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.

Quantifying the causal effects of race is one of the more controversial and consequential endeavors to have emerged from the causal revolution in the social sciences. The predominant view within the causal inference literature defines the effect of race as the effect of race perception and commonly equates this effect with “disparate treatment” racial discrimination. If these concepts are indeed equivalent, the stakes of these studies are incredibly high as they stand to establish or discredit claims of discrimination in courts, policymaking circles and public opinion. This paper interrogates the assumptions upon which this enterprise has been built. We ask: what is a perception of race, a perception of, exactly? Drawing on a rich tradition of work in critical race theory and social psychology on racial cognition, we argue that perception of race and perception of other decision-relevant features of an action situation are often co-constituted; hence, efforts to distinguish and separate these effects from each other are theoretically misguided. We conclude that empirical studies of discrimination must turn to defining what constitutes just treatment in light of the social differences that define race.

As societies grapple with mitigating or adapting to climate change, law plays a prominent role in the social relations that constitute a response. In this essay, we briefly review of the many different perspectives on law and climate change offered by the authors in this special issue of Law and Society Review. From transnational human rights activism to constitutional litigation to local practices and all around the globe, both the powerful and the marginalized draw on legal institutions and actors in multiple arenas and at multiple scales to address the consequences of climate change. Together, these articles show that law is not confined to courtrooms or judicial systems or regulations; rather, law offers both limitations and opportunities in the ongoing struggle over climate change.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bringing critical race theory and settler colonial theory to bear on legal mobilization scholarship, this article examines the ongoing campaign to strike down the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). ICWA sought to end the forced removal of American Indian children from their tribes. If successful, the challenges to ICWA’s constitutionality stand to undermine tribal sovereignty writ large. Drawing on a content analysis of documents from 17 major court cases (2013–2023) and a unique dataset of public-facing documents from the leading ICWA challengers, I interrogate the argumentative architecture of this legal mobilization. I find that the campaign to strike down ICWA is structured around three ideological maneuvers: erasure, settler normativity, and reclassification. These maneuvers scaffold a fourth – colorblindness – and the claim that ICWA is an unconstitutional race-based statute. I show how ICWA adversaries use these ideological maneuvers to legitimate white possession of Indigenous children and delegitimize tribal sovereignty. While existing work tends to treat colorblind racism and settler colonialism as analytically distinct, these findings shed light on the linkages between the two. They also marshal empirical analysis to illustrate how the embeddedness of settler colonialism and racism in the law enables broad claims to and defense of whiteness as property.

As Chile embarked on a constitutional replacement process during its worst-ever drought, local environmental activists secured significant representation at the Constitutional Convention responsible for drafting a new constitution, and successfully integrated provisions on climate change and water protection. However, despite the popularity of these measures, the citizenry rejected the proposal. This article, using legal mobilization and constitutional reform studies, examines the dynamics of constitutional mobilization against climate change, presenting two major findings. First, the feasibility of constitutional mobilization hinges on the ability of activists to navigate the politics of constitutional change, as their tactical choices are crucial for enhancing the process’s legitimacy. Second, including environmental measures in a constitutional replacement process tie them to less popular provisions, potentially jeopardizing the entire process, delaying state action on climate change, and weakening activists’ standing. The data supporting these findings come from interviews with Constitutional Convention delegates, archival research, and participant observation. In a context where climate change is intensifying, this article underscores the unintended consequences and challenges of pursuing environmental goals through constitutional reforms.

Despite large-scale racial inequalities across multiple social domains, racial innocence highlights the complacency of the law and social science research in denying racial power through race neutral assumptions. We explore three theoretical and methodological mechanisms maintaining racial innocence within quantitative social science: treating unequal structural conditions and organizational practices as impartial, isolating samples to reflect limited stages, and focusing on individual levels of analysis. Given that mass incarceration is one of the most visible modern-day exemplars of racial subordination in the United States, we use the example of incarceration sentencing to highlight these mechanisms. Using case processing data from Miami-Dade County between 2012 and 2015 (N = 86,340), we first examine racial inequality in incarceration sentencing when treating unequal case characteristics impartially across racial groups relative to when we allow case characteristics to be unequal across racial groups. Second, we examine racial inequality when isolating limited samples with narrow decision points relative to when we draw from samples across multiple stages. Finally, we examine racial inequality with individual-level frameworks relative to a neighborhood level frameworks. In this case, racial inequalities in incarceration sentencing with a racially consciousness approach are twice as large than with a racially innocent one.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ), often referred to as the “World Court,” plays a central role in the field of international law. Despite the significance of this court, socio-legal scholarship has not examined the ICJ’s inner workings due to limited access. Drawing from field theory and organizational theory, this study addresses this gap by using various data sources including interviews, organizational documents, and publicly available texts from insiders. Based on this data, this article explores how the ICJ’s institutional context shapes its organization and the experiences of its actors. We argue that the ICJ provides a space that tightly connects institutional myths, organizational practices, and individual action. This tight coupling effectively mediates and manages differences among ICJ actors, fostering a stable practice of international law within a field otherwise marked by conflict. This enables the ICJ to produce and sustain a specific way of doing international law which has stabilizing effects in this field. By linking the macro level of the field – an area emphasized in prior scholarship – with a microlevel organizational perspective, this article offers a nuanced understanding of the conflicts and organizational practices influencing the ICJ’s operations and development of international law.

System avoidance refers to the tendency of individuals who are concerned about formal social control (e.g., incarceration, immigration enforcement, or the removal of children from their families) to avoid surveilling institutions that engage in recordkeeping. While this research locates concerns about formal social control in an individual’s sanctionable status, the laws, policies, and practices that generate the threat of formal social control vary across space and time. Drawing on theories of legal consciousness, this article posits that spatial and temporal variation in the threat of formal social control has differential associations with whether and to what degree individuals with a sanctionable status report involvement in surveilling institutions. Our empirical case is U.S. immigration policing, which burdens Latinos across citizenship statuses. We link individual-level data on institutional involvement from the American Time Use Survey with administrative data on immigration policing across state-years. Results from double-hurdle models show that Latinos in state-years with higher rates of immigration policing (1) are less likely to report involvement in surveilling institutions but, (2) conditional on any involvement, do not vary in the time reported involved. We evaluate variations by nativity, citizenship status, institution, and the presence of sanctuary policies that circumscribe immigration policing. We conclude that the threat of formal social control across space and time implicates the situational meanings of institutional involvement for subordinated populations.

A central goal of Critical Race Theory (CRT) is to deconstruct the “jurisprudence of color-blindness” that is infused with the language of equality while operating to maintain racial hierarchies. Color-blind ideology extends to the procedures governing criminal juries, ensuring they are disproportionately white while constraining diversity of perspectives, especially regarding policing issues. In this paper, we merge CRT insights about color-blindness and race-consciousness in the criminal jury context and in the Fourth Amendment law governing policing, to advance empirical socio-legal scholarship on race and jury decision-making. We analyze deliberations data from mock jury groups that decided on verdict in a federal drug conspiracy trial, focusing on how groups talked about law enforcement testimony. We find that negative discussions of the law enforcement testimony is associated with shifts toward acquittal, there are more skeptical discussions about this testimony when the defendant is Black, and that the presence of at least one Black juror in any given group is associated with more skeptical discussions of law enforcement testimony. Our qualitative analysis illustrates how Black jurors, in particular, raised concerns about policing, including unjust treatment of Black citizens, then successfully tied those concerns to the specific legal considerations at issue in the case.