Recent decades have seen the rise of both community partnerships and the carceral state. Community policing in Los Angeles arose after the 1992 uprisings and was built on two conceptual building blocks—the territorial imperative and community partnership—which remain central more than 20 years later. At the same time, LA has undergone a significant black-to-Latino demographic shift linked with its restructured economy. This article discusses these changes using archival analysis and 5 years of participant observation in one South LA precinct. Police help to reshape the demography of South LA in ways conducive to post-Fordist economic shifts. The “community” concept appropriated by urban governance initiatives is composed against an unwanted “anticommunity,” which serves to heighten territorial control over black and Latino residents. Rather than encourage community cogovernance over the institution of policing, community rhetoric facilitates racial preference in neighborhood transition under the auspices of an increasingly bifurcated labor market.

This article examines how activists build a movement for sexual orientation and gender identity minorities in Myanmar, a country that is known for violent suppression of protests and is undergoing political reform. Based on original fieldwork, it finds that activists deploy a strategy of “vernacular mobilization of human rights” to persuade others to join their cause despite the risks to personal safety and to get around political constraints on collective organizing. Conceptualized at the intersection of the cultural study of human rights and social movements scholarship, “vernacular mobilization of human rights” theorizes the relationship between vernacularization—the translation and local adaptation of human rights—and movement micromobilization, specifying how the former unfolds as collective action framing processes. Through vernacularization activities, such as human rights workshops, movement leaders reframe grievances and shift the attribution of blame to empower and recruit new activists. Furthermore, with these framing processes, they generate a political community with a collective identity and social networks that they use to continue expanding the movement. The article enriches debates about the implications of implementing human rights and understandings of the relationship between human rights and movement mobilization, especially under repressive or uncertain political conditions.

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top-down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.

How can we make sense of the use of legal claims and tactics under conditions of internal displacement and armed conflict? This article argues that in violent contexts mobilization frames are unstable and constantly shifting, resources tend to vanish, and political opportunities often imply considerable physical danger. It is grounded on a three-year, multimethod study that followed internally displaced women's organizations as they demanded government assistance and protection in Colombia. Through detailed examples of specific cases, this article illustrates the constraints of legal mobilization in violent contexts, as well as different social movement strategies of resistance. It, thus, contributes to decentering theories of social movement uses of law that tend to be based on the legal cultures and institutions of industrialized liberal democracies, rather than on those of the Global South, and hence, tend to exclude violence.

Drawing on socio-legal literature and fieldwork in South Sudan, this article argues that international aid groups operating in conflict settings create and impose a rules-based order on the local people they hire and on the domestic organizations they fund. Civil society actors in these places experience law's soft power through their daily, tangible, and mundane contact with aid agencies. As employees they are subject to contracts and other rules of employment, work under management and finance teams, document routine activity, and abide by organizational constitutions. In analyzing how South Sudanese activists confront, understand, conform to, or resist these externally imposed legal techniques and workplace practices, this article decenters state institutions as sites for understanding law's power and exposes how aid organizations themselves become arenas of significant legal and political struggle in war-torn societies.

This article introduces the law-before as an analytic tool for enhancing explanations of legal reform. Based on an integration of neo-institutional law and organizations studies and punishment studies of local variation in penal policy, I define the law-before as the past organizational practices and power arrangements that precede law-on-the-books and shape present day implementation. I utilize the law-before as a heuristic to investigate the legacy effects of variations in local practice on the implementation of the prison downsizing law, AB 109, or “Realignment,” in California. I analyze organizational documents produced by county practitioners in the aftermath of AB 109's enactment in 2011 as empirical windows into how actors shape the meaning of law in local settings. I find that practitioners in counties with divergent historical imprisonment patterns enact four processes (overwriting or underwriting law, selective magnification, and selective siting) to arrive at distinct interpretations of AB 109 as mandating system-wide decarceration or the relocation of incarceration from state prisons to county jails. Although my data do not speak to the ultimate implementation of AB 109, the processes revealed have practical implications for the reform goal of decarceration by rationalizing distinct resource allocations at an early stage in the implementation process.

Sentencing studies have incorporated social context in studying sentencing decisions, but to date the bulk of prior work has focused almost exclusively on county context. An unresolved question is whether there also may be state-level effects on sentencing. Drawing from the minority threat perspective, we examine (1) whether state-level racial and ethnic contexts affect sentencing, (2) whether this effect amplifies the effect of county-level racial and ethnic contexts on sentencing, and (3) whether the interaction of county-level and state-level contextual effects is greater for minorities than for whites. Analysis of State Court Processing Statistics and other data indicates that state-level racial and ethnic contexts are associated with sentencing outcomes and that this effect may differ by outcome (e.g., incarceration versus sentence length) and by type of context (e.g., racial or ethnic). The study's findings and their implications are discussed.

This article uses a fine-grained anthropological and linguistic analysis to expose the routine negotiating practices and power games behind the conclusion of paragraph 115 on responsible agricultural investments during the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012. These negotiations are simultaneously a telling example for the quotidian stuff of international governance—an arena in which much larger forces are played out through small language-based tactics, and they are representative of an exceptional moment when global multilateral policy making in the frame of the United Nations was challenged by the legitimation of private authority and corporate self-regulation. Combining anthropological and linguistic methods, the article focused on language use, analyzing the ways in which people interact in a highly coded language, how they “perform,” by exploring, playing with, and twisting the grammatical structures of the spoken language. At issue is the large-scale appropriation of agricultural land all over the world by multinational corporations, investment funds, and foreign governments.

This article explains the impact of India's engagement with the law of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on both the Indian state and on the WTO itself. In each case, it explains the role of Indian lawyers within the larger transnational context. In engaging with globalization and the WTO, India has transformed itself. The Indian state has moved toward a new developmental state model involving a stronger emphasis on trade, greater government transparency, and the development of public-private coordination mechanisms in which the government plays a steering role. The analysis shows that it has done so not as an autonomous policy choice, but rather in light of the global context in which the WTO and WTO law form an integral part. Reciprocally, the article displays the ways that India has built legal capacity to attempt to shape the construction, interpretation, and practice of the trade legal order. Indian private lawyers play increasing roles, although they remain on tap, not on top.

Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's “birth” in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead, this study offers a neo-institutional account of the prison's diffusion, emphasizing the importance of national, field-level pressures rather than local, contextual factors. This study distinguishes between the prison's innovation and early adoption, which can be explained by the need to replace earlier proto-prisons, and its subsequent adoption, particularly in the South and frontier states, which was driven by the desire to conform to increasingly widespread practices. This study further attributes the isomorphic nature of the diffusion to institutional pressures, including uncertainty surrounding the new technology, pseudoprofessional penal reformers and their claims about competing models of confinement, and contingent historical factors that reinforced these institutional pressures. This study illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the motivations that initiate criminal law innovations and those that advance their diffusion.

Accounts of mass atrocities habitually focus on one kind of violence and its archetypal victim, inviting uncritical, ungendered misconceptions: for example, rape only impacts women; genocide is only about dead, battle-aged men. We approach collective violence as multiple, intersecting forms of victimization, targeted and experienced through differential social identities, and translated throughout communities. Through mixed-method analyses of Darfuri refugees' testimonies, we show (a) gendered causes and collective effects of selective killing, sexual violence, and anti-livelihood crimes, (b) how they cause displacement, (c) that they can be genocidal and empirically distinct from nongenocidal forms, (d) how the process of genocidal social destruction can work, and (e) how it does work in Darfur. Darfuris are victimized through gender roles, yielding a gendered meaning-making process that communicates socially destructive messages through crimes that selectively target other genders. The collective result is displacement and destruction of Darfuris' ways of life: genocide.

We address fundamental questions about the ability of interest groups to shape public policy by examining the influence of amicus curiae briefs on U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion content. We argue that the justices will incorporate language from amicus briefs into their opinions based on the extent to which the amicus briefs contribute to their ability to make effective law and policy. Using plagiarism detection software and other forms of computer assisted content analysis, we find that the justices adopt language from amicus briefs based primarily on the quality of the brief's argument, the level of repetition in the brief, the ideological position advocated in the brief, and the identity of the amicus. These results add fresh insight into how interest groups influence the development of federal law by the Supreme Court.

This article examines the effects of hate speech laws in Australia. Triangulating data from primary and secondary sources, we examine five hypothesized effects: whether the laws provide a remedy to targets of hate speech, encourage more respectful speech, have an educative or symbolic effect, have a chilling effect, or create “martyrs.” We find the laws provide a limited remedy in the complaints mechanisms, provide a framework for direct community advocacy, and that knowledge of the laws exists in public discourse. However, the complaints mechanism imposes a significant enforcement burden on targeted communities, who still regularly experience hate speech. We find a reduction in the expression of prejudice in mediated outlets, but not on the street. We find no evidence of a chilling effect and we find the risk of free speech martyrs to be marginal. We draw out the implications of these findings for other countries.

This article examines the consequences of prison overcrowding litigation for U.S. prisons. We use insights derived from the endogeneity of law perspective to develop expectations about the likely impact of overcrowding litigation on five outcomes: prison admissions, prison releases, spending on prison capacity, prison crowding, and incarceration rates. Using newly available data on prison overcrowding litigation cases joined with panel data on U.S. states from 1971 to 1996, we offer a novel and comprehensive analysis of the impact that overcrowding litigation has had on U.S. prisons. We find that it had no impact on admissions or release rates and did not lead to any reduction in prison crowding. Litigation did, however, lead to an increase in spending on prison capacity and incarceration rates. We discuss the implications of these results for endogeneity of law theory, attempts to achieve reform through litigation, and the politics of prison construction.

As public awareness of and concern about sexual victimization has increased in recent decades, stigmatization of sex offenders has also increased considerably. Contemporary sex offender policies transform discrete criminal behaviors into lifelong social identities. Although there is much debate about the efficacy and constitutionality of such policies, we know little about how the category of “sex offender” is constituted in the first place. In this article, I reveal how prosecutors and defense attorneys construct sex offenders, not as monsterous or racialized as is commonly thought, but as “lower class” men. This analysis is based on 30 in-depth interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in Michigan. These legal actors wield disproportionate power in defining the boundaries of criminal behaviors and individuals. That they associate sexual criminality with lower class men demonstrates yet another way that class-based inequalities are reproduced in the legal field.

The members of the U.S. Supreme Court have different ideas about what constitutes good judicial policy as well as how best to achieve that policy. From where do these ideas originate? Evolutionary psychology suggests that an answer may lie in early life experiences in which siblings assume roles that affect an adult's likely acceptance of changes in the established order. According to this view, older siblings take on responsibilities that make them more conservative and rule-bound, while younger ones adopt roles that promote liberalism and greater rebelliousness. Applying this theory to the Court, I show that these childhood roles manifest themselves in later life in the decisions of the justices. Birth order explains not only the justices’ policy preferences but also their acceptance of one important norm of judicial decisionmaking, specifically their willingness to exercise judicial review.

This article investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination.

Using survey data from a sample of white, black, and Hispanic incarcerated females (N = 554), we examine if the theoretically hypothesized and empirically demonstrated relationship between procedural justice and obligation to obey the law is substantiated among a sample of offenders and explore the impact that sharing the race/ethnicity of the defense attorney and prosecutor in their most recent conviction has on female inmates' perceptions of court procedural justice and their perceived obligation to obey the law. The findings reveal that female offenders who perceive the courts as more procedurally just report a significantly greater obligation to obey the law. In addition, white female inmates who had a white prosecutor were significantly more likely to perceive the courts as procedurally just. Non-whites, though, perceive the courts as more fair if they encountered a minority prosecutor regardless of whether the prosecutor was black or Hispanic.