Mexico’s 1917 Constitution has gone through 737 reforms; no other codified constitution has been subjected to such a constant pattern of renewal through amendment. We argue that the study of Mexican patterns offers important theoretical insights for the study of constitutional change by calling into question the generalizability of the thesis—articulated by Donald Lutz and currently endorsed by most specialists in the field—according to which amendment and interpretation are substitute means of constitutional updating. Based on two original data sets containing all constitutional amendments and all Supreme Court precedents on constitutional matters from 1917 to 2020, we find that in Mexico hyper-reformism is correlated to a steep increase in the number and diversity of binding constitutional precedents. Quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that these precedents not only apply the Constitution, but substantively revise it, suggesting that, in Mexico, amendment and interpretation are not alternative but complementary channels of constitutional change. Our account suggests that, in Mexico, hyper-reformism has actually led to innovative constitutional interpretation as a mechanism to cope with its effects. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and comparative insights this case offers for better understanding the nature, causes, and effects of the different modalities of constitutional change.

The law is commonly described as one of the major forces shaping contemporary correctional institutions. However, we still lack a satisfactory understanding of how it has affected power relations behind bars. Drawing from two ethnographies of French correctional facilities, this article finds that changes to the material environment where incarcerated people and correctional staff interact have altered the relational economy of prisons and jails more than legal actions have. To avoid litigation, prison administrators design and use countless graphic artifacts, which has further reshaped the adversarial nature of social relations in prisons and jails. This bureaucratic approach has introduced the form of the law into the most banal of everyday communications between prisoners and authorities, replacing the informal asymmetrical interpersonal negotiations that have traditionally maintained order. Building on Robert Kagan’s typology of modes of policy making and dispute resolution, I re-examine power relations in contemporary French prisons and jails as a tension between formal and informal framings as well as hierarchical and participatory organizations of authority. I call this hybrid relational economy, where the force of the law lies mostly in its formal shadow, adversarial formalism.

Business courts can function as loci of privilege, both institutional and substantive, expressing a clear privileging of business as a sphere of social action. Using an original case study, we show how the establishment of a new business court privileged businesspersons in two ways: by providing them with expert judicial services and by receiving into law a rule that gives them unique protection from liability—the Delaware Business Judgment Rule. We did not find that this reception reflected court capture by businesspersons. It did reflect a conviction that Delaware law is best, inculcated by US-educated academics, and inter-jurisdictional competitive aspirations. Our case study demonstrates how business courts express the structured power of business and businesspersons.

In this examination of domestic violence protection orders in two lower-level Chinese courts, the interpretation of gender violence with respect to political concerns for social stability plays an essential role in the law’s effectiveness. In an urbanized coastal area court, judges see gender violence as a direct threat to social stability. To maintain stability, they facilitate claims against gender violence. Conversely, in a rural court, judges view gender violence as a direct threat to family stability. To maintain family stability, which is closely linked to social stability, they suppress claims against gender violence. This study proposes that, when global discourses are reformulated, new forms of cultural and political appropriation emerge. It highlights the complexities that arise when law, culture, and politics intermingle in the process of law and globalization. Understanding these complexities is crucial for addressing challenges in implementing global legal reforms at the local level and ensuring protection against gender violence.

This article examines what happens when plural normative ideas and arrangements to address an issue reach local settings through transnational networks. Using anti-corruption reforms in East Timor as the lens, I show the diverse normative aspirations of international and local actors involved in transferring and receiving new regulatory arrangements. By proposing compromise as another possible outcome of transnational legal transfers, the study examines how compromises shape the scope and limits of adopted regulations. The anti-corruption reforms case study from East Timor allows us to identify when and how translocal compromises occur, who is part of such compromises, and how they influence the legal transfer and adoption process. Drawing on insights from comparative law, law and society, and regulation studies scholarship, the article provides a bottom-up perspective of transnational legal reforms, illustrating the entanglements of these initiatives with the local politics, conflicts, and power struggles. The findings underscore the need for more qualitative studies on legal transfers where multiple international and local actors are involved, capturing how their power struggles shape the scope and limits of regulatory arrangements that are ultimately adopted. By illustrating the interactions between local, national, and international actors, the article contributes to understanding the complexities, possibilities, and limits of transnational legal reform initiatives in specific contexts.

