberty in the domain of reproductive rights. Since the US Supreme Court’s renowned articulation of privacy in Roe v. Wade, privacy’s opponents have condemned the right as an illegitimate judicial invention with no basis in the Constitution. This article addresses the puzzle of why a coalition of Christian conservative legal organizations, conservative foundations, Trump administration officials, Republican party lawmakers, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists has assembled to redefine the right to privacy in service of anti-transgender politics. While much attention has been paid to the proliferation of religious liberty-based challenges to the rights of sexual and gender minorities, these accounts miss how central the fight to reassociate privacy has become in conflicts waged in state and federal courts, city and state legislatures, and ballot referendum campaigns. Although this coalition eschews any mention of Roe or reproductive rights, it does adopt a substantive due process-based interpretation of privacy’s mandate despite the typical conservative disdain for that doctrine. Additionally, the coalition frames its project as one that balances competing rights claims by defending (cis) women’s rights against allegedly lopsided trans-inclusive reforms.

Drawing upon an analysis of congressional records and media coverage from 1981 to 1996, this article examines the growth of mass immigration detention. It traces an important shift during this period: while detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative that was received with skepticism by the legislature, Congress was ultimately responsible for entrenching the system over objections from the agency. As we reveal, a critical component of this evolution was a transformation in Congress’s perception of asylum seekers. While lawmakers initially decried their detention, they later branded them as dangerous. Lawmakers began describing asylum seekers as criminals or agents of infectious diseases in order to justify their detention, which then cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more broadly. Our analysis suggests that they may have emphasized the dangerousness of asylum seekers to resolve the dissonance between their theoretical commitments to asylum and their hesitance to welcome newcomers. In addition to this distinctive form of cognitive dissonance, we discuss a number of other implications of our research, including the ways in which the new penology framework figured into the changing discourse about detaining asylum seekers.

In the 1960s, farmers pressed trespass charges against aid workers providing assistance to agricultural laborers living on the farmers’ private property. Some of the first court decisions to address these types of trespass, such as the well-known and frequently taught State v. Shack (1971), limited the property rights of farmers and enabled aid workers to enter camps where migrants lived. Yet there was a world before Shack, a world in which farmers welcomed onto their land rural religious groups, staffed largely by women from the local community, who provided services to migrant workers. From the 1940s through the 1960s, federal, state, and local law left large gaps in labor protections and government services for migrant agricultural laborers in Michigan. In response, church women created rural safety nets that mobilized local generosity and provided aid. This article uses Michigan as a case study to argue that these informal safety nets also policed migrant morality, maintained rural segregation, and performed surveillance of community outsiders, thereby serving the farmers’ goals of having a reliable and cheap labor force—ultimately strengthening the economic and legal structures that left agricultural workers vulnerable.

Advocates have long observed that sexual minority women are treated less favorably than sexual minority men under US asylum law. However, there has been little empirical examination of these claims in a US context. We offer the first systematic comparative empirical analysis of 199 asylum decisions for cisgender sexual minorities. Using quantitative metrics to contextualize in-depth qualitative analysis, we show that even when cisgender sexual minority men and women face very similar types of violence, women’s claims are adjudicated differently. This is particularly stark in courts’ treatment of sexual violence but is also evident in determinations of generalized persecution and individuals’ sexualities. When women attempt to use laws that are structured around straight, white, Western male perspectives and experiences, their pathways are limited and sometimes nonexistent. Although the flexibility in this area of asylum law has allowed many types of new claims, these changes have mostly benefited those assigned male at birth, and this surface malleability has ultimately worked to maintain law as a regulatory structure. Even with seemingly progressive changes in asylum law, the law itself continues to uphold race, gender, and sexuality as durable social structures and does little to ameliorate inequalities along these axes of social difference.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program provides qualifying undocumented immigrant youth with significant benefits. These benefits exist in a state of tension because they are temporary, making the status of DACA recipients precarious. In this article we draw on survey and interview data collected with DACA recipients in Colorado, along with community stakeholder interviews and observations to examine the liminally legal experience of recipients, both before and after Donald Trump’s announced intention to terminate the program. Focusing on their experiences of precarity across educational, economic, and emotional spheres, we document the negative and lasting consequences that the loss of DACA status would have for them. Given the rapidly shifting legal context of the DACA program, we argue that liminal legality varies in intensity based on political context and place. While undocumented young adults are acutely aware of the uncertainty of this moment, we also show how they are demonstrating resilience in the face of increasingly harmful immigration policies. The liminal legality of DACA status, which has worsened in the recent political context, underscores the urgent need for a permanent legislative solution.

