This article provides a new account of employers' advantages over employees in federal employment discrimination cases. We analyze the effects of judicial deference, in which judges use institutionalized employment structures to infer nondiscrimination without scrutinizing those structures in any meaningful way. Using logistic regression to analyze a representative sample of judicial opinions in federal EEO cases during the first thirty‐five years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, we find that when judges uncritically use the presence of organizational structures to reason about whether discrimination occurred, employers are much more likely to prevail. This pattern is especially pronounced in opinions written by liberal judges. In light of these findings, we offer recommendations for judges, lawyers, and policy makers—including legal academics—who seek to improve the accuracy and efficacy of employment discrimination adjudications.

Through an examination of legislative debate and court opinions, this article illustrates that the French understanding of public order policing as a bulwark of freedom and national sovereignty deeply informed the development of (and contestation surrounding) the 2010 ban on all facial coverings in public. This ban notably includes the burqa or niqab, garments worn by a small minority of Muslim women in France. This article has two aims. The first is to expand on the sociolegal argument about the contested nature of rights protections and constitutional constraints on legislative authority by highlighting how a nation's legal culture can profoundly shape that contestation. The second aim of this article is to show, through a technique called legal archaeology, how longstanding French views on rights confront current European‐inspired alternative views that would give more weight to individualistic protections against state action than has traditionally been the case in France.

Since the law and society movement in the 1960s, the sociology of law in the United States has been dominated by a power/inequality approach. Based on a sociological distinction between the forms and substances of law, this article outlines a “powerless” approach to the sociology of law as a theoretical alternative to the mainstream power/inequality approach. Following Simmel and the Chicago School of sociology, this new approach analyzes the legal system not by its power relations and patterns of inequality, but by its social forms, or the structures and processes that constitute the legal system's spatial outlook and temporality. Taking a radical stance on power, this article is not only a retrospective call for social theory in law and society research, but also a progressive effort to move beyond US‐centric sociolegal scholarship and to develop new social science tools that explain a larger variety of legal phenomena across the world.

Prison privatization has generally been associated with developments in neoliberal punishment. However, relatively little is known about the specific impact of privatization on the daily life of prisoners, including areas that are particularly salient not just to debates about neoliberal penality, but the wider reconfiguration of public service provision and frontline work. Drawing on a study of values, practices, and quality of life in five private‐sector and two public‐sector prisons in England and Wales, this article seeks to compare and explain three key domains of prison culture and quality: relationships between frontline staff and prisoners, levels of staff professionalism (or jailcraft), and prisoners' experience of state authority. The study identifies some of the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of the public and private prison sectors, particularly in relation to staff professionalism and its impact on the prisoner experience. These findings have relevance beyond the sphere of prisons and punishment.

The aims of retributive or nonutilitarian sentencing are said to conflict with parole as part of a determinate sentencing framework. In this article, we claim that a nonutilitarian approach to punishment does not necessarily conflict with parole. In particular, by adopting core elements of Duff's framework of communicative sentencing, we argue that parole inherently holds a communicative meaning in the form of retributive whisper and can thus be reconciled with a nonutilitarian approach to punishment. In addition, we explore a way to enhance the communicative potential in the parole process and suggest that by recognizing and further incorporating the inherent communicative message in parole we can increase or maximize the board's communicative potential. Finally, we discuss some benefits that can emerge from adapting a communicative sentencing framework to the parole process.

We investigate the influence of subject matter expertise, opinion specialization, and judicial experience on the role of ideology in decision making in the courts of appeals in a generalized, as opposed to specialized, setting. We find that subject matter experts and opinion specialists are significantly more likely to engage in ideological decision making than their nonspecialist counterparts and that opinion specialization is a particularly potent factor in ideological decision making. Further, increased judicial experience has no effect on the conditional use of ideology. We discuss the potentially wide‐ranging implications of our findings for both theory and policy.

Detractors have long criticized the use of courts to achieve social change because judicial victories tend to provoke counterproductive political backlashes. Backlash arguments typically assert or imply that if movement litigators had relied on democratic rather than judicial politics, their policy victories would have been better insulated from opposition. We argue that these accounts wrongly assume that the unilateral decision by a group of movement advocates to eschew litigation will lead to a reduced role for courts in resolving the relevant policy and political conflicts. To the contrary, such decisions will often result in a policy field with judges every bit as active, but with the legal challenges initiated and framed by the advocates' opponents. We document this claim and explore its implications for constitutional politics via a counterfactual thought experiment rooted in historical case studies of litigation involving abortion and the right to die.

