Prior studies in the United States argue that the discretionary decisions of federal prosecutors regarding which issues to prioritize are shaped by the politicians who appoint them, while studies on state prosecutors emphasize the role of press coverage and public opinion. However, these studies leave untheorized whether prosecutors’ discretionary decisions are also affected by how their peers frame issues within and beyond prosecution offices. Building on the scholarship of collective action frames, this study develops a framework to explain how prosecutors’ framing work affects their colleagues’ decisions about which issues to focus on. I draw on the case of Brazil, where federal prosecutors focused on crime-fighting and human rights, but in the mid-2010s switched focus to corruption following a large-scale investigation called Lava Jato. I compare Lava Jato with two similarly large investigations that failed to transform corruption into the dominant issue within the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Drawing on 131 original interviews, I show how federal prosecutors’ framing work can persuade their colleagues to focus on the same issue through two stages: (1) conceptualization of versatile frames that speak to problems a variety of issues prosecutors care about and (2) diffusion of frames through professional meetings – providing roadmaps for how other prosecutors can implement the new frame – and to the press, increasing public attention.

Prior scholarship has established that controlling space is central to policing, while highlighting various ways in which this form of social control can be racialized. Extending this work, we advance a theory on the racialized control of space that predicts a higher level of police stops and lower standards of suspicion along neighborhood racial boundaries, the areas where racial composition changes between adjacent neighborhoods. Our theoretical argument sheds light on the selective enforcement of law and order in these transitional spaces, which is a form of racialized spatial social control. Integrating data from New York City’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program from 2008 to 2012 with extensive neighborhood measures, our analyses reveal that White neighborhoods along boundaries experienced substantially elevated levels of police stops even after conditioning on a wide array of potential confounders. This relationship is partially mediated by elevated crime along neighborhood racial boundaries. Still, a sizable direct effect persists, indicative of the racialized social control of spaces. Further, the police tended to require less suspicion before deciding to conduct stops in White neighborhoods along racial boundaries, but only for Black and Hispanic suspects. Implications for the study of race and policing, law and society, and urban and racial inequality are discussed.

Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police misconduct. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police behaviors. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent interactions with police enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of police misconduct, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with their cellphones – what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police, reflecting the micro-dynamic connections between individuals’ legal consciousness and legal cynicism. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–citizen interactions to challenge police misconduct. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats, and arrests.

Under what conditions will people be inclined to seek remedy when facing rights violations? While some socio-legal scholars have found structural position and/or the ideological macro-context to be the key factors shaping individuals’ legal consciousness, often inhibiting their pursuit of remedies, others contend that social experiences and political interventions, including participation in social movements, affect people’s willingness to demand redress. What happens, then, when a diffuse popular mobilization challenges a state’s fundamental normative framework and demands justice and rights for long-excluded sectors of the population? This article offers empirical and theoretical insights to these debates based on results from a nationally representative survey conducted in Chile at the height of such a mass political mobilization. In this context of widespread citizen engagement and collective claim-making, we find that participation in the protests and self-perceived knowledge of where to turn are statistically related to individuals’ professed willingness to pursue a formal remedy across two hypothetical rights violation scenarios. These findings suggest that participation in protests might have an empowerment effect on those who take part, even among disadvantaged groups, opening new avenues for research at the intersection of socio-legal and political participation studies.

Public interest lawyers seek to empower clients through collaborative approaches to direct representation that redistribute legal knowledge and affirm clients’ agency; however, the legal settings in which attorneys operate shape their capacity to subvert dynamics they consider oppressive. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork at a legal nonprofit serving asylum seekers in Los Angeles, this study explores how the broader environment of a restrictive immigration system transforms the aspirations, possibilities, and strategies of public interest lawyering. Drawing from sociolegal literature on cause lawyers, access to justice, and the U.S. immigration system, the article argues that the politicization of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy destabilizes foundational legal norms, hindering the agenda of public interest attorneys. Procedural formalism constitutes one of the only resources at attorneys’ disposal, yet here it often impedes lawyers’ ability to disrupt perceived power hierarchies. Specifically, the prevalence of complex legal procedures that obstruct access to asylum reconfigures opportunities to uplift clients. These findings illuminate how hostile legal settings strain lawyers. They also contribute to timely debates around how attorneys protect access to justice and advance meaningful social transformation.