Across the globe, people who mobilize to protect their rights in highly oppressive contexts may have to navigate government institutions that not only fail to implement protections but also engage in discriminatory practices. This article introduces the term “circumventive legal resistance” to describe practices of making legally grounded claims but facilitating relief through processes of expression and negotiation that are distinct from explicit mechanisms of legal enforcement. Based upon a study of twenty-seven rural, semi-rural, and urban areas across the north and north-west regions of India, this article documents how Dalit women—from the most marginalized groups at the base of the caste pyramid—mobilize to protect their rights in contexts where local institutions do not enforce laws prohibiting caste discrimination and instead perpetrate caste-based forced labor practices. In particular, I focus on a campaign to end manual scavenging—a form of caste-based forced labor that is one of the worst surviving symbols of untouchability. With local channels to legal relief largely foreclosed, Dalit women who leave manual scavenging engage in circumventive legal resistance: they draw on law to make claims but win relief through avenues distinct from those envisioned within the parameters of the law.

This article uses the theoretical framework of “performative sovereignty” to analyze the role of sovereignty in the Palestinian Authority’s interactions with human rights treaty bodies and to the judicial decisions of the Palestine Supreme Constitutional Court. We argue that, in contrast to dominant views of sovereignty as a threshold, sovereignty is performed through a series of discrete (yet related) interactions and practices that—when accepted by their designated audience—result in rights and privileges being granted, accompanied by sovereign status. Analyzing both Palestinian communications with human rights treaty bodies and cases brought before the Palestinian Supreme Constitutional Court, we argue that the drive to perform sovereignty helps explain states’ actions in joining and reporting to human rights treaty bodies and the responses those actions have elicited. We also find that sovereignty operates as an iron cage—an almost ubiquitous framework—that structures (both constrains and enables) the possible actions of different actors in the field of human rights. The inquiry deepens our understanding of the development and operation of human rights and the role of statehood in shaping the global legal order.

Law school students are encouraged frequently to “network.” However, depending on demographic categories, they may have access to differently resourced social networks in law school. In this article, we draw from our mixed-methods research to explore this diversity of experience, its limitations of access, and the possible network inequalities that may limit the value of legal education to diverse students across different institutional contexts. Using survey and network data (N = 744), collected during the fall of 2019 from three law schools, as well as supplementary interview data (N = 55), we examined students’ social networks, the structures of these relationships, and their associations with law school satisfaction. We find that, while students tended to cluster based on shared characteristics (that is, race, gender, sexual identity, political orientation, religion, and age) and contexts (that is, type of program, section assignments), these emergent clusters produced disparities in satisfaction across racial categories. Homophilous networks were tied to satisfaction for Black and White students, but the same embeddedness was associated with lower satisfaction with law school for Asian and Latinx students. These results provide grounds for rethinking how diversity matters in law school and its implications for marginalized students’ experience and success.

This article examines the idea of introducing a comprehensive reward program for whistleblowing on violations of environmental laws. The common criticism that rewards for external reporting considerably discourage employees from internal reporting is unjustified. This argument overlooks both legal practices of whistleblowing and prior research on social preferences. We argue that prosocial motivations are a crucial determinant of both internal and external reporting. Prosocial individuals are predominant in society. They respond to monetary incentives for external reporting while maintaining their commitment to internal reporting driven by prosocial motives. By combining a vignette-based survey and a measurement of social value orientation, we find that the effect size of prosociality on the likelihood of whistleblowing is comparable to, or greater than, the effect sizes of established predictors like demographic and contextual variables. We also find that the discouragement effect is less pronounced for prosocial individuals than for proself individuals. Based on these findings, we discuss how to design legal frameworks that balance the discouragement effect and the incentive effect of whistleblower rewards.

Over the past several years, socio-legal researchers have focused attention on the phenomenon of eviction, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color. One major aspect of the eviction phenomenon has been largely overlooked: how and why certain eviction filings result in forced, legally compelled tenant moves and others do not. Through coding of the legal documents associated with eviction filings and multi-level regression analysis, this article advances the analysis of evictions in two crucial ways. First, it identifies and describes the frequency of the distinct legal procedural pathways that result in forced tenant moves once an eviction case has been filed. Second, it identifies the case, tenancy, neighborhood, and property correlates of forced tenant moves and of distinct procedural pathways to forced tenant moves. The article demonstrates that move-out agreements are the primary procedural pathway by which tenants are forcibly moved, yet they have been largely overlooked in previous eviction research because they are not easily analyzable in administrative datasets. The regression analyses advance the growing work examining the role of landlord characteristics in shaping tenants’ housing stability and break new ground in identifying the characteristics of the different pathways through which tenants are forced out of their homes following eviction filing.