This article advocates for ethnographic and historical study of the political roots of corruption. Focusing on informal economies of Belarusian universities, it reexamines two theoretical propositions about corruption in autocracies. The first proposition is that authoritarianism breeds bureaucratic corruption; the second is that autocrats grant disloyal subjects corruption opportunities in exchange for political compliance. Using qualitative data, the author finds that autocracies can generate favorable as well as unfavorable preconditions for bureaucratic corruption. The author argues that lenient autocratic governance, characterized by organizational decoupling, creates favorable conditions for bureaucratic corruption. In contrast, consolidated autocracy, defined by rigid organizational controls, is unfavorable to such corruption. The author also concludes that in autocracies, disloyal populations may be cut off from rather than granted opportunities for bureaucratic corruption. These findings suggest that the relationship between autocratic governance and corruption is more complex than current studies are able to reveal due to their methodological limitations.

Lawyers who engage in misconduct can do substantial harm. To screen out “unfit” lawyers, bar examining authorities collect detailed personal information from bar applicants. The rationale for this “character and fitness” inquiry is to identify who is likely to become a problematic lawyer. Despite the history of discrimination associated with this inquiry and the highly personal information requested, there has been no rigorous test of whether such predictions are possible. This article examines the information disclosed by 1,343 Connecticut bar applicants and their subsequent disciplinary records. It reveals that while some bar application data are associated with an elevated risk of future discipline, the predictive power of the data is extremely low. Moreover, several variables are more strongly associated with less severe discipline than with more severe discipline. We argue that some of the causal mechanisms linking application data to subsequent discipline may have more to do with career trajectory than with an underlying propensity to engage in misconduct.

This article explores the role of emotion in the capital penalty‐phase jury deliberations process. It is based on the qualitative analysis of data from ninety video‐recorded four to seven person simulated jury deliberations that examined the influence of race on death sentencing outcomes. The analysis explores when and how emotions are expressed, integrated into the jury's sentencing process, and deployed in penalty‐phase decision making. The findings offer critical new insights into the role that emotion plays in influencing these legal judgments by revealing how jurors strategically and explicitly employ emotion in the course of deliberation, both to support their own positions and neutralize or rebut the opposing positions of others. The findings also shed light on the various ways that white male capital jurors utilize a panoply of powerful emotion‐based tactics to sway others to their position in a manner that often contributes to racially biased outcomes.

The implementation of criminal law involves formal law enforcement, education, and public outreach aimed at preventing criminal activity and providing services for victims. Historically, quantitative research on global trends has focused on a single policy dimension, potentially masking the unique factors that affect the diffusion of each policy dimension independently. Using an ordered‐probit model to analyze new human trafficking policy data on national prosecution, prevention, and victim‐protection efforts, we find that global ties and domestic interest groups matter more where international law is less defined. Although prosecution, mandated by the Trafficking Protocol, was relatively impervious to global ties and domestic interest groups, both trafficking prevention and victim protection were associated with these factors. Our findings also suggest that fear of repercussions is not a major driver of state actions to combat trafficking—neither ratification of the protocol nor levels of US aid were associated with greater implementation of antitrafficking measures.

There is little documentation about how nuisance property laws, which fine people for excessive 911 calls, affect victims of domestic violence. In St. Louis, we found that police and prosecutors believe that the law benefits victims of domestic violence by providing them with additional services. By contrast, advocates for domestic violence victims believe that the law undermines battered women's access to housing and discourages them from calling 911. Using qualitative data, we analyze how the organizational structures and dynamics within which each group works give rise to different stocks of working knowledge. We conclude that law enforcement officials are unaware of these harms because women's voices and experiences are marginalized during the enforcement process. This research reveals mechanisms through which law enforcement policies reinforce gender inequality, and illustrates some ways in which gender relations and power come into play in what, on their surface, appear to be gender‐neutral laws.

Increasingly punitive attempts to curb prescription drug misuse constitute an expansion of the “War on Drugs” into mainstream medicine, leaving frontline health care providers caught between competing institutional logics of treatment and punishment. This study brings an institutional approach to frontline work by empirically examining how pharmacists manage discrepant logics while deciding whether to provide abusable medications and devices. Analyses of semistructured interviews with seventy‐one retail pharmacists in the United States reveal that pharmacists manage discrepant logics by engaging in two gatekeeping processes—medical and legal—that lend themselves to different identities, epistemologies, field foci, patterns of action, and interpersonal orientations. Pharmacists' decisions have implications for patients' access to care and exposure to the criminal justice system. Findings advance theories of frontline work by systematically examining the interplay between elements of institutional environments and decision making and yield policy considerations as states increasingly monitor patients and providers through prescription monitoring programs.

Debates over whether transnational and international legal institutions are fair, effective, or legitimate responses to corruption of local public officials have an important empirical dimension. We use case studies to examine whether foreign legal institutions serve as fair, effective, and legitimate complements to local anticorruption institutions. We refer to this set of claims as the “institutional complementarity theory.” The first case study centers on proceedings concerning bribes paid by subsidiaries of Siemens AG, a German company, to obtain and retain a contract to provide national identity cards for the Argentine government. The second case study examines events stemming from overbilling in the construction of a courthouse in Brazil. Analysis of these cases suggests that the institutional complementary theory is credible. At the same time, the findings suggest that local institutions have greater potential, and foreign institutions have more limited potential, than the theory assumes.

A central paradox defines the scholarship of criminal justice and race: while racial disparities manifest throughout the criminal justice system, it is often portrayed as race‐neutral. We identify two central paradigm shifts: one in penology (that focuses on risk) and one in racial ideology (that focuses on colorblindness) that create a perfect storm; criminal justice apparatuses produce an illusion of racial neutrality while exacerbating racial disproportionality. We join an expanding list of scholars encouraging discourse that engages critical race theory on an empirical level and import this approach to the consideration of race within the criminal justice system. We identify issues with the conceptualization and operationalization of race as a variable within criminal justice research and recommend that scholars consider the mutual constitution of race and criminal justice. That is, scholarship must examine and empirically measure how race and criminal justice institutions actively form and inform each other.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country to grant legal rights to nature. In this article, I examine how this happened. I show that while proponents of nature's rights acted during a key political moment, their efforts were successful due to the presence of environmentalist social movements that elevated the environmental agenda at the national level during prior decades, and due to the power of indigenous organizations and their call to recognize Ecuador as a “plurinational” polity, demanding respect for indigenous territories and ways of life and incorporating politicized versions of indigenous beliefs about the environment. The study considers the consequences of mobilization for legal innovation and institutional change, and shows the complexity of struggles over the environment in the global South. It is based on research at the Ecuadorian National Legislative Assembly archive, semistructured interviews with respondents involved in the politics of nature and the constitutional assembly, and secondary historical sources.

Scholars of legal mobilization have long explored how litigation is used as a resource for social and political change. While most studies focus on the actions of private groups, this article considers law enforcement as a form of legal mobilization. Employing a case study of recent pharmaceutical litigation, this article examines how prosecutors have mobilized the law to reshape corporate responsibilities in the prescription drug industry. Prosecutors' litigation campaigns have forced changes in organizational practices, expanded the scope of the conflict over pharmaceutical industry actions, and established new legal norms that have spread throughout the political system. This form of prosecutor‐led legal mobilization has occurred in other contexts as well, including gun control and mortgage lending. In addition to indicating how lawyers within the state can engage in a form of cause lawyering, the government litigation explored in this article illustrates both the instrumental and constitutive power of the law.

Scholars are increasingly interested in exploring ways to strengthen the rule of law in authoritarian states—especially when deeper political reforms are not attainable. The article contributes to this discussion by revisiting the story of the emergence of the so‐called socialist legality in the communist states of Eastern Europe. Using the historical record from Poland, the author demonstrates a previously unnoticed, yet pivotal, role of legal professionals in facilitating socialist legality's rise to prominence. Using the lenses of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of fields, the article chronicles the evolving dynamic between the legal profession, the authoritarian regime, and society. These observations challenge conventional explanations of the emergence of the rule of law in nondemocratic conditions.

Most studies of comparative judicial politics suggest that judicial autonomy emerges from democratic competition, but despite its authoritarian political system, China has introduced reforms that increase merit‐based competition, transparency, and modest professional autonomy in local courts. Variations in judicial selection procedures across urban China reflect differences in local markets for professional legal services: when mid‐ranking judges can easily find lucrative local employment as lawyers, court leaders strategically reform appointment and promotion mechanisms to retain these young, but experienced, judges. These findings are based on nearly fifteen months of in‐country fieldwork, conducted between 2012 and 2014, including forty‐nine interviews with judges across three different cities: Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chengdu. Employing the subnational comparative method, this article not only builds theory regarding the legal profession's role in authoritarian states, but also offers new empirical detail regarding the selection, performance evaluation, and behavior of judges in urban China.

Although compulsory, many people treat jury duty as voluntary. This article examines the conceptual and empirical links between participating in voluntary activity and stated willingness to serve on a jury. We also consider the role of engaging in other normative behaviors. Analysis of 1,304 US citizens in the Survey of Texas Adults showed an initial relationship between volunteering and willingness to serve, net of personal resources, prior jury service, and prosocial attitudes. However, indicators of normative activities (voting, contacting elected officials, keeping up with medical appointments, and avoiding bars) largely eliminated this relationship. People who volunteered some, but not too much, were more willing; an analysis of domains of volunteering showed that engaging in public service work predicted willingness. Results suggest that the public service and duty‐based nature of jury participation should be emphasized to understand willingness to serve and to consider novel ways to increase summons responses.