Ghana has inherited colonial legislation that recognizes and regulates the consequences of Muslim family law (MFL). However, in practice, courts almost never recognize the normative existence of MFL and systematically dismiss the cases on procedural grounds without discussing their merits. What explains the judiciary’s attitudes toward Islamic law? Why do Ghanaian courts refuse to engage with MFL in substantive terms? How does this judicial policy affect Ghana’s pluri-legal system and its multireligious democracy? Drawing on Robert Cover’s insights and concepts from “Nomos and Narrative,” the present article suggests that Ghanaian courts engage in “undignified” jurispathy against Islamic law. Having inherited the colonial narrative that Islamic law is not a native law of the land, the judiciary destroys the legal meanings built around Islamic law without discussing what is at stake. This perpetuates normative tensions between the state and Muslim groups, undermines the rule of law, and erodes public trust in democratic institutions. Utilizing the theoretical and empirical insights drawn from the Ghanaian case, the article urges scholars to expand the scope of their inquiries to include instances of undignified jurispathy to better understand state-religion relations and constitutional debates in pluri-legal societies.

In 2019, Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Celebrated as a victory for global lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights, Taiwan’s 2019 law privileges marriage and biological parent-child ties as the foundation for LGBT family rights and (co-)parental recognition. This article contributes to sociolegal debates about the benefits and limitations of marriage equality by asking how restrictive legal approaches to legitimating LGBT parenthood may harm LGBT families, with consequences both for families ostensibly protected under the new laws and for those denied newly bestowed rights and protections. Drawing from legal and ethnographic research on Taiwan’s same-sex marriage law and the family formation strategies of Taiwanese LGBT parents, we interrogate how marriage equality interacts with related legal domains and prevailing stigmas of illegitimacy, adoption, and homosexuality in Taiwan. Encoded in, and reproduced through, the substance and implementation of law, these stigmas narrow the scope of legal rights and foster potentially discriminatory forms of recognition. The article shows how progressive laws may reduce LGBT family stigma for some, while also creating new stigma interactions that devalue diverse forms of LGBT parenthood.

Prison monitoring has been promoted by international human rights bodies as a way to support the prevention of torture and ill-treatment in prison. However, there has been very limited examination of the operation of prison-monitoring bodies, especially from the perspective of those most affected by their recommendations: those who live and work in prisons. This article draws on interviews conducted with people living and working in a Scottish and a Norwegian prison to explore how they perceive a long-standing prison-monitoring body, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (CPT). The article provides an examination of the benefit and utility of CPT recommendations from the point of view of people in prison and prison staff. The study further reveals that the effectiveness of CPT monitoring in prisons may be considered in terms aside from state implementation of recommendations and should include how people in prison see its work, its impact, its power to persuade, and its connection to the outside world. Through taking a prison-centered approach, the article contributes to wider discussions on whether and how human rights frameworks can alter experiences of punishment.

What factors influence citizens’ demand for law to protect social rights? We turn to the case of social rights in South Africa, just under three decades after the end of apartheid and the adoption of social rights constitutionalism, to examine the contours of rights claims-making in the courts. Drawing on original interview and survey research, we argue that above and beyond factors such as the accessibility of the courts and support of civil society, citizens must believe that rights claims-making through courts is possible. We find that these beliefs and the subsequent demand for justice are connected to people’s personal circumstances, sentiments as rights-holders, and trust in legal institutions, rendering the legitimacy of social rights constitutionalism beholden to people’s perception that the state actually delivers on these constitutional promises.

Political scientists analyze the global rise of judicial appointment commissions as a response to judicialized politics. They argue that appointment processes have formalized to include more constituencies now affected by judicial decisions. This article presents evidence from Southern Africa confounding their expectations. In this region, formalization has social as well as political origins. Over the last two decades, the senior judiciary has suddenly become subject to the same demands for organizational accountability and descriptive representation that sociologists of other professions have been documenting for decades. Throughout the region, therefore, it has become increasingly difficult to defend opaque practices inherited from British (and South African) colonialism. Twenty years ago, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland/Eswatini all recruited most appellate judges from abroad through informal channels. In every country, this system has come under pressure from a variety of local sources. Yet those demanding reform have always been able to mobilize new international orthodoxies that require the judiciary to represent its society and make itself accountable to profane, external audiences. These new orthodoxies have acquired an unusual power in Southern Africa thanks to their embodiment in South Africa’s own post-apartheid transition, and long-standing moral imperatives to “localize” senior expatriate positions in postcolonial states.

Since the early 2000s, many of the left groups that spurred the alt-globalization movement have embraced directly democratic organizing and the creation of ethical relationships and subjectivities far more than they have pursued projects to reform legal and political institutions. These practices are often described as prefigurative because people are working to build alternative possible futures in the here-and-now outside of dominant statist and capitalist rationalities. In this essay, we ask if prefiguration can also involve imagining legal forms anew. Drawing on Amelia Thorpe, Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property (2020), we discuss contemporary efforts to use the language, form, and legitimacy of law to imagine it otherwise, efforts that occur through various kinds of direct actions rather than primarily through appeals to courts, legislators, or other state officials. In so doing, we point to an emergent field of critical and sociolegal scholarship that we call prefigurative legality.

How do courts mediate the relationship between the practice of torture and the content of law in places where torture is neither explicitly criminalized nor authorized? If torture is recounted in court, then what happens? Drawing on sixteen months of observation and documentary research in Thailand, this article outlines a jurisprudence of torture in which judges accommodate the practice by denying the facticity of narratives about torture, or accepting the narratives’ facticity but denying that anyone can be held responsible, or accepting that someone might be held responsible but excusing them of responsibility in the name of duty or by holding only one or two of them, or their employer, in some way liable. Through this jurisprudence, judges in Thailand have kept torture at the limits of law: not on a boundary between the legal and illegal, but on a line between the legally ordered and unordered, which is to say, in the realm of the alegal.