Racism has become more covert in post-civil rights America. Yet, measures to combat it are hindered by inadequate general knowledge on what “colorblind” race talk says and does and what makes it effective. We deepen understanding of covert racism by investigating one type of discourse – racial code words, which are (1) indirect signifiers of racial or ethnic groups that contain (2) at least one positive or negative value judgment and (3) contextually implied or salient meanings. Through a thematic analysis of 734 racial code words from 97 scholarly texts, we develop an interpretive framework that explains their tropes, linguistic mechanisms and unique roles in perpetuating racism, drawing from race, linguistic and cultural studies. Racial code words promote tropes of White people’s respectability and privilege and Racial/Ethnic Minorities’ pathology and inferiority in efficient, adaptable, plausibly deniable and almost always racially stratifying ways, often through euphemism, metonymy and othering. They construct a “colorblind” discursivity and propel both “epistemic racism” (racism in knowledge) and systemic racism (racism in action). We further strengthen applications of Critical Race Theory in sociolegal studies of race by presenting a “racial meaning decoding tool” to assist legal and societal measures to detect coded racism.

Through the lens of legal consciousness, this paper analyzes institutional dissatisfaction within the backdrop of profound skepticism directed at formal institutions, particularly within the context of post-October 2019 Chilean society. It aims at inquiring into the relationship between the expression of deep state antipathy and the stance that individuals manifest regarding legality. The paper reports on the findings derived from 12 focus groups, categorized by age, gender and location. We find that despite prevalent negative sentiments harbored by individuals toward these establishments, interviewees continue to use the language of law, expressing their dissatisfaction as frustrated formal entitlements or a lack of enforcement of the law regarding corrupt elites. We conclude that the existence of a gap between normative expectations and the acute rejection of the fulfillment of those expectations by institutional actors points to a structure of opportunities conducive to the emergence of more authoritative forms of state power.

The emergence and dissemination of new legal ideas can play an important role in sparking change in the way activists in marginalized communities understand their rights and pursue their objectives. How and why do the legal beliefs of such communities evolve? We argue that the vigorous advocacy of new legal ideas by entrepreneurs and the harnessing of specialized media to help disseminate those ideas are important mechanisms in this evolution. We use the rise of marriage equality as a central legal priority in the mainstream American LGBTQ+ rights movement as a case study to illustrate this phenomenon. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Evan Wolfson’s legal advocacy and an examination of The Advocate, we investigate how Wolfson developed and disseminated legal ideas about same-sex marriage. We show how this advocacy eventually dominated discussion of the issue among elite LGBTQ+ legal actors and the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ publication. However, Wolfson’s advocacy tended to emphasize LGBTQ+ integration into “mainstream” American culture and prioritized the interests and values of relatively privileged subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community. Our research informs our understanding of the interplay between legal advocacy and media reporting in the development of LGBTQ+ rights claims and the strategies adopted to achieve them.

While sociologists have focused on the national adoption of public-sphere women’s rights such as the right to vote in elections or participate fully in economic matters, less work has examined the diffusion of private-sphere women’s rights, rights of women in the home. We address this gap by examining the cross-national adoption of laws that criminalize marital rape. Building on prior research that finds that women’s rights organizations and women’s rights focused treaties, we explore the cross-national determinants of the criminalization of marital rape. Using an event history analysis covering 131 countries from 1979 to 2013, we find support for the global institutionalist framework that contends that socialization into the global system and direct advocacy efforts of global organizations contribute to faster rates of criminalization of marital rape. Further, we suggest that these global institutionalist processes become amplified when they are focused by events that set the agenda for international organizations. Implications for world-society scholarship on the global adoption of women’s rights are further discussed.