The social category of “youth” occupies liminal space with blurred boundaries between “childhood” and “adulthood.” Dominant modes of socio-legal inquiry into youth typically yield adult-centered, criminological accounts that place adult interests and perspectives at the core of their analyses, focusing ultimately on remedies to quell troubled adolescents and suppress disruptive delinquents. Youth-centered accounts, by contrast, locate young people as agents negotiating the contradictory expectations of adults and their institutions while forging socio-legal orders of their own making. This review essay draws from six key works on youth published over the past century—Kathryn Abrams’s Open Hand, Close Fist: Practices of Undocumented Organizing in a Hostile State, James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education, Nikki Jones’s Beyond Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence, C. J. Pascoe’s, Nice Is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High, Forrest Stuart’s The Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy, and Frederick Thrasher’s 1927 text The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago—to explore how young people constitute their own socio-legal orders. This exploration suggests a new front in research on legal pluralism while identifying mechanisms through which youth-centered socio-legal orders influence adult-centered orders via mobilization, cooperation, imitation, and imbrication.

Traditional legal scholarship has long focused on the exercise of discretion in all its forms; however, by borrowing from the analytical toolkit of science and technology studies (STS), we begin to take an ‘ontological turn’ into the courtroom by documenting a new tool of judicial discretion invoked by criminal justice adjudicators: what we call ontological discretion. By examining three objects from our own research – sleep, death, and intoxication—we show how their lack of a universal, singular ontology may necessitate that adjudicators use their discretion to either choose a coherent ontology in a given case, or else avoid opining on ‘what things are’ altogether. We therefore start to move beyond those important but now rather mainstream sociolegal inquiries into legal knowledges, instead shifting our focus toward what legal actors say the objects of their various knowledges actually are, as well as the widespread legal effects of the court’s ontological games.

Prison has long been recognized as a racialized institution in America, where race determines myriad aspects of life—from where individuals sleep to those with whom they live, eat, and socialize during incarceration. However, there is little evidence on how to effectively remediate prisons’ deep racial divisions—a question that is imperative given that interracial animus in prisons can be both a result and a determinant of racial conflict and violence. In this study, we argue that higher education in prison has significant potential to improve racial attitudes and foster racial integration by providing a “contrasting context” for interracial interaction in the classroom within an otherwise racially segregated institution. Using administrative data on college-level course completion, an original longitudinal survey of prison college students, and in-depth qualitative interviews with prison college alumni, we show evidence of shifts in racial attitudes and self-reported behavior as students move through their college career. Our results demonstrate the potential for prison higher education to shift race-based norms and offer a framework through which to analyze prison education that prioritizes outcomes of interest beyond recidivism.

The rise of judicial populism in various national jurisdictions is usually explained through the vicissitudes of power conflicts between the judiciary and other governmental organs. In this article, I try to locate the origins of India’s well-known judicial populism in the peculiarities of Indian constitutional design itself. I argue that the heavily statist nature of India’s transformative constitutionalism, specifically its “Directive Principles of State Policy,” has made the practice of classical judicial review increasingly untenable and provided the grammar for its judicial populism. Directive Principles add another layer of complexity to the “counter-majoritarian difficulty” in India, forcing the constitutional courts to traverse increasingly unconventional territory to legitimise their role. It helps explain why the famously powerful Indian judiciary has failed to act as an institutional check to the crisis of constitutionalism well underway in India. The article provides a stark example of the normative challenges faced by a constitutional court in a transformative constitution.

How do “novel” spaces of transnational law emerge rather than being captured within existing legal regimes? This article argues that processes driving how the subject matter of a transnational legal space is defined and framed and by whom are notable in mediating such outcomes. The article presents the empirical case study of global neurotechnology governance and examines socio-legal processes whereby individual and organizational actors have constructed and defended neurotechnology as a distinct space of transnational law. Here, I argue that this can be understood as boundary work, which examines discursive and spatial processes of demarcating social entities from one another. The article shows how attention to external and internal boundaries around and within a transnational legal domain can sensitize socio-legal analysis to the more emergent features of these spaces, including more subtle modes of exclusion, cooperation, and coordination. The article concludes by reflecting on how attention to processes of boundary work can enrich inquiry into, and critique of, the earliest stages of transnational legal ordering.

Contemporary political science research suggests historically low public faith in judicial institutions. However, modern years have seen a proliferation of “court-watching” groups that harness volunteer observation to increase accountability in the courts. While these trends may seem in conflict, this article suggests that, in the absence of faith in traditional judiciary systems, court watching acts as a decentralized, grassroots method of legal participation, allowing engagement in the American socio-legal system. We address this relatively under-analyzed area of legal activism by establishing an original dataset (n = 59) that tracked court watch groups as of 2024. Our dataset includes the mission, jurisdictional focus, and major accomplishments of each court-watching group, providing a useful starting point for the analysis of court watching as a growing area of legal socialization. We also establish a four-part definition of “court watching,” which builds on existing scholarship. We proceed with descriptive analysis of our database and findings, providing brief vignettes of well-established or unique court-watching groups and preliminary observations. Based on these preliminary findings, we assert that these volunteer organizations are well positioned to increase civic engagement and democratic faith in US legal proceedings among broad populations and thus deserve further attention from socio-legal scholars.