In the event of a work-related death, Turkish law directs the victim’s family to see the death as accidental and understand monetary compensation as a primary vehicle for justice. Based on interview data from a group of victims’ survivors, I examine how the bereaved make sense of accepting money for their losses. Despite the compliance of these families with monetized justice, the interviews suggest that they also have resentments against it. I show that pressing economic needs, a sense of disenfranchisement, and the limited nature of legal counsel lead the survivors to suppress their frustrations. In turn, many come to narrow their expectations of justice to getting what they think of as a fair sum of money. This situated framework, I argue, works to trivialize concerns about workplace safety. Insofar as the families see monetary compensation through a frame of justice, structural factors behind their losses remain unaddressed. Viviana Zelizer has long treated money as being grounded in meanings and moralities. In the tradition of legal consciousness literature, this article extends Zelizer’s fundamental approach by providing a framework to address how the moral underpinning of money can emerge from and reinforce power imbalances and systemic bias in the legal system.

This article aims to explain the differential use of litigation by social movements pursuing social change. While previous studies have sought to compare non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that turn to litigation with those that do not, we study organizations that have all resorted at least once to legal action. Taking Belgium and the field of antidiscrimination as a case study, our research confirms the findings of previous literature that the characteristics of the legal environment do impact on the choice of organizations whether or not to go to court. But we also find that legal action is used differentially by NGOs depending on two factors in particular: their position as an insider or outsider in the political realm and their possession of legal resources. Based on a quantitative measure of legal actions initiated by NGOs and interviews with activists, we propose a typology of civil society organizations—which we label “experienced litigants,” “occasional litigants,” and “litigants by necessity”—that could be transposed to other contexts and other types of interest groups.

This article develops a new conceptual framework designed to critically study how locality and transversal power relations structure activity and developments in the global field of international criminal justice. The framework is built around the concept of “justice sites,” defined as localities in which organized and social labor—in this case, working with international criminal justice—takes place. The potential effects of social labor performed in specific sites of justice are structured partly by their locality and the resources to which it gives access and partly by their structural position in wider transversal chains of cooperation and competition that cut across different globalized and national fields. In addition to structuring the connections between justice sites, transversal power relations link sites of justice to “practice sites” embedded in other fields in which localized, social labor is not routinely engaged with international criminal justice. Such linkages demonstrate how the framework, developed to study how locality and transversal relations shape the fight against atrocity crimes, can also be used to investigate sites engaged in and across other globalized and national fields of justice, law, governance, and security.

Every other day, books and articles are published that examine the withering of democracy across multiple national contexts, perhaps best summarized by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zibblat’s How Democracies Die. The law has not been ignored in this burgeoning literature. Telling examples are the studies on autocratic legalism by Javier Corrales and Kim Lane Scheppele; Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq’s book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy; a recent review essay by Michael McCann and Filiz Kahraman on the “interdependence of liberal and illiberal legal orders … in the United States”; and two forthcoming works from the Project on Autocratic Legalism: a special issue in the Verfassung und Recht in Übersee/World Comparative Law journal and a book on Brazil edited by Oscar Vilhena Vieira and colleagues. In this review essay, I focus on three critical issues arising from these and other sources. First, they show that a backlash against liberal democracies is happening in both the global South and the global North. Second, they show that law is no longer thought of as an intrinsic bulwark against assaults on liberal democracy—on the contrary, rising autocrats, many of whom are trained lawyers, often use the law as a tool to consolidate power, sideline minorities and political adversaries, and rule unconstrained. Finally, while earlier analyses of this phenomenon have tended to emphasize legislative change that reconfigured governance at its highest levels (the Presidency or Prime Minister’s Office, Congress, and High Courts), new studies are revealing––and are helping constitute––an empirically broader field of inquiry.

This review essay considers Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross’s Becoming Free, Becoming Black (2020); Laura F. Edwards’s The People and Their Peace (2009); Ariela J. Gross’s Double Character ([2000] 2006); Martha S. Jones’s Birthright Citizens (2018); Kelly M. Kennington’s In the Shadow of Dred Scott (2017); and Kimberly M. Welch’s Black Litigants in the Antebellum South (2018), arguing that one important implication of these works is that the roots of post-Reconstruction Black legal culture can be found during the antebellum period. The essay synthesizes the insights of these works regarding legal culture, legal consciousness, vernacular legal education, and legal networking. It concludes that, for students of Black legal culture and litigation for and by Black people beyond Reconstruction (that is, Jim Crow), examining the historiography of antebellum litigation for and by Black people is an important starting point in advanced discussions about Black legal culture.

Drawing on Rosalind Dixon and David Landau’s Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy, this review essay calls attention to three competing metaphors for democratic decline (democratic erosion, democratic backsliding, and abusive constitutionalism) and elaborates their implications for how supporters of liberal democracy might arrest and reverse the decline. Drawing on Richard L. Hasen’s Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—And How to Cure It, Stephen M. Feldman’s Pack the Court: A Defense of Supreme Court Expansion, and the Final Report of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, the essay then turns to two proposals for legal and institutional reforms in the United States that, depending on how one understands the nature of the threat, might be understood either as further indications of (and even contributors to) democratic decline or as “constitutional hardball” in democracy’s defense. It argues that scholarly treatments of democratic decline can help sharpen for citizens and policy makers the key tradeoffs implicated by Supreme Court expansion, restrictions on extremist speech, and other proposed democracy reforms.