This article takes a retrospective look at legal advocacy on behalf of Central American asylum seekers, which has been influential in the development of US asylum law and in the creation of an infrastructure to address immigrants' needs. The article considers three time periods when Central Americans have been deemed to fall outside of the category of refugee: (1) the 1980s, when US administrations argued that Central Americans were economic immigrants; (2) the 1990s, when civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala came to an end; and (3) the 2000s, when some Salvadoran youths in removal proceedings have argued that they faced persecution as perceived or actual gang members. This retrospective analysis highlights the ways in which law can be creatively reinterpreted by legal actors, as well as how legal innovations carry forward traces of prior historical moments.

This article analyzes testimony about forced prostitution voiced in New York City's Court of General Sessions from 1908 to 1915. During these years, the problem of coercive prostitution—commonly called “white slavery”—received an unprecedented amount of attention from journalists, politicians, and antivice activists. Drawing from verbatim transcripts of compulsory-prostitution trials, our research examines the relationship between cultural narratives and courtroom storytelling. We show how the white slavery narrative in popular culture oriented prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and jurors in prostitution trials. Extending the account of social control in the sociological literature on antivice activism, our analysis shows that the prosecution of forced prostitution was not simply a top-down exercise of juridical power. Using insights from conversation analysis and cultural history, an examination of compulsory-prostitution cases reveals a quadripartite storytelling process where judges and jurors—with different orientations to the white slavery narrative—played a constitutive role in how the defense and prosecution argued their cases.

Law school admission decisions are heavily influenced by a student's undergraduate grade point average (UGPA) and Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score. These measures, although predictive of first-year law school grades, make no effort to predict professional competence and, for the most part, they do not. These measures also create adverse impact on applicants from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups. This article describes the rationale for and process by which we explored new tests to predict lawyer effectiveness rather than law school grades and reports results of a multiyear empirical study involving over 3,000 graduates from Berkeley Law School and Hastings College of the Law. Tests measuring personality constructs, interests, values, and judgment predicted lawyering competency but had little or no adverse impact on underrepresented minority applicants. Combined with the LSAT and UGPA, these broader tests could assess law applicants on the basis both of projected professional effectiveness and academic indicators.

Regulatory regimes are notoriously resistant to change, so when less powerful actors manage to reshape long-established rules and gain increased access to a natural resource the interesting question is why? This article investigates relations between different claimant groups and the state in the reshaping of the regulations governing Oregon's private forestlands, how this process was mediated by broader political opportunities and constraints, and the conditions that supported a shift in the legal regime that benefited less advantaged interests. The intent is to deepen our understanding of the circumstances under which well-established rules of governance are altered. Analysis points to each of the following variables as significant for successful reform: (1) active challengers and their success in reframing issues to support their goals, (2) new political opportunities facilitating wider participation in the rulemaking process, and (3) concurrence between local and national aspirations supporting reform. While each condition is noteworthy, it is insufficient on its own. Rather, my study comparing two contested administrative rules suggests that a clear alignment of all three variables provides the strongest impetus for legislative and administrative rule changes at the state level benefiting less advantaged interests.

Condominium is a form of land ownership that combines private ownership of an individual unit in a multi-unit building with an undivided share of the common property in the building and a right to participate in the collective governance of the private and common property. Introduced by statute across North America in the 1960s, condominium facilitated the vertical subdivision of land and enabled a massive increase in the density of private interests. This article describes condominium and considers the justifications that were offered for this rearrangement of property. It then chronicles the introduction of condominium to the city of Vancouver and maps its spread across the city from 1970 to 2010. In doing so, the article reveals that condominium, a legal innovation without peer in its capacity to increase the density of private ownership in land, has provided the legal architecture of ownership for the remaking of Vancouver.

France regulated competition through the gradual development of jurisprudence rooted in Old Regime practices of speculation and hoarding. This article aims to understand the reasons for this institutional legacy in order to determine if and how these norms could be adapted to the new phenomena of industrial concentration as they appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century.

I argue that French regulation of futures trades and speculation are aimed to stabilize and enhance markets and not to limit them, and that continuities in market and capitalism regulation were much more important than usually held.

This article explores the politics of identification in immigration proceedings by examining the struggles over family-based immigration in South Korea in the context of ethnic Korean “return” migration from China. It focuses on micropolitical struggles in bureaucratic settings, analyzing how migrants and immigration bureaucrats struggle to establish kinship and marital status in order to secure or limit migrants' access to the labor market and citizenship. Drawing on fieldwork in both the sending and receiving communities, it shows how migrants and bureaucrats use various types of “identity tags” (official documents, performance, and biometric information) to establish the authenticity of family relations and to accept or reject particular understandings of personhood, belonging, and entitlement. It also highlights the multiple normative orderings that inform migrants' strategies (including their use of “fraudulent” identity) and their implicit or explicit challenge to the criminalizing and stigmatizing view of the immigration state.

Law is often seen as peripheral to Southern life before the Civil War, and the South as an outlier in the American legal history of that era. In The People and Their Peace (2009), Laura Edwards demonstrates the profoundly legal nature of Southern society and takes an important step toward integrating the legal history of the South with that of the nation. Edwards identifies two dueling legal cultures in North and South Carolina between 1787 and 1840—the law of local courts, which she terms localized law, and the state law of professionalized lawyers and reformers. She argues that white women, slaves, and the poor fared better in localized law—which was based on notions of popular sovereignty and the flexible rubric of restoring “the peace”—than in state courts, which were steeped in a national culture of individual rights that led to more restrictive results. This essay questions Edwards's dichotomy between local law and state law and her depiction of the popular content of localized law, while building on Edwards's innovations to suggest a new direction for Southern legal history.