Socio-legal studies has grown rapidly over the last six decades. As the field has expanded, however, it seems the pace of field-defining research (most notably, high-quality theoretical work, especially with aspirations toward grand or general theorizing) has waned, and a regime of normal science currently dominates. For some scholars, this state of affairs gives the impression of treading water, an incoherent field, or even theoretical stagnation. Using the subfield of punishment and society as a case study, we argue that the field suffers from a kind of stalled academic dialecticism. We argue that various factors have worked together to impede a standard dialectical process of theoretical growth by dissuading scholars from moving onto a new stage of innovative research and incentivizing them to continue to pursue smaller-scale, less innovative studies. However, precisely because the field has a rich, diverse array of scholarship available to glean, synthesize, and use to make next-generation insights, the field is poised for breakthrough research—particularly, generalizable theories of legal phenomena—if only scholars are willing to pursue them.

The relationship between law and autocratization is usually discussed with reference to the judiciary and how a powerful executive can encroach on the domain of the judicial branch. In this article, I suggest that the legal profession also needs to be brought into the discussion on autocratic legalism. Taking Turkey as my case, I put forward two main arguments: first, that, in national contexts where the legal profession is perceived to be originally and organically tied to the state—the “ancien regime” that aspiring autocrats try to dismantle—autocratic legalism involves efforts to overtake not only the judiciary but also such legal professional institutions as bar associations and their umbrella organizations and, second, that legal autocratization is made possible not only through such conscious/targeted attacks but also through processes and policies that are intended for other goals. In Turkey, the neoliberalization of legal education through a populist discourse and the consequent massive increase in the lawyer population has created heterogeneity and multiple fault lines within the profession. Such dynamics have created not only apathy, particularly on the part of young(er) lawyers, but also a weakening of the profession as a whole, preparing the groundwork for the more intentional attacks of the autocratic government. The result, I argue, is “professional liquidation.”

This article addresses a critical gap in the study of victimhood in historical grievance cases by examining the transformation from passive and powerless victims to active, empowered victim identities through litigation. Focusing on the aftermath of the 1947-1954 political repression and violence in Jeju Island, South Korea, known as the Jeju April 3 Incident, this study draws on archival research and in-depth interviews with survivors, bereaved family members, activists, and lawyers. It demonstrates how litigation plays a crucial role in empowering victims by allowing survivors and families to actively engage in the legal process, where they publicly perform, socialize, and symbolically mobilize their narratives. The Jeju April 3 trials show how survivors and bereaved families, once stigmatized as “rioters” or “families of rioters,” reclaimed their dignity and transitioned from passive subjects of injustice into active agents of social change. By highlighting how court proceedings serve as crucial spaces for marginalized individuals, this study contributes to the scholarship on legal mobilization and identity transformation, particularly in the contexts of state violence and historical grievances.

Analyses of the relationships between law and society often focus exclusively on domestic laws, meaning laws that emanate from domestic sources. This approach is not necessarily appropriate in contexts that involve significant cross-border flows of ideas, information, goods, services, people, or legal authority. In these cases, there are both practical and intellectual reasons to define the set of laws to be analyzed as including all of the laws, both domestic and foreign, that affect a particular aspect of a given society. In other words, the analysis ought to focus upon sets of laws that are defined in terms of their subjects rather than their sources. A case study from Jamaica illustrates this point. The legal determinants of Jamaica’s relatively high homicide rate include many foreign laws and associated enforcement practices—most notably, US laws and practices concerning trafficking in firearms and narcotics, deportation, extradition, and cross-border fraud. Consequently, it will be difficult to understand the relationship between law and society in Jamaica without taking into account all of the laws that affect Jamaicans as opposed to just the laws adopted by Jamaican legal institutions.

When the USA entered World War I, Socialists, German immigrants, and German-Americans in southeastern Wisconsin went from being generally accepted and influential members of their communities to being marginalized and vilified. German immigrants who had been well integrated into conventional society became enemy aliens. Socialists and German-Americans faced new restrictions on their movement and speech. Scholarship on groups faced with this level of repression finds that they often either withdraw from mainstream society and acquiesce to their mistreatment or fight back through violent or other extralegal tactics. Socialists and German-Americans in Milwaukee did neither. Instead, they embraced their marginalized status and continued to use the law to advance their interests. They resisted their vilification by the law by uniting around those very shared identities that the law was used to marginalize them.

