Public recourse to vigilante self-help has often been attributed to a lack of effective state intervention; less attention has been given to the character of this intervention. Using the Tylerian procedural justice perspective, I argue in this article that perceived procedural injustice contributes to increased public support for violent self-help mechanisms such as vigilante violence. The current study tests this theoretical argument using survey data of 374 residents of Accra, Ghana. The results show that age, education, and police trustworthiness were the most significant predictors of support for vigilante self-help. The impacts of procedural fairness were found to be embraced within police trustworthiness, but perceptions of police effectiveness and experience of police corruption were not statistically significant predictors of vigilante support.

This article examines a widely publicized corporate accountability and human rights case filed by Burmese plaintiffs and human rights litigators in 1996 under the Alien Tort Claims Act in U.S. courts, Doe v. Unocal, in conjunction with the three main theoretical approaches to analyzing how law may matter for broader social change efforts: (1) legal realism, (2) Critical Legal Studies (CLS), and (3) legal mobilization. The article discusses interactions between Doe v. Unocal and grassroots Burmese human rights activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, including intersections with corporate accountability activism. It argues that a transnationally attuned legal mobilization framework, rather than legal realist or CLS approaches, is most appropriate to analyze the political opportunities and indirect effects of Doe v. Unocal and similar litigation in the context of neoliberal globalization. Further, this article argues that human rights discourse may serve as a common vocabulary and counterhegemonic resource for activists and litigators in cases such as Doe v. Unocal, contrary to overarching critiques of such discourse that emphasize only its hegemonic potentials in global governance regimes.

Under what circumstances do courts act in ways that challenge the political hegemony of the military in countries with weak democratic institutions? This article addresses this question by focusing on a critical case of judicial activism in Turkey. It argues that lower courts unexpectedly can be centers of judicial activism that contributes to expansion of civil liberties and restrictions on arbitrary state power when the high judiciary supports the political status quo. This is because lower courts provide greater access to legal mobilization pursued by civil society actors. At the same time, judicial activism in lower courts is sustainable only when political power is distributed among elites with conflicting interests, and the civilian government offers support and protection to activist members of the judiciary.

Law and society scholars have theorized about the link between capital punishment and the hegemony of individualism, but few offer empirical investigations to illustrate how individualism makes capital punishment possible (and vice versa) in the contemporary United States. In order to fill this gap, we analyze the legal and human service records that were compiled in the construction of one executable subject, Daniel Farnsworth. Using a critical discourse approach, we look at what was said and not said about Daniel in the records created by various helping agencies. In our analysis, we demonstrate how the helping agencies involved in Daniel's life repeatedly relied on an individuating psychological paradigm that led them to produce decontextualized catalogs of his actions and characteristics. Next, we illustrate how these pathologizing accounts were, ironically, later invoked in court in the name of preserving his life. Finally, we explain how “helping” discourses, along with the rules that regulate capital defense practice, straightjacket defense attorneys into reinforcing individualism in this context.

Based on an ethnographic study of courtroom interactions in the bilingual (Chinese/English) common law system in Hong Kong, this article investigates how language plays a constitutive role in shaping the ways people use, argue, and think about law. While the use of English in Hong Kong prescribes by default the supposedly universal speech act of statement-making, the presence of Cantonese allows local speech acts to be brought into the courtrooms. Two local speech acts, “catching fleas in words” and “speaking bitterness,” are discussed. The findings of this study suggest that by studying the local practices and beliefs in postcolonial settings, researchers can gain insights into the complex ways in which Anglo American–style legal institutions are reconstituted.

Why do some business firms and not others work hard to advance regulatory values such as environmental protection and comply with regulations? Previous research indicates that business firms are influenced in that regard by a number of variables—not merely the perceived likelihood of legal punishment but also the risk of negative reactions by societal actors (which we call “social license pressures”) and the intensity of managers' commitment to norms of law-abidingness and environmentalism. This article reports on a study of control of diesel emissions in the trucking industry, a highly competitive market with many small firms, mobile pollution sources, expensive “best control technologies,” and weak regulatory demands. In contrast to findings in studies of large firms, we found that social license pressures on small trucking firms are minimal. Trucking companies' environmental performance—good and bad—flows from managers' economic choices, which are influenced by their particular market niche. In such highly competitive, small-firm market contexts, these findings imply, significant improvement in environmental performance is not likely without strong direct regulatory pressures.