Research informed by sociological neoinstitutionalism often frames organizational reactions to legal norms as either loose coupling, where formal legal commitments are only weakly aligned with actual practices, or tight coupling, where strong internal or external compliance pressures drive close alignment. This article introduces a third pattern – contentious coupling – where some organizational members attempt to realign practices with legal commitments, but these very efforts provoke pushback from others, resulting in substantive yet constrained success. This paradox is key to understanding the widespread yet limited effects of legal rights. I illustrate contentious coupling by examining how international human rights law has shaped solitary confinement reform in Taiwan. While hierarchical enforcement led by rights advocates and policymakers has successfully reduced prolonged solitary confinement, it has also alienated frontline correctional officers by triggering a sense of relative deprivation and perception of hypocrisy, encapsulated in their complaints of a “human rights upsurge.” In response, these officers engage in two forms of passive resistance – formalistic care and resistance spillover – both of which undermine the authority of human rights and hinder their capacity to transform correctional culture.

This article engages in a theoretical exercise, tackling an intentionally provocative question: is there such a thing as too much access to justice? Conventional wisdom suggests that barriers to access to justice ought to be low. Countless reform efforts put in place throughout the world have sought to expand access to justice and strengthen judicial institutions. What happens when access to these institutions is expanded? Who takes advantage of that access? Who is left behind? Weaving together scholarship on the unintended consequences of legal reforms and empirical examples from access to justice experiments in Canada, China, Colombia, India, Russia, South Africa, and the United States, this article shows how lowering material barriers to access to justice can: (1) increase strain on the legal system, (2) raise but fail to live up to expectations about the possibilities claim-making, (3) reinforce existing inequalities, and (4) offer limited and perhaps inadequate solutions.

Kwalitatieve interviews onder 100 verdachten in Nederlandse strafzaken bieden inzicht in de vraag of ervaren procedurele rechtvaardigheid ertoe doet voor verdachten en, zo ja, welke componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid voor hen van belang zijn. Het epistemologische vertrekpunt van dit onderzoek verschilt van de kwantitatieve studies die het onderzoeksveld domineren, doordat dit onderzoek nagaat welke componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid respondenten eventueel zelf ter sprake brengen in plaats van respondenten te vragen naar vooraf bepaalde componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid. De grote meerderheid van de respondenten bracht zelf kwesties ter sprake die met procedurele rechtvaardigheid te maken hebben. Zes componenten vormden de kern van hun rechtvaardigheidspercepties: (1) informatie waarop beslissingen zijn gebaseerd, (2) bejegening, (3) gepaste aandacht, (4) neutraliteit, (5) inspraak en (6) zorgvuldigheid. Hoewel deze componenten overeenkomen met de literatuur over procedurele rechtvaardigheid, noemden respondenten sommige componenten vaker – en andere juist minder vaak – dan men op basis van de literatuur zou verwachten. In het bijzonder speelt neutraliteit een belangrijke rol in de Nederlandse rechtbankcontext die hier werd onderzocht.

Though the use of court documents as data is widespread within US sociolegal scholarship, their use remains surprisingly undertheorized as a methodological practice. This article, therefore, asks, what differentiates court materials from other forms of documentary data, and how do these attributes impact claimsmaking in law and society scholarship? Drawing on varied empirical examples from existing scholarship, we uncover five distinctive attributes: their multitemporality, their dialogic nature, the multiple truths they house, their multivocality, and their social productivity. Considering these attributes, we argue that court documents unite our diverse field of scholarship in two important ways. First, as an essential output of the legal system, they are arguably “our” data, shaping law and society as we know it today. Second, they both reify and obscure the power dynamics that make social inequality so durable, helping inequality appear “just.” Despite their underexploited promise for theory-building in sociolegal research, we also discuss the practical, epistemic, and ethical pitfalls to their use. Ultimately, ignoring these rich yet complex documents is to our field’s analytic peril.

Critical Race Theory (CRT) can be understood as an attempt to examine how race and racism are central rather than peripheral to law and legal thinking. Rather than viewing the long and ongoing story of race in American law as a series of unfortunate aberrations to an otherwise fair and impartial legal system, CRT sees racial subordination and the marginalization of other disempowered groups as foundational to how law and democracy are organized and function in society. With this intervention comes other commitments such as rejecting law’s presumed neutrality; a dissatisfaction with traditional Civil Rights approaches to racial equality; understanding how identity traits such as race and sex intersect and constitute one another; and taking the inherently political nature of legal scholarship seriously (Crenshaw et al. 1995). This framework has been both widely celebrated and consistently attacked since its emergence in the 1980s by people both inside and outside the academy (Rosen 1996). In many ways, CRT is the proverbial millennial that seems forever young but, in reality, is now middle aged.