Though formal life sentences have been abolished in Norway, forvaring (post-conviction indefinite preventive detention) – a type of informal life sentence – can be imposed on individuals convicted of certain offenses who are considered to be at high risk of future offending. While great attention has been paid to Norway as an “exceptional” penal outlier globally, there is a notable lack of comprehensive knowledge about its indefinite penal sanction. Drawing on extensive historical research and legal and policy documentary analysis as well as leveraging a unique national dataset on the total forvaring population, this article provides the first international in-depth assessment of the evolution and implementation of Norway’s ultimate penalty. In so doing, it highlights significant disparities between policy ambitions and current practice and questions the extent to which the sanction of forvaring can be considered an “exceptional” approach to life imprisonment. It is argued that the development and growth of this type of informal life sentence can be seen as the epicenter of the impact of a more punitive ideology in Norway, emphasizing the need to move away from the concept of penal exceptionalism to better understand the full spectrum and practice of Norwegian and Nordic penality.

With the upsurge of anti-globalizing ideologies and politics, the increasing institutionalization of xenophobia within the legal system has emerged as a pressing concern. Existing law and social science research has underexplored xenophobic bias in the US legal system. This article conceptualizes xenophobic bias as consisting of racism and nationalism. It investigates whether mock jurors reach different verdicts on defendant companies from foreign countries of origin (Japan, France, and China) compared to domestic (US) companies. Using a test simulating a patent lawsuit, the research finds no evidence of general xenophobic bias in juror liability verdict decisions, yet there is a specific bias against the Chinese company when granting damage awards. The similarity-leniency effect that has been established in the previous literature is corroborated in this article. Additionally, political views moderate the effects of the company’s country of origin on juror decisions. This research offers a more nuanced conceptual framework of xenophobic bias in juror decision-making for future law and social science research and informs judicial policies seeking to improve jury instructions and jury selection to reduce xenophobic bias.

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) migrants’ disclosure of their identity or “coming out” has significant stakes. It can facilitate access to resources (institutional disclosure), cultivate intimacy and belonging (social disclosure), or support claims for legal protections (legal disclosure). This article analyzes SGM unaccompanied minors’ disclosures as shaped by the evolution of their legal consciousness in pursuing legal relief and incorporation in the United States. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews from 2014–2019 with 11 SGM unaccompanied minors reveal a striking pattern in their disclosure practices. During apprehension and detention, minors engaged in social, institutional, and legal disclosure of their SGM status. However, their interactions with agents from the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services led them to believe that SGM rights, support, and acceptance were contingent on legal status. Later, upon release from state custody, minors withheld legal disclosure from their deportation proceedings and immigration cases, even against the advisement of their attorneys. They also became more strategic in their social and institutional disclosure across other contexts. Post-legalization, however, minors broadened their disclosure practices and embarked on claims related to their SGM status. This study raises implications for research and policy. By analyzing shifts in legal consciousness over time, how certain experiences become reference points for how immigrants understand the law with respect to their identity and related behaviors are illustrated. It also extends the discussion of the far-reaching implications of SGM punishment and the disadvantages of immigration detention for children and youth.

The Turkish state long enforced intellectual property (IP) rights only loosely. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, market liberalization and trade agreements drove an overhaul of the country’s copyright regime that transformed musical ownership and creativity, though music copyright stakeholders view this legal reform as ongoing. This article builds on existing accounts of legal consciousness to ethnographically document how a range of music industry actors—including legal professionals, musicians, music industry executives, and commercial users of copyrighted music—participate in IP reform. I identify a distinct set of cultural schemas that mediate such actors’ legal consciousness in this context. The internationally integrated nature of the copyright system, together with Turkey’s geopolitical positioning on the margins of Europe, has produced a reflexive aspect of legal consciousness in which Turkish citizens exhibit a heightened group status awareness as they compare their experience of domestic IP law to the imagined situation elsewhere. In a novel contribution to the literature, I observe how they often make sense of perceived dissonances between the ideals and practice of the law through culturally intimate narratives, taking the copyright system’s purported failures to typify something essential about what it means to be a citizen of Turkey.

