This article asks how legalism emerges in policy fields long governed by informal coordination and weak legal enforcement, focusing on Japan’s consumer finance regime. It develops the concept of “processual legalism,” in which legalism is understood not as an all-or-nothing regime type but the cumulative result of recurrent interactions between courts, bureaucracies, legislators, and cause lawyers. The article identifies three core mechanisms: institutional friction, generated by regulatory ambiguity and uneven enforcement; normative reframing, through which lawyers transform moralised, individualised grievances into structural injustices; and consensus realignment, as judicially articulated norms are integrated into administrative and legislative reforms. Together, these mechanisms illuminate legalism as a contingent process rather than a structural condition. While legalism is episodic in its activation, the institutional changes it generates are incremental and consensus-dependent, revealing important varieties of legalism within coordinated market economies.

Despite their status as a formally protected group in US immigration law, unaccompanied minors are not guaranteed legal representation. Facing removal proceedings in immigration court alone places children at high risk of deportation back to danger and deprivation in their home countries. Limited funding exists for migrant-serving legal aid organizations, and indigent children’s demand for free legal services far outpaces the available supply. This article examines access to counsel among unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings in US immigration court using a newly compiled administrative dataset comprising nearly four hundred thousand cases. We contribute to access-to-justice scholarship on the “justice gap”—the difference between the number of people experiencing civil legal problems who could benefit from legal assistance and those who receive it. Past research on immigrant adults and the broader civil legal realm has focused on geographic factors and resource availability as determinants of access to counsel. We find that these are also important determinants of access to counsel among immigrant children. In addition, we show that client characteristics—namely, gender, age, nationality, and Indigeneity—that potentially shape the viability of the case in immigration court, and, thereby, attorneys’ client selection practices, also act as determinants of access to counsel.

Prefigurative law reform develops and experiments with ideas about radical legal change. But these ideas are vulnerable to being challenged, including for having failed and for being unreal. This article responds to such charges, drawing on utopian studies for a different account of failure and the not real. Its focus is a speculative legal proposal to “decertify” sex and gender so that they would no longer be assigned, obligatory aspects of legal personhood. The article explores the utopian dimensions of decertification alongside accusations that it is fictive, undesirable, and nonviable. Reading these charges through utopianism reduces their sting since failure and the not real become inevitable, even positive, qualities. At the same time, dichotomies of real/fictive, existent/non-existent, and achievable/unachievable do injustice to prefigurative legal proposals. This article therefore proposes an alternative frame that embraces failure and the not real while reaching beyond their limits: staying “in play.” This combines simulation, disorientation, and falling short with the ambition, hopefulness, and pleasures of utopian praxis. Sutured to a utopian impulse, in play emphasizes the importance of persistence for prefigurative proposals while recognizing that their form may fluctuate and change over time.

Puerto Rico has recently emerged as one of the fastest-growing tourist destinations in the Caribbean, a shift accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic and promoted by the local government as a response to prolonged economic crisis, austerity, and socioenvironmental disasters. This article argues that Puerto Rico’s recent expansion of tourism is a legal extension of its offshore financial diversification project. It examines how tax incentives and credits, regulatory waivers, and investment laws, most notably the Puerto Rico Incentives Code (Act 60 of 2019), have integrated tourism and luxury real estate into the archipelago’s broader transformation from a corporate tax haven into an offshore financial center. Drawing on sociolegal and political economy scholarship, the article shows how tourism and offshore finance are legally and institutionally entangled, constituting a colonial offshore economy: a legal–fiscal framework that facilitates capital mobility, regulatory arbitrage, and speculative investment. Empirically, it combines legal analysis with two case studies of luxury tourism megaprojects, Moncayo in Fajardo and Esencia in Cabo Rojo, to demonstrate how the colonial offshore economy materializes through tourism development, restructuring land use, redistributing public resources, and intensifying legally mediated forms of displacement and socioenvironmental harm.

The arbitration community has traditionally argued that arbitrators should be shielded from criminal liability for actions performed in their professional capacity. However, a global trend has emerged wherein criminal law is increasingly used to regulate arbitrators’ behavior. Central to the debate on the extent of arbitrators’ immunity from criminal prosecution are questions of whether such immunity is necessary to ensure the fairness of arbitral proceedings and the degree to which arbitrators can be trusted to fulfil their professional responsibilities. Although this topic has been extensively debated in legal scholarship, there has been a notable lack of empirical research on the implementation and effectiveness of these criminal provisions. This study addresses this gap by examining Mainland China’s use of criminal law to regulate arbitration. China is a particularly relevant case study due to its adoption of a controversial provision titled “Perversion of Law in Arbitration” in 2006. Critics have argued that the broadly defined language of this provision could be susceptible to abuse, potentially undermining the integrity of arbitral proceedings. By analyzing twenty-seven cases of criminal prosecution against arbitrators in China, this research evaluates whether the critics’ concerns have materialized in practice. The findings suggest that this provision has not been used in Mainland China to improperly influence arbitral decision‑making.

Tens of millions of Americans are subject to drug and alcohol tests each year. How did this biochemical surveillance become so routine and normalized? This article examines the historical emergence, contestation, and gradual acceptance of the first biochemical surveillance technology, the drunkometer—the predecessor of the breathalyzer—which analyzed blood alcohol content in the breath. In the 1930s, public concerns over drunk driving grew alongside mistrust of rapidly expanding policing and security apparatuses. In this context, the drunkometer emerged as a seemingly commonsense solution to the problems of drunk driving and police mistrust, using a scientific technology to decenter law enforcement testimony and, in turn, streamline difficult cases. By examining contestations to the drunkometer in newspapers, court records, and other public documents, we detail how courts and the public gradually accepted the biochemical constitution of the body as the legitimate domain of authoritative institutions. We introduce the concept of “chemical citizenship” to analyze this authoritative institutional use of biochemical technologies to extract and deploy “the truth” about substance use as a mode of governing access to the rights and benefits of citizenship. We apply this concept to demonstrate how the drunkometer laid the foundation for contemporary drug testing.

This article examines Israeli juvenile courts as sites where poverty is present yet systematically denied as a cause of child neglect. Drawing on focused ethnographic observations, I show how factual reports routinely document material deprivation—housing shortages, lack of food, utilities cutoffs—yet court actors reject poverty as a legitimate explanation for neglect. Instead, they insist that “good parents” should be able to cope with scarcity, thereby displacing structural conditions onto individualized parental failure. I frame this configuration as part of “criministrative law”: an administrative forum that adopts criminal-style rituals of blame and correction while deferring to welfare agencies, leaving families without the protections of either criminal or administrative law. This criministrative denial of poverty produces epistemic marginalization of parents and legitimates punitive interventions. As a normative remedy, I propose adapting the poverty-aware paradigm from social work to law, reframing protection as solidarity rather than surveillance.

This article examines the incentives, strategies, and constraints faced by judicial entrepreneurs in advancing bankruptcy enforcement—a legal area traditionally considered politically sensitive—in Wenzhou, China. While existing studies on Chinese courts emphasize external and institutional factors, this study argues that judicial entrepreneurs can play a pivotal role in driving reforms. In response to the 2011 private lending crisis, Wenzhou court leaders promoted bankruptcy as a means of resolving failing firms. They began with pilot cases and gradually institutionalized bankruptcy by mobilizing social, judicial, and political resources. These efforts were shaped by both personal attributes and self-serving interests. However, judicial entrepreneurship encountered limits, such as legal rules, the inconsistency of enforcement, and the government’s core interests. The study contributes to the debates on courts and social change by showing how court leaders can overcome institutional constraints through alliance building, public engagement, and local adaptation of national rules. It also enriches our understanding of judicial policymaking across regimes by highlighting a symbiotic, rather than a zero-sum, state-court relationship in the analysis of judicial politics.

COVID-19 lockdown restrictions forced several courts to conduct remote video or telephone hearings of cases. Many argue for the continued use of these hearing formats based on claims of increased transparency and access to justice. Recent research, however, has highlighted that virtual hearings may lead to unfair proceedings, especially in trial courts. Furthermore, this research suggests that technology gaps—for example, the lack of computer literacy among litigants—may impact case outcomes. In this article, we test whether the introduction of virtual hearings due to COVID-19 affected the way in which traffic courts adjudicated traffic tickets in Arkansas. Using an original dataset of all court cases that occurred in three Pulaski County courthouses in 2020, we find that courts were less likely to dismiss charges where hearings took place through videoconferencing. Further, using a difference-in-differences design, we find that this bias is mitigated when the technology used for the hearing is equalized among litigants. We suggest reasons for this effect and offer some recommendations to mitigate the biases inherent in virtual environments. Our results invite more research into the impact of remote communication technology on judicial behavior to ensure that the long-term use of virtual hearings guarantees equitable justice to all litigants.