Using Cambodia as a case study, this article examines cause lawyering in a repressive political environment. It focuses on “closeted” cause lawyering, a practice that we define as the intentional pursuit of change through the legal process that is concealed for strategic purposes. Situated within the wider scholarship on (cause) lawyering in general and authoritarian Southeast Asia and China in particular, the article draws upon interviews conducted over seven years in Cambodia with 37 lawyers and human rights defenders working in practice areas considered politically controversial by the authoritarian state. We identify how closeted cause lawyers operate in such a way as to ensure professional and personal survival while quietly advancing their goals across three settings, including dignity restoration work with clients, legal professionalism in court and sustaining a moral community of like-minded lawyers. The article underscores the ongoing relevance of cause lawyering even where intentionality must be hidden, as well as the enduring importance of cause lawyers’ efforts to preserve an ideal of the rule of law. We conclude by suggesting that the authoritarian turn in a range of democracies, including the Unites States, suggests that closeted cause lawyering may be required to defend democracy even among conventional lawyers.

Despite symbolic boundaries between civil and criminal law, sociolegal scholars note their conceptual and operational overlap, or hybridity. Values (e.g., restoration vs. punishment) and practices (e.g., monetary compensation vs. incarceration) thought distinct to each manifest in both, and contact with one legal system can generate involvement with the other. Scholars typically attribute hybridity’s emergence to top-down mechanisms like legislation. This article presents interviews with sexual violence plaintiffs’ attorneys who describe their efforts to improve case outcomes by incorporating criminal legal artifacts like police reports, police evidence and criminal convictions into civil litigation and inserting civil legal artifacts, including costly evidence, victim support and monetary compensation, into criminal prosecutions. Building on organizational theories of boundary work, this article argues that attorneys, in taking purposive action to win their cases, blur distinctions between civil and criminal law from the bottom-up, a distinct mechanism through which civil-criminal hybridity emerges.

This article investigates the interplay between legal consciousness and legal mobilization in Chinese workplace sexual harassment cases. Drawing on 78 in-depth interviews with victims and fieldwork observations, it argues that second-order legal consciousness – the understanding of law derived from observing others’ experiences within relational networks – acts as a lens through which experiences of harassment are interpreted, inhibiting formal legal mobilization. Findings reveal that Chinese employees, facing a legal framework with limited protections and workplace hierarchies that discourage dissent, often strategically avoid formal reporting to safeguard their positions. This calculated inaction is informed by second-order legal consciousness, reinforced by the belittling of grievances, where complaints are minimized, dismissed, or normalized. Consequently, grievances are channeled away from formal, employment-based reporting toward individualized or gender-based remedies, which fail to address the systemic nature of workplace harassment. Bridging legal consciousness and mobilization literatures, this study reveals how the two concepts interact within Chinese workplaces. It further demonstrates that the belittling of employee grievances is not only a barrier to mobilization but also a crucial source of second-order legal consciousness, thus shaping victims’ decisions and perpetuating a cycle of non-reporting.

Using 60 interviews with a range of minority law students and early career legal professionals (primarily differentiated by race, gender identity, religion, and disability), this Article illuminates the cruciality of empirical Critical Race Theory to understand individual deviance within the legal profession and develops a framework – blasé – for considering interactional violence that is not legally or socially cognizable as discrimination but still causes harm. These data reveal that discrimination was minimized and denied to varying degrees for all minority respondents. However, for genderqueer respondents whose identities had not achieved a high degree of sociolegal legibility, these denials had low contestability and were often without contrition. Unlike microaggressions which might have resonance in common cultural parlance as operationalizations of structural violence, what distinguishes blasé discrimination, I argue, is the ordinariness of the act in interactional parlance alongside its relative unlikeliness to be seen as problematic when confronted. It is this possibility of defense and justification in the face of being challenged that makes blasé and its ambiguous parameters worthy of our attention in identity jurisprudence. This exploration of the blasé response to discrimination sheds light on the opportunities available for revealing structural inequalities when analysis begins from the perspectives of peripheral actors.