There is conflicting evidence as to whether employers prefer immigrants over native-born workers when hiring. Some evidence suggests that employers might penalize immigrants over comparably educated co-ethnic native-born workers. Yet other evidence suggests just the opposite: employers prefer immigrants over native-born workers because of associations with compliance or exploitability. However, many of these studies generate data from workers, not employers, which makes it hard to understand employers’ underlying motivations when hiring. In addition, very few studies consider employers’ occupational roles and variations in organizational contexts. Drawing on original employer-level data—including an original survey experiment of 1,515 employers and interviews with 47 employers and immigration lawyers—I find that there’s tension in the legal awareness and professional interests of employers by their occupational role. Organizational and team leaders are motivated to hire whom they perceive as “exceptional” immigrants to make themselves and their companies look good, while HR staff are motivated to follow legal procedures and avoid regulatory fines. This article has contributions to studies on immigration, the law and society, and organizational sociology. For instance, it finds that in the case of immigration, employers’ occupational roles inside of firms help to mediate the influence of the law on immigrant inequality.

This article analyzes how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) handles evidence of pushback, where states violently force asylum seekers away from borders. An examination of how the experiences of pushback survivors get translated (or not) into judgments contributes to theoretical discussions about truth, epistemic practices, and law. The article asks why so little of what researchers, journalists, civil society actors, and international organizations have documented about European border violence is visible in the court’s judgments. Based on a mix of legal and anthropological research methods, the article traces how states and the ECtHR erase pushback evidence at borders and during litigation. Taking seriously on equal grounds the construction of facts outside and inside a court room, the article connects external perspectives on the production of evidence with an internal analysis of evidence in judgments. In doing so, the article highlights the political dimensions of seemingly merely technical and legal procedures. We argue for a clearer separation of courts’ and states’ versions of facts, contending that the presumption of the states’ good faith should no longer apply when there is evidence, including in case law, of misrecordings and false statements by respondent states.

In times of political crisis and attacks against the foundations of political liberalism, can we put our trust in lawyers and other legal occupations to fight for our freedoms when they are under attack? The role of the legal profession in the rise, development, and resilience of political liberalism has been at the core of a body of work commonly framed as “the legal complex”: Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik’s Lawyers and the Rise of Western Political Liberalism, Halliday, Malcolm Feeley, and Karpik’s Fighting for Political Freedom, Halliday, Karpik, and Feeley’s Fates of Political Liberalism in the British Post-Colony, and Feeley and Malcolm Langford’s The Limits of the Legal Complex. In view of the precariousness of political liberalism in contemporary global politics, this review essay reflects on the core ideas of the legal complex literature. By identifying connections with other strands of scholarship on legal agents, legal mobilization, and the move to law in transitional politics, I suggest rescaling the study of the legal complex to enable consideration of its relevance for the study of political liberalism at the international level of analysis and, specifically, of its importance to the resilience of the liberal international order currently in rapid decline.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has come under challenge in recent years as some countries have decided, or considered, to withdraw from it. Against this backdrop, an emerging literature has begun to examine attitudes toward the court among the general public as a key court constituency. However, little is known about how domestic elites perceive the court. This research gap is particularly surprising given that domestic elites have a considerable impact on both public and state support of the court. This article explains why political and societal elites across world regions have confidence or lack confidence in the ICC. We present the results from a unique survey of 722 elite respondents conducted from 2017 to 2019 across six countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. We furthermore enrich our analysis by using public opinion data to draw comparisons between elites and the general public. The analyses reveal that the views of elites are most consistently related to their perceptions of other, more well-known international organizations and their country’s relationship with the ICC. Our findings indicate both similarities and differences between how elite and public opinion about the ICC are formed, demonstrating the value of further research on elite opinion on international courts.

The animal protection movement has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the criminal punishment system through lobbying and campaigning for harsher punishments for animal abuse, while at the same time showing an interest in restorative justice (RJ) as a response to harm against animals. In this article, we take a critical position aligned with anti-carceral feminists and prison abolitionists against the carceral systems that fail humans and animals in circumstances of violence. We consider the potential of RJ as an alternative approach to address and prevent harm against animals in abuse cases on an individual level while highlighting the limitations of RJ in achieving the necessary changes on a societal level to end structurally produced violence against animals, such as industrial animal exploitation. We propose that transformative justice (TJ), which involves some RJ processes, is the most promising approach that could achieve justice for both humans and nonhumans in the long term without reproducing traumas and violence for the individuals and communities involved in harm reduction and prevention. Drawing on examples of RJ and TJ as developed and practised in marginalized human communities, we apply their lessons to thinking through similar practices in the context of animal abuse and neglect.