Does the process of writing a constitution have any impact on its durability? Using a cross-national analysis of 209 constitutions adopted since 1974, this study shows that the broader inclusion of different societal and political groups in constitution-making processes, rather than mere public participation, positively correlates with constitutional durