The expansion of immigration enforcement in the United States has increased the documentation requirements to which immigrants are subjected. A case in point is birth certificates, which are used to establish identity, nationality, age, and kin relationships in myriad US immigration cases. This development gives highly localized bureaucratic practices in immigrants’ countries of origin transnational implications. Based on fieldwork in a registry of vital records in El Salvador, interviews with Salvadoran officials, and legal work with immigrants in the United States, this article analyzes birth certificates’ use as immigration documents, focusing on the understandings of legality and authenticity that underpin their circulation. This analysis contributes to theorizing citizenship by detailing the ways that immigration enforcement practices in immigrants’ country of residence can make their relationship to their country of origin both more important (in that they need identity documents) and less accessible (due to distance).

This article demonstrates how civil liberties lawyers’ efforts to address the complaints of imprisoned people in the 1970s inadvertently helped provide state attorneys with tools they used to stymie prisoners’ organizing efforts. Using North Carolina as a case study, I explain why a diverse range of legal actors—including civil liberties lawyers, federal judges, and state attorneys—supported the creation of prison grievance procedures. I then reveal how state attorneys successfully used them, once implemented, to argue that because the procedures offered a seemingly fair, institutional avenue for imprisoned people to express their grievances, prison administrators could ban prison organizing without violating prisoners’ First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. The history of prison grievance procedures, I suggest, highlights the limits of constitutional rights litigation for achieving social change, offers a new approach to the study of legal endogeneity, and helps explain the demise of the prisoners’ rights movement.

Since 2001, we have witnessed the development of a counterterrorism war paradigm built to advance claims about the post-9/11 scope and discretion of US executive power and to articulate specific interpretations of national security interests and strategic objectives in the “war on terror.” What makes this a paradigm rather than merely a conglomeration of evolving policies is the cohesiveness and mutual reinforcement of its underlying rationales about the rights of the US government to prosecute a territorially unbounded war against an evolving cast of enemies. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of a juridical field, the article focuses on how officials who constructed a legal framework for this paradigm, rather than disregarding international law wholesale, have engaged in interpretations and crafted rationales to evade some international humanitarian law (IHL) rules and norms while rejecting the underlying logic or applicability of others. This article traces the counterterrorism war paradigm’s development and explains how it now competes with and threatens to supersede the customary law principles enshrined in IHL.

In 1992 Peter Fitzpatrick published The Mythology of Modern Law, a work that exposed the constitutive relation between Europe’s racialized imperialism and its conception of modern law. In the three decades since, a renewed field of “law and development” has grown, this time in the name of “the rule of law.” This Article shows how the mythology of modern law endures in this field of rule-of-law development. To do this, Part I draws out the main threads from Mythology. These are then woven through the Article, beginning with the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index®, before turning to the United Nations’ rule-of-law assistance, and ending with the World Bank’s 2017 World Development Report. The analysis shows how the mythology of modern law, in its racialized imperial form, is integral to the work of international rule-of-law promotion. One consequence is the denial of “local” law by a rule of law that obtains its authority by purporting to be responsive to legal pluralism. But the Article also points to the mythological possibilities of decolonization, specifically the possibilities of a “mythological legal pluralism” that is attentive to the ways in which the world’s plurality of laws already rule.

Nonconsensual pornography, commonly known as “revenge porn,” is the dissemination of another’s sexually explicit images or videos without their consent. This article explores this phenomenon in gay and bisexual male online communities. The first part reviews the current sociological and legal literature on online dating, gay culture on the Internet, and revenge porn. Then, based on a survey of gay and bisexual male dating app users, ethnographic interviews, and an analysis of platform content moderation policies, the next part makes three related points. First, it shows that gay and bisexual men who use geosocial dating apps are more frequently victims of revenge porn than both the general population and the broader lesbian, gay, and bisexual community. Second, it shows that geosocial dating apps create powerful norms of disclosure that make sharing personal information all but required. And third, it describes how gay and bisexual male users engage in privacy navigation techniques with the goal of building trust and enhancing safety. The final substantive section then shows how inadequate protections for online privacy and inadequate legal incentives for safe platform design contribute to the problem of revenge porn. The article concludes with a summary and avenues for future research.

Governments in developing countries have adopted policies, laws, and programs to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), with the funding and rules provided by global institutions and transnational actors. The transnational legal process for REDD+, entailing the construction and diffusion of legal norms that govern the pursuit of REDD+, has been driven by discursive struggles over the purposes and requirements of REDD+. At the global level, the development of legal norms for REDD+ has been primarily influenced by coalitions committed to the discourses of ecological modernization, civic environmentalism, and to a lesser extent, climate justice. Through discourse analysis of the transnational legal process for REDD+ in Tanzania, I show how domestic efforts to operationalize REDD+ have been dominated by a government coalition that has emphasized green governmentality, made few concessions to the discourse of civic environmentalism, and completely neglected the climate justice claims of Indigenous Peoples. This case study reveals how discourse analysis may enhance the study of transnational legal phenomena by drawing attention to the complex interplay of global and domestic discourses and its role in shaping legal norms and reinforcing or challenging structures of power and knowledge within and across legal systems.

Using quantitative and qualitative data from a large national sample of lawyers, we examine self-reports of perceived discrimination in the legal workplace. Across three waves of surveys, we find that persons of color, white women, and LGBTQ attorneys are far more likely to perceive they have been a target of discrimination than white men. These differences hold in multivariate models that control for social background, status in the profession and the work organization, and characteristics of the work organization. Qualitative comments describing these experiences reveal that lawyers of different races, genders, and sexual orientations are exposed to distinctive types of bias, that supervisors and clients are the most frequent sources of discriminatory treatment, and the often-overt character of perceived discrimination. These self-reports suggest that bias in the legal workplace is widespread and rooted in the same hierarchies of race, gender, and sexual orientation that pervade society.

This article considers how legal systems capture different cultural perceptions of work in an individual’s life. We inquire how two models—“human capital,” based on the works of Adam Smith; and “vocation,” based on the works of G. W. F. Hegel—are reflected in legal regulations and judicial rhetoric in the United States and Germany. Specifically, we examine how these two legal systems treat the practice of using personal names—the most direct referents to individuals’ identities—in business. We discuss three sets of cases: cases involving the use of personal names as trademarks, cases involving conflicts between parties with similar names, and cases involving the transfer of rights in personal names. The article demonstrates that the US legal system treats work as a commercial asset, as “human capital” in Smith’s sense, whereas German law perceives work as an integral part of one’s identity, echoing the Hegelian line of “vocation.”

In civil cases that took place in southern courts from the end of the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century, black men and women frequently chose to bring litigation and then negotiated the white-dominated legal system to shape their cases and assert rights. In some ways, these civil cases were diametrically opposite from the criminal cases of black defendants who did not choose to enter a courtroom and often received unequal justice. However, this article draws on almost 2,000 cases involving black litigants in eight state supreme courts across the South between 1865 to 1950 to argue that in both civil and criminal cases African Americans were at times shaping their cases and fighting for their rights, as well as obtaining decisions that aligned with the interests of white elites. Southern state courts during the era of Jim Crow were thus spaces for negotiating for rights and sites of white domination, in both criminal and civil cases.

This article seeks to establish the extent to which the voices and interests of transnational commercial surrogates—women who are paid by intended parents from another country for carrying a pregnancy—are accounted for by those with power to shape the policy around this complex area in the country of the intended parents. Through a first-of-its-kind qualitative study of the viewpoints of policy makers and government officials, taking Israel as a case study, the research maps the hierarchy of interests in Israel as the country of the intended parents, in which the rights and well-being of the transnational surrogates are largely neglected. The study finds that, even when awareness of the vulnerability of transnational surrogates is relatively evolved among officials, they admit that the motivation and ability of the country of the intended parents to supervise the protection of the surrogates—during a process that takes place in another country—are extremely limited. Equipped with the empirical findings, the article examines the actual and potential regulative arenas relevant to transnational surrogacy (also known as international surrogacy), and offers an alternative normative framework to correct the current regulative failure in providing much-needed legal protection for transnational surrogates.

From arrest to sentencing, cases in which the defendant is charged with capital murder in the United States take substantially longer to resolve than homicide cases in which prosecutors choose not to seek the death penalty. One might reasonably attribute the slowness of capital trials to heightened procedural safeguards that attend the potential deprivation of life. In this article, I suggest that this explanation, straightforward as it is, glosses over more probing and analytically interesting truths about the complex temporal dimensions of death penalty trials. Based on my experiences as both a former defense advocate and an ethnographic researcher of capital defense practices, the slowness of capital cases revolves in large measure around the investigative pursuits of sentencing mitigation. Mitigation investigation’s knowledge practices are informed by distinct temporal operations whose interrelations feed into a deeper logic to capital defense advocacy. This article parses out and traces the connections between these inner workings, using social theory on time to articulate the processes by which mitigation’s temporal logics produce the characteristically slow pace of death penalty cases. I conclude with brief thoughts speculating how the temporal analysis experimented with here might be extended to processes of US criminal adjudication more broadly.

While scholars recognize that cause lawyers use public education as a reform tactic, they rarely place this tactic at the center of their analysis, leaving a gap in our understanding of how cause lawyers use extrajudicial tactics to navigate the limits of litigation. In this article, I examine the role of public education in the work of cause lawyers, through a study of lawyers from eight legal organizations representing the rights of LGBTQ people. Through interviews, archival work, and analysis of publications, I find that lawyers and organizations use education for four functions: (1) to prime a pathway to successful litigation; (2) to control for backlash; (3) to leverage pressure during litigation or policy negotiation; and (4) to generate community and public awareness. This article shows that public education is not simply an ancillary tool to these groups—it is vital to their missions and their everyday work.

Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016), by Lauren Edelman, presents an integrated theory of endogeneity that explains how organizational responses to civil rights laws undermine civil rights protections, preserve managerial prerogatives, and redefine judicial interpretations of compliance. Structural dynamics baked into organizations and driven by legitimacy and meaning produce organizational practices that appear to prohibit discrimination but do little to change discrimination on the ground. Working Law raises important questions for future research: Under what conditions might symbolic structures be effective? How does power affect the institutionalization of some symbols of compliance but not others? Can legal reforms limit the effects of endogeneity?

Lauren B. Edelman’s Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) offers an empirically supported theory of legal endogeneity, explaining how managerialized ideas of compliance with employment discrimination legislation diffuse in organizational fields and shape judicial doctrine. Managerialization and legal endogeneity explain how and why equality-promoting civil rights legislation may do little to reduce workplace inequalities. This essay places Edelman’s theory within a broader terrain of opportunities and limits of law for promoting egalitarian change. Managerialization is not always detrimental to enhancing workplace race and gender equality. However, typically reinforcing logics of market capitalism and liberal legality often make it so, while blocking reforms countering judicial deference to managerialized compliance.

Lauren Edelman’s Working Law: Courts, Corporation, and Symbolic Civil Rights (2016) is remarkably relevant to the study of financial regulation. In particular, three factors that Edelman identifies as contributing to legal endogeneity and symbolic compliance—ambiguous law, a lack of clear outcome measures, and the presence of legal intermediaries—are especially salient in this context. It has long been recognized that powerful financial institutions and the lawyers, lobbyists, and other agents who serve them have the ability to influence the law ex ante, through political lobbying. Edelman’s work reinforces the point that they may also do so ex post through an endogenous process of interpretation, implementation, and, ultimately, enshrinement of symbolic compliance with ambiguous law.

This essay analyzes inequality and the construction of childhood in the early US juvenile justice system. Although the juvenile justice movement’s best intentions focused on protecting children from neglect and the criminal justice system, historians have argued that protective juvenile justice was unequal and ephemeral. I critically summarize three histories of juvenile justice: Anthony Platt’s The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (1969), Geoff Ward’s The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice (2012), and Tera Agyepong’s The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender, and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (2018). I argue that the common thread in these studies is the construction of poor and black youth as unchildlike. Because the juvenile court arose in a context where not all youth were considered children, it never treated all youth as innocent or in need of protection.