This study examines how the professional work of elite corporate lawyers is constructed by influence from different types of clients. The data presented include interviews with 24 lawyers from six elite corporate law firms in China and the author's participant-observation in one of the firms. For these elite Chinese corporate law firms, foreign corporations, state-owned enterprises, and private enterprises constitute their extremely diversified client types. Accordingly, lawyers' work becomes flexible and adaptive to accommodate the different demands of the clients. Meanwhile, client influence on lawyers' professional work is mediated by the division of labor within the corporate law firm: whereas partners have solid control over the process of diagnosis, inference, and treatment and thus enjoy a high degree of professional autonomy, associates are largely stripped of this cultural machinery in the workplace, and their work becomes vulnerable to client influence. As a result, client influence on professional work appears to decrease with a lawyer's seniority.

This article critically examines the development of legal consciousness among legal aid plaintiffs in Shanghai. It is based on 16 months of research at a large legal aid center and in-depth interviews with 50 plaintiffs. Chinese legal aid plaintiffs come to the legal process with high expectations about the possibility of protecting their rights; however, they also have only a vague and imprecise knowledge of legal procedure and their actual codified rights. Through this process of legal mobilization, plaintiffs' legal consciousness changes in two separate dimensions: changes in one's feelings of efficacy and competency vis-à-vis the law, and changes in one's perception/evaluation of the legal system. Put another way, the first dimension is “How well can I work the law?” and the second is “How well does the law work?” In this study I observe positive changes in feelings of individual efficacy and competency that are combined with more negative evaluations/perceptions of the legal system in terms of its fairness and effectiveness. The positive feelings of efficacy and voice provided by the legal process encourage labor dispute plaintiffs in the post-dispute period to plan new lawsuits and to help friends and relatives with their legal problems. Disenchantment with the promises of the legal system does not lead to despondency, but to more critical, informed action. This study provides new evidence on the nature of China's developing legal system with a focus on the social response to the state-led “rule of law” project.

This study considers whether U.S. Supreme Court justices use opinion content strategically, to enhance the legitimacy of case outcomes. This hypothesis is tested by examining the Court's use of rhetorical sources, which are references to esteemed figures and texts that corroborate the justices' views. The data are consistent with the position that justices use rhetorical sources strategically, citing them when the legitimacy of their actions is lowest, such as when they are overturning precedent, invalidating state or federal law, or issuing directives from a divided bench. The study also tests several other explanations for the use of these sources, such as legal considerations, the justices' ideologies, and efficiency concerns.

Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search-and-seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.

In the early 1980s, Sebba (1980) explored the victimological and criminological dimensions of German Holocaust reparations, utilizing a broad definition of victimization similar to Mendelsohn's (1976) earlier framing of this notion, which included victims of genocide and mass violence. Since this time, scant attention has been paid to the victimology of state crime, and even less to the victimological implications of genocide and mass violence. This is unfortunate since critical victimological lessons can be drawn from the study of the victims of genocide and mass violence. In this article, we focus on the post–World War II monetary reparations, or “compensation,” demands made against the West German state by Jewish and “Gypsy” survivors of Nazi state-sponsored violence. Through a comparative analysis of these two cases, we seek to illustrate the organizational, social, and discursive conditions that either enabled or obstructed victim mobilization and, in so doing, to develop critical tools for better understanding “victim movements” and the trauma narratives they construct.

This exploratory article relies upon a historical-interpretive approach to understanding the relationship between legal narrative and popular consciousness in particular historical moments, focusing especially on “troubled times,” in which the legitimacy of a hegemonic worldview embodied in law comes under challenge from a newly ascendant ideology in the popular domain. To discern the nature of that relationship and its implications, I offer a three-pronged analysis, drawing on two original data sets. Initially, each data set is analyzed individually to elaborate the nature of, and changes in, (1) representations of homosexuals circulating in popular culture, and (2) constructions of homosexuals in defendants' narratives in “homosexual advance” homicide cases between 1946 and 2003. Findings from these two analyses are thereafter combined to explore the relationship between the two constructions of homosexuals across that time period. In combination, these three analyses provide empirical evidence that, rather than mirroring changes in popular discourse about homosexuality, the changes revealed in the defense narratives actually opposed them. I use these findings to argue that, in what Swidler (1986) has called “unsettled times,” ideological pluralism is pronounced and may be discerned in the complex and sometimes counterintuitive relationships that exist within and between legal narrative and popular discourse.

The U.S. courts consistently have upheld the constitutionality of laws regarding mandatory drug testing policies in the workplace and schools; these policies were designed to detect individuals' drug use that could compromise public safety. Yet looking at the uses of drug test results in another setting—the justice system—reveals one aspect that goes largely unaddressed in these laws and prior research on drug testing: the organizational context surrounding the administration of drug tests that shapes how their results are understood. In response, this article uses ethnographic methods to analyze the ways that staff at a juvenile drug court in southern California interprets drug test results. The article demonstrates that the staff's understandings of drug testing results involve interactional and institutional processes, dependent upon meanings constructed and situated in local organizational contexts.