The United Nations (UN) has operated a longstanding peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), while simultaneously contributing to rule-of-law building and transitional justice processes. Sexual violence is widespread in the DRC including routine allegations against UN peacekeepers. The operation of numerous legal systems and judicial mechanisms in the DRC produces a legally plural environment that is difficult for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence to navigate, and this is especially true for survivors of peacekeeper-perpetrated sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). In this paper, we explore justice-seeking among SEA survivors in the DRC and the challenges imposed by the complicated jurisdictions and layered legalities pertaining to SEA. Moreover, we argue that, beyond barriers to justice, we see a recession of justice for SEA produced by the United Nations and member states positioning SEA as distinct from other forms of gender-based harms and exacerbated through the legal navigational challenges faced by survivors.

A decade ago, it seemed that America’s punitive system of mass incarceration was on the precipice of a transformation, stimulated by a legitimacy crisis as great as any in a century. A decade later, far more modest steps toward reform have been accomplished, and mass incarceration in the United States has proven stubbornly resilient. While overall imprisonment rates are modestly lower, there is little evidence of improving prison conditions or a fundamental reorientation of the use of prolonged incarceration. This prompts a deeply historical question, to which answers, of necessity, must be speculative. What makes the carceral state so resilient, not just in recent decades but also across centuries? Following recent law and society scholars, who have brought together the literature on the historical political-economy of punishment with new institutionalist accounts of the role of myth and ceremony in formal organizations and the bureaucratization of modern societies, this article identifies five “legal-rational myths” about crime and punishment that have perennially delayed a reckoning with its lack of alignment with central public values like respect for human dignity and racial justice. The article turns to California as the epicenter of this most recent legitimacy crisis to chart how myths work to bolster the carceral state against efforts to shrink or abolish it.

A growing number of analysts use the term “judicial populism” to refer to judicial behavior that they find problematic, but they apply it to divergent phenomena and find it objectionable for different reasons. What, then, is judicial populism, and when and why should it be of concern? Taking a deductive approach, I argue that judicial populism is best understood as a performance/discursive style, analytically distinct from judicial activism. Like judicial activism, it is a gradational concept, and both populism and activism may present in judicial behavior to different degrees and in different combinations. To illustrate, I develop a grid matrix with an X-axis that runs from maximal restraint/deference to maximal creativity/dominance in the content of judicial rulings (the “what”) and a Y-axis that runs from maximally removed and technocratic to maximally proximate and publicly oriented in the performance or communication of the judicial role (the “how”). This two-dimensional framework enables nuanced comparison of judicial behavior in disparate times, places, and issue areas, illuminating relative variations and trends therein. It also helps to illustrate that, from a pluralist and deliberative democratic perspective, it is not judicial populism per se that should trouble democrats but, rather, populist behavior taken to extremes.

What is a populist judge, and when do judges embrace populism? Populist judges bypass legal and procedural constraints, seek an unmediated relationship with the public, and claim to represent the public better than political elites. Judicial populism can emerge in response to institutionalized dissonance in the political system. Dissonant institutionalization facilitates contestation between state institutions and can undermine the legitimacy of political institutions. This legitimacy crisis can imbue judges with a belief in their role as representatives of the public interest. In Pakistan, the dissonance caused by unresolved differences between the civil-military bureaucracy and the elected political leadership—differences that were embedded into the constitutional framework, facilitated the rise of judicial populism. I outline the key features of judicial populism and study the dynamics surrounding the rapid expansion of populist jurisprudence between 2005 and 2019 in Pakistan, with a focus on public interest litigation that became the cornerstone of the judiciary’s populist turn. Through case analysis, archival research, and semi-structured interviews, I discuss features of the populist approach to jurisprudence and trace how dissonance within Pakistan’s political system created new opportunities for the judiciary and changed judicial role conceptions within the legal and judicial community.

This article discusses the legitimacy of solitary confinement in prisons in Japan, which is still used despite the spread of modern international human rights norms in the twentieth century. The article examines the disciplinary measures provided for in the Act on Penal Detention Facilities and the Treatment of Inmates and Detainees (2006), which is a revision of the Prison Law (1908), and argues that although the legal revisions appear to have been made, the discretionary power of prison wardens remains unrestrained, wardens retain decision-making power for disciplinary measures. The article then critiques this approach on two grounds: first, there is an overuse of solitary confinement (over 85%) among other means of disciplinary measures; and, second, this violates both the spirit and the provisions of the Mandela Rules. International standards are based on the idea of human dignity with the established principle that solitary confinement should be imposed only as a last resort. The article ends with practical suggestions to make a more serious move forward to comply with international standards.

This article provides an overview of the key issues in international and Israeli human rights standards related to incarceration from a legal and sociological perspective. We argue that the Israeli imprisonment system is currently undergoing uncertain changes, showing high volatility due to its historical development and normative nature. Our account of the tensions between punishment and human rights in Israel over recent decades suggests that this field is highly volatile, making it difficult to predict future developments. Although Israel’s constitutional and human rights-oriented reforms seemed to indicate progress, Israel also experienced a series of harsh and regressive statutory and penological reforms.