Sociolegal scholars have long debated the effectiveness of legal mobilization as a strategy for achieving social change. In addition to evaluating outcomes of wins and losses in court, they have identified several indirect effects of legal mobilization on social movements. Mobilizing new rights concepts can increase support for a movement, divide its base, and create new political allies or opponents. A win in court might lead to rights being institutionalized but not enforced, and it can serve to demobilize a movement base. This article contributes to this body of literature by arguing that movement groups can strategically mobilize the law to engage in co-optation from below – learning about an agency in order to build more effective organizing strategies. Using data gathered as a participant ethnographer in a grassroots environmental justice organization, I show how organizers used meetings with state regulators to learn how the agency interprets and enforces environmental laws and adjust their tactics in response. This study also demonstrates the value of conducting in-depth studies of local legal contests even as we seek to understand the role of the law in navigating our most pressing global challenges.

Mounting climate-related floods, fires, droughts and storms across the globe raise crucial questions about the role of law in adjudicating rights and obligations. While climate litigation attracts scholarly attention, vulnerable populations often lack the means to use formal laws and courts. We draw on ethnographic interviews conducted in 2022 in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, to study how residents of informal settlements exposed to flooding resist exclusionary climate adaptation laws. The findings show how formal law has exacerbated differential climate vulnerability, and resulted in “seawalls for the rich, relocation (and stalled adaptation) for the poor.” In this context, residents claim land in risk-zones through a local rule system known as “the law of the four poles.” We argue that by challenging the legality of the state, and creating a rival legal order that better represents locally identified interests and entitlements, they are claiming a political voice in climate adaptation. We advance theory in both climate adaptation and sociology of law and discuss how the law can better reflect not only the science behind climate change but also the interest and needs of marginalized communities.

Public experiences with the law in some neighborhoods are marked by an overwhelming police presence alongside deep-seated beliefs that legal agents are disinterested in ensuring public safety. This mutual experience of intrusive policing and legal cynicism has important implications for people’s recognition of the legitimacy of legal authority. In the context of a global city in the Global South, this study provides a quantitative assessment of the dynamics of perceived police intrusion and cynicism about police protection and the implications of those experiences for beliefs about the legitimacy of legal institutions. Drawing on a three-wave longitudinal survey representative of adult residents of eight neighborhoods in São Paulo, Brazil (N = 1,200), I demonstrate that perceived police intrusion and cynicism about police protection (a) are two sides of the same coin, being produced by similar social forces and dynamically reproducing each other and (b) operate to undermine police legitimacy. Integrating the legal cynicism and procedural justice theoretical frameworks, this study shows that intrusive as well as unheeding and neglectful policing practices can contribute to delegitimizing legal authority. I conclude with a discussion about the distribution of repression and protection and highlight the urgency of exploring public–authority relations in the Global South.

Sobre la base de información recolectada en tribunales de primera instancia y en una unidad del Ministerio Público en Santiago, Chile, en este artículo se explora la manera en que el sistema de justicia penal trata los delitos considerados “flagrantes.” Citando literatura sobre tecnicismos jurídicos, describo cómo los delitos flagrantes se construyen a través de prácticas que hacen posible para los actores involucrados evitar referirse directamente a los supuestos hechos. Desde su identificación en las calles por parte de policías a su asignación a otra unidad del Ministerio Público, los delitos flagrantes se definen por una manera específica de aproximarse a los supuestos hechos, la que consiste en prácticas organizacionales y documentales específicas. Estas prácticas contrastan con el rol marginal de la detención “en flagrancia” según el Código Procesal Penal. Como un tecnicismo, el carácter flagrante del delito expresa ciertas suposiciones epistemológicas respecto a cómo determinar lo que pasó y lo que exactamente lo constituye. Más específicamente, el carácter flagrante expresa suposiciones sobre lo que, por el momento, no puede ser sabido y puede, por tanto, ser ignorado a través del proceso burocrático y judicial.

How do sociolegal scholars who liken monetary sanctions to “bleeding a turnip” or “drawing blood from stones” reconcile these idioms with the fact that fines and fees constitute a growth industry? We take up this puzzle by turning our attention to perhaps the most relatable experience with monetary sanctions among the population: parking tickets. Much of the available law and society literature on fines and fees documents how these sanctions disproportionately impact communities subjugated by race and class. Because parking tickets are adjudicated within a legal domain so fundamentally different from fines and fees that dominate the academic focus, we ask whether these insights extend outside criminal counts to municipal ones. Using Chicago as a case study, our inquiry measures the structural determinants of 11.3 million tickets issued between 2013 and 2017. We use a series of count models to predict the incidence rates of tickets at the tract level as well as how many were subject to reprimands for nonpayment. What we find are disparate patterns of racialization in terms of who is targeted by these sanctions versus who is devastated by them. We synthesize key ideas from empirical critical race theory and developing work on predation theory to make sense of these findings.

A partir de 2014, a política brasileira foi sacudida pela operação Lava Jato (LJ), uma iniciativa anticorrupção centrada no direito. A LJ expôs um grande esquema de corrupção na empresa nacional de petróleo, a Petrobras, envolvendo seus diretores, dirigentes de partidos políticos e grandes empreiteiras. Para alguns, a LJ representou um marco, um novo capítulo na história do Brasil, promovendo o “estado de direito” e um desejo coletivo de “acabar com a impunidade” na política e nos negócios. Para outros, a operação enfraqueceu a democracia e o estado de direito, abrindo caminho para uma liderança autocrática sob o ex-presidente Jair Bolsonaro. Este artigo contribui para esses debates ao analisar a LJ como um espaço de produção de “consciência jurídica.” Empiricamente, examina conversas lideradas por procuradores da LJ no Facebook entre 2017 e 2019. A questão central abordada é: “Quando os procuradores e o público falavam sobre a LJ, sobre o que falavam?” Os resultados se alinham às visões céticas sobre a operação, sugerindo que as interações entre os procuradores da LJ e seus seguidores no Facebook ajudaram a co-criar um quadro cultural que conflita com o “estado de direito.” Essas percepções oferecem implicações para estudos sobre consciência jurídica e esforços anticorrupção.

A través del lente de la conciencia jurídica, este trabajo analiza la insatisfacción institucional en el marco de un profundo escepticismo hacia las instituciones formales, particularmente en el contexto de la sociedad chilena post-Octubre de 2019. El artículo busca investigar la relación entre la expresión de una profunda antipatía hacia el estado y la postura que los individuos manifiestan con respecto a la legalidad. El trabajo reporta los hallazgos derivados de 12 grupos focales categorizados por edad, género, y locación. Encontramos que, a pesar de los sentimientos negativos prevalentes que albergan las personas hacia estas instituciones, los participantes continúan usando el lenguaje del derecho, expresando su insatisfacción como derechos formales frustrados o por una falta de aplicación de la ley con respecto a las élites corruptas. Concluimos que la existencia de una brecha entre las expectativas normativas y el agudo rechazo por su incumplimiento por parte de actores institucionales abre una estructura de oportunidades para la emergencia de formas más autoritarias de poder estatal.

How does social science insulate police from social movements’ demand for abolition? We explore this through a content analysis of policing social science research funded by Arnold Ventures, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Institute of Justice published from 2011 to 2022 (N = 143 studies). Our mixed method content analysis revealed what we call “Academic Copaganda,” or studies contesting social movement claims by authors (1) masking their conflicts of interest, or (2) espousing police epistemology. Although Academic Copaganda comprised 20% of studies in the sample, they received most media mentions after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. We conclude by discussing our contributions to legal scholarship on police legitimacy and empirical critical race theory.

Our article offers an in-depth account of the role of the transnational practices of collaboration, storytelling, and learning in the diffusion of rights-based climate litigation (RBCL). Drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and quantitative data, we trace how the performance of these practices by lawyers, litigants, communities, scholars, and NGOs have fostered and sustained the transnational generation, exchange, and flow of resources, relationships, narratives, and knowledge underlying the field of RBCL. We argue that all three practices have fostered the diffusion of RBCL by influencing the local determinants of legal mobilization through enabling, discursive, and relational pathways. Finally, we show that these practices have had structural effects that have shaped the ideas and identities of the practitioners in the field of RBCL. Over time, the discursive and relational dimensions of practices have given rise to and have been strengthened by the formation of multiple communities of practice. The emergence of distinct communities provides the possibility for deeper forms of socialization and acculturation among their members, but they also make conflict and competition between different communities more likely. Overall, our article emphasizes the importance of understanding legal mobilization for climate justice as a set of practices that are shaped by the transnational social-legal context in which they are performed.