The standard paradigm of contracting assumes that parties will revise subsequent contracts if a court interpretation of a clause does not reflect their intent. This assumption, however, often does not match behavior—particularly, in boilerplate contracts. We examine the aftermath of an (in)famous 2016 case, Wilmington Savings Fund v. Cash America, to unpack possible reasons for this mismatch between theory and practice. We find evidence of a phenomenon in contracts that involves sophisticated parties who are nevertheless not represented by their own lawyers, lack full awareness of the fine print of the contractual terms, and, having devoted little attention to them, may be eclectic as to their meaning when they enter into these contracts. In these contracts, which we call contracts of inattention, a gap between lawyers’ understanding of a provision and the understanding of market participants is prone to emerge. The potential for such gaps has implications for how courts should interpret contracts of inattention and for how market participants will react to court rulings.

A substantial body of scholarly research has examined decision-making in domestic high courts, but international judicial behavior remains relatively poorly understood. Building on research that uses judges’ career background as a proxy for their motivations at the European Court of Human Rights, we deploy a new measure of judicial career backgrounds and a new dataset of the Court’s free expression decisions. We combine quantitative analysis of judicial votes with qualitative analysis of judges’ signed dissenting opinions to advance existing understandings of the Court’s decision-making. We show that former diplomats are less likely to support contested free expression claims than their colleagues with different career backgrounds. In their published opinions, former diplomats are more likely to voice concerns about the objectionable nature of particular speech acts and to call for broad judicial deference to state restrictions on such speech. By contrast, judges with prior service in domestic government roles, as well as judges with career backgrounds outside of government, exhibit greater tolerance of objectionable speech, greater willingness to impose European-wide standards, and more frequent invocation of extra-European legal standards. Our findings contribute to broader debates about the influence of individual-level preferences on judicial behavior in international courts.

In 1976, the US Supreme Court established that incarcerated people have a constitutional right to health care, ratifying lower court decisions. Corresponding professionalization and standardization initiatives included the advent of third-party certifications of individual correctional health care (CHC) practitioners. Drawing on historical evidence about CHC reforms and contemporary data on certifications, incarcerated people’s lawsuits, and incarcerated people’s mortality rates, this study assesses relationships between certifications and key outcomes of incarceration. We find that corrections actors tend to adopt certifications when directly threatened by elevated rates of litigation in their states. This finding suggests that corrections actors are legally reactive, responding to filed lawsuits’ salient threat, rather than legally proactive, attempting to manage risk through anticipatory certification adoption. While early standardization and professionalization interventions reflected the legally proactive logic, our results indicate that contemporary corrections actors tend to “wait and see” about legal liability. Barriers to settlements or court rulings favoring incarcerated people—particularly the Prison Litigation Reform Act—help explain this tendency. Lawsuits’ observed influence on standardization and professionalization offer some support for litigation’s capacity to impel changes; litigation’s failure to predict mortality, however, gives pause regarding this capacity’s extent.

How do legal strategies at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) vary among activists in highly asymmetrical social positions? Social scientists have demonstrated that legal mobilization raises the pressure on states to provide broader minority accommodation. While this may be true, such outcome-oriented studies overlook the fact that judicial mobilization is itself deeply imbued with inequalities and divergent interests among diverse activists. We lack comparative studies to examine how such differences play out in litigation. Drawing on a qualitative in-depth study among Sikh, Muslim, Catholic, Evangelical, and secular advocacy groups involved in religious freedom disputes at the ECtHR, this article argues that claims making often is a balancing act between legal power relations and extra-legal commitments, which leads to variation in activists’ leverage to challenge legal marginalization. First, hostile legal environments discourage more easily activists with weaker transnational connections who are in vulnerable domestic positions. Second, while the most marginalized readily seek to fit identity narratives into dominant legal frames of religion, more powerful actors can target the core of legal principles and power distribution within the legal field as such. Even when unsuccessful in judicial outcomes, they might affect broader political and legal debates.

Critical migration studies emerged to trace how restrictive immigration contexts contribute to conditions of migrant “illegality” and deportability. More recently, researchers have turned to examine diversity in migrants’ experiences, revealing how migrant “illegality” and deportability can take varied forms based on different social factors, including migrants’ immigration status, developmental stage, ethno-racial background, gender, and nationality. Yet, despite increasingly nuanced and contextualized accounts of migrants’ lived experiences, the psychology of migrant “illegality” remains under-theorized, as we lack general concepts and frameworks to explain how deportability shapes, and is shaped by, migrants’ psychosocial lives. This article introduces such a framework by drawing upon findings from two ethnographic studies with undocumented migrants in Canada and the United States. Observing common psychosocial patterns in both groups, I propose cycles of deportability as a framework to capture how migrant “illegality” develops at the psychosocial level through repeated occurrences of status-related stressors, which produce both acute and chronic fears that further require distinct agencies and coping strategies. Next, I examine differences in migrants’ cycles of deportability based on their national context and immigrant generation. I conclude by discussing how this framework can help consolidate previous research findings and guide future psychological and critical migration studies.