Although more than 60,000 workers formally charge their employers with unlawful sex or race employment discrimination annually, fewer than one in five charges results in outcomes favorable to the complainant. Building on sociolegal and organizational theory, this study examines how employing organizations avoid unfavorable discrimination-charge outcomes. Using EEO-1 establishment reports matched to discrimination charge data provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I assess the effect of employers' legal experience, resources, and indicators of legal compliance on the likelihood that complainants receive favorable charge outcomes, benefits, monetary settlements, and policy change mandates. In general, I find that legal experience, establishment size, and indicators of legal compliance insulate employers from unfavorable charge outcomes. However, in situations where employers are willing to settle claims, legally experienced establishments are more likely to pay monetary damages and receive mandates to change their workplace policies.

This article addresses two basic questions. First, it examines whether incarceration has a lasting impact on health functioning. Second, because blacks are more likely than whites to be exposed to the negative effects of the penal system—including fractured social bonds, reduced labor market prospects, and high levels of infectious disease—it considers whether the penal system contributes to racial health disparities. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and both regression and propensity matching estimators, the article empirically demonstrates a significant relationship between incarceration and later health status. More specifically, incarceration exerts lasting effects on midlife health functioning. In addition, this analysis finds that, due primarily to disproportionate rates of incarceration, the penal system plays a role in perpetuating racial differences in midlife physical health functioning.

Past research indicates that front-line criminal justice workers are the critical players in determining whether innovations in penal policy are realized. Recent attempts to understand the diversity in the application of the penal harm movement have, however, sidestepped the primary audience of these policies, the population of convicted offenders. This article uses data from two prisons to examine the effects of correctional officers on women prisoners' adjustment to prison life. Using regression models and interview data, we find that correctional officer behavior has a profound impact on women's ability to adjust to prison, and this effect is largely independent of the prisoners' characteristics and the institutions in which they are housed. On a theoretical level, the findings speak to recent calls to examine the background and foreground of penal culture. On a practical level, they highlight the need to understand the environments from which women are emerging, not just the communities into which they are released.

Traditional views hold that citizens' attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are responsive to systematic and periodic national-level political factors. In particular, we show that national elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using a logistic regression model and diachronic data from Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, we find that attitudes toward the police and the national government are linked, and this linkage is responsive to the influence of national election campaigns in varying degrees. In addition, we find that attitudes toward the Mexican police are sensitive to partisan changes in the composition of the national political government. We find no such sensitivity in the police attitudes of Costa Rican and U.S. citizens. This suggests that police attitudes are not only affected by the performance of the national political government but also by the character (consolidated versus unconsolidated) of the national political government. In short, police attitudes in new democracies are an indication of the unconsolidated nature of the state apparatus.

Through a case study of the early American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), this article examines the empirical ramifications of constitutional scholars' recent exhortations to “take the Constitution away from the courts” in order to promote democratic deliberation about constitutional meaning. While it is now one of the most prominent examples of a litigation-based interest group, the ACLU began its existence demonstrating a commitment to constitutionalism outside the courts. Through coding a decade's worth of meeting minutes and examining archival sources, I demonstrate that the ACLU's mounting unpopularity rendered extrajudicial politics impossible, precipitating the ACLU's shift toward litigation. The ACLU's move toward litigation, despite its early devotion to political activism outside the courts, suggests that it is not always possible for political actors to make constitutional arguments without courts. Furthermore, the ACLU's use of courts to publicize and dramatize its constitutional arguments demonstrates that litigation may actually promote popular deliberation about constitutional meaning. These political realities both highlight and contradict two empirical assumptions underlying arguments about the normative desirability of restricting courts' involvement in constitutional politics. First, the state is not a neutral arena in which all political actors are equally free to pursue their constitutional visions through majoritarian processes. Second, courts may facilitate (rather than hinder) popular deliberation about constitutional questions.

All the recent attention to the so-called obesity epidemic provides a fascinating context for understanding interactions between civil rights consciousness and the ordinary lives of fat people, who both deploy and resist the ideological formations that make up our most basic presumptions about who deserves rights protections. This study of fat acceptance advocates asks how stigmatized people who are excluded from legal protections muster descriptions of themselves as deserving inclusion in antidiscrimination laws. Analysis of in-depth interviews with fat acceptance advocates from around the United States reveals elaborate techniques for managing social life and enacting legality that coexist with more narrowly framed and contradictory arguments for rights. Culturally dominant logics for reasoning about what persons deserve prefigure what is possible to say in defense of fat people, in many ways even for fat advocates themselves. And yet in their struggles to overcome the limitations of the presumptions they are given, fat advocates reveal deep tensions in our antidiscrimination ethics and hint at a new way to think about difference.