Nuancing the conventional wisdom that informal economic activities endure by marginalizing, circumventing, or colluding with the law, we use original court data from China to reveal a counterintuitive mechanism: informal finance can endure through formal litigation. Drawing on 66,843 judicial decisions, case studies of seven top-filers, and interviews, we examine how sophisticated moneylenders, inactive debtors, and embedded courts collectively helped sustain unlicensed moneylending in China before 2020. Moneylenders—whether operating through Fintech or offline channels—leverage superior legal resources to enforce semilegal debts. Debtors facing moneylenders suffer from serious hurdles in accessing justice, especially lacking professional legal help that could potentially change case outcomes. Courts, despite concerns over debtor protection, largely tolerate the semilegal lending in alignment with the pre 2020 regulatory environment that valued the expansion of private financing, particularly through Fintech. Beyond China and the financial market, this litigation-endured mechanism of informal economy reflects a pattern in high-volume civil dockets where litigation is strategically used to bypass regulation, which has contributed to access-to-justice crises in other jurisdictions, including the USA. Theorizing these dynamics raises pressing questions about the institutional role of courts in either sustaining or remedying welfare pathologies, and in shaping a just society.

This paper introduces the concept of symbolic rule of law promotion, which consists of repeated enactments of policy and initiatives equated with advancing the rule of law despite no evidence suggesting actual progress. To demonstrate its existence, US rule of law promotion in Afghanistan is examined as a “least likely” crucial case, from the end of President Obama’s Surge in 2014 to the Taliban’s return in 2021. During this time, Afghanistan— a major foreign policy priority—received the most US rule of law aid of any country globally. Unlike earlier attempts that sought to use the rule of law policy and practice to achieve substantive goals and adapted over time, US rule of law endeavors from 2015 to 2021 were symbolic. Decision makers consistently pursued rule of law strategies, and practitioners implemented initiatives that lacked any prospect of success. Previously unsuccessful strategies and programming were replicated alongside partnerships with disinterested, uncooperative stakeholders. More broadly, symbolic rule of law promotion has potentially significant implications for understanding the persistence of underperforming long-term rule of law efforts elsewhere. To increase the prospects of success, it shows the need to engage with non state justice authorities, support robust accountability mechanisms, and take concerns about state legitimacy seriously.

Worldwide, the legal profession is grappling with how deeply to embrace the datafication of law. Drawing on interviews and the public record, this article offers a case study of how France’s 2016 Law for a Digital Republic—which promised public release of all judicial decisions—exposed divisions within the French legal profession over technology, big data, and identity. A heated debate over “predictive justice” (justice prédictive) mobilized competing coalitions, ultimately resulting in France becoming the first country to ban data analytics that reveal the identity of individual judges in 2019. For scholars of the legal profession, this episode highlights how legal professionals serve as gatekeepers of technological change and, in the process, reshape law-related cultural scripts central to national identity. For scholars interested in big data, the French case reminds us that the datafication of law is not an inexorable force, but rather a contested political process. And for those interested in court administration, France’s experience offers insight into how one early-moving jurisdiction re-negotiated the boundaries of privacy and judicial transparency for the twenty-first century.

Judges in Vietnam have increasingly been called upon by the state and society to resolve new social and economic problems. However, the expansion of judicial authority presents a problem for Vietnam’s authoritarian government, which wants courts that can resolve social problems without challenging state interests. This study draws on empirical research to explore whether judges in Vietnam’s authoritarian polity can harness legal reasoning to extend their authority. It uses a novel theoretical framework based on systems theory to understand how judges determine who is entitled to benefit from the law, which norms are appropriate to particular cases, and how such norms might direct them to reach decisions. Data from case studies and interviews with judges reveal that courts in Vietnam are increasingly using legal reasoning to manage the interaction between legal and extralegal norms, which is a decision-making process with the potential to expand judicial authority over socially significant disputes.

The history of legal aid in South Asia has hitherto been restricted to appendages or short overviews in writings orientated towards its contemporary. This article offers the first archivally grounded study of the birth of the legal aid movement in early twentieth-century colonial India, focusing specifically on the Bombay Legal Aid Society. It pursues three major lines of inquiry. First, I consider the transnational intellectual networks between India and America upon which early Indian legal aid thinking developed. Second, I tackle the fraught politics of doing legal aid in interwar Bombay, a period marked by anticolonial nationalism and strong trade union organizing. Finally, the article examines why the BLAS succeeded in building strong working relationships with existing social welfare societies, state institutions, and like-minded legal professionals, but failed to garner considerable interest from the working classes it sought to serve. I argue that these struggles point to the hard limits of legal aid in the colony but also present a valuable window into the Bombay working classes’ legal consciousness. The article thus contributes to ongoing efforts at globalizing the history of legal aid and to the small but growing study of the legal profession in colonial South Asia.