Rio de Janeiro is home to over one-thousand favelas (slums), the majority of which are controlled by armed drug traffickers engaged in a long-standing war with police. This article shows how state legitimacy is challenged by the everyday reality of dual power, postcolonial legacies of inequality and marginalization, and a porous culture of law. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in one of the largest favelas in the city, I argue that police actions revolve around the enactment of violent spectacle, performed by the Elite Special Forces, BOPE. The use of performative violence, however, rather than shoring up state control at the margins of city life, works instead to undermine police (and state) authority.

Ghana is widely considered as “a beacon of hope for democracy in Africa” (Gyimah-Boadi 2010, 137). Yet substantive democratic transformations of policing have stagnated mainly because the police continue to act as a handmaiden of the state and powerful elites. Consequently, the reliance on performance in crime control and order maintenance as the bedrock of colonial police legitimacy (as judged by colonial administrators) has survived unscathed. Anxieties about violent crime, mainly in urban areas, have accompanied the pursuit of neoliberal economics and politics. Having staked their legitimacy on performance, the police view these anxieties and doubts about their effectiveness as potentially de-legitimating. They have responded in a highly dramatic but violent fashion, including the extrajudicial killing of suspected violent offenders believed to be the cause of feelings of insecurity. This article examines the nature of this pathway to legitimacy.

Less than two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa is witnessing a range of policy interventions that almost iconoclastically challenge the premises of democratic governance. Police military ranks have been reintroduced and an exemplary postapartheid law governing the use of lethal force has also been amended in favor of police discretion. Simultaneously, however, community policing, a benchmark for democratic policing, is being rolled out on unprecedented scale. This article argues that the seemingly contradictory mobilization of militarized policing and popular civilian institutional forms has a definite logic and captures the postcolonial condition of policing in South Africa: a populist-oriented ANC administration has allowed practices of popular policing underwritten by a desire for a forceful state to capture the law that had previously restrained this kind of policing. The result is a violent but intimate relationship between police and people, a situation in which the law is estranged from itself and normalized into the informal realm of private policing.

This article explores a “particularistic” concept of legitimacy important to Taiwanese democracy. This form of legitimacy, I suggest, has been instrumental for Taiwan's successful democratic consolidation in the absence of the rule of law. As evidence, I combine ethnographic observation of neighborhood police work with historical consideration of a type of political figure emergent in the process of democratic reform, which I call the “outlaw legislator.” I focus my analysis on the institutional and ideological processes articulating local policing into the wider political field. The center of these processes is a mode of popular representation that positions the outlaw legislator as a crucial hinge articulating the particularistic local order with central state powers. By analyzing the cultural content of the dramaturgical work used to reconcile low policing with higher-level state operations, this article shows how a particularistic idiom of legitimacy helps hold Taiwanese democracy together.

It is a truism that police in India generally lack legitimate authority and public trust. This lack is widely understood by scholars, policy analysts, and police practitioners as being rooted in the institution's colonial development as a means of oppression, and its alleged corruption and criminalization in the postcolonial period. The social facts of situational hyper-empowerment and the widespread decadence of police do much to explain their poor image and performance, but these explanations do not account for the fact that police in India are also structurally disempowered by cultural-political and legal-institutional claims to multiple and conflicting forms of authority that challenge and often overwhelm the authority of police. This structural disempowerment and its performances in everyday interactions between the police and the public constitute an ongoing social process of delegitimation of police authority in contemporary India. Following ethnographic analysis of this process of delegitimation, I explore the implications of focusing on police disempowerment for theorizations of the sources and capabilities of state legal authority more generally.

This article proposes a processual theory of the legal profession. In contrast to the structural, interactional, and collective action approaches, this processual theory conceptualizes the legal profession as a social process that changes over space and time. The social process of the legal profession includes four components: (1) diagnostic struggles over professional expertise; (2) boundary work over professional jurisdictions; (3) migration across geographical areas and status hierarchies; and (4) exchange between professions and the state. Building on the processual theory and using China as a primary example, the author proposes a research agenda for studying lawyers and globalization that seeks to shift the focus of research from the legal elite to ordinary law practitioners, from global law firms to local law firms, and from advanced economies to emerging economies.

Why have accounts of botched executions not played a larger role in the struggle to end capital punishment in the United States? In the twentieth century, when methods of execution became increasingly controlled and sterilized, botched executions would seem to have had real abolitionist potential. This article examines newspaper coverage of botched executions to determine and describe the way they were presented to the public and why they have contributed little to the abolitionist cause. Although botched executions reveal pain, violence, and inhumanity associated with state killing, newspaper coverage of these events neutralizes the impact of that revelation. Throughout the last century, newspapers presented botched executions as misfortunes rather than injustices. We identify three distinct modes by which newspaper coverage neutralized the impact of botched executions and presented them as misfortunes rather than as systemic injustices: (1) the dual narratives of sensationalism and recuperation in the early years of the twentieth century, (2) the decline of sensationalism and the rise of “professionalism” in the middle of the century, and (3) the emphasis on “balanced” reporting toward the end of the century.

This article reviews three books on labor law written by Christopher Tomlins. They are, in order of publication, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880–1960 (1985); Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (1993); and Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (2010). Tomlins has been an influential figure in the movement known as “critical legal studies” and has helped shape a new approach to the field of labor history, labor law, and the study of US workers. Over the span of twenty-five years, Tomlins's research has been central to evolving theories of law and social interaction and has continuing relevance to more recent scholarly developments such as the field of “cultural cognition” studies.

In the introduction to the new Oxford History of the Laws of England 1820–1914, the authors suggest that their task is to tell the “history of the law itself.” This review essay examines what can be learned from a history told from law's internal point of view rather than through the perspectives of other disciplines, such as economics or philosophy. It considers whether and how the common law responded to industrialization and laissez-faire ideology, the influence of salient philosophical movements—such as utilitarianism—on statutory change, and how all history is an exercise in ideology. In considering the public sphere, it suggests that this work should form the inspiration for further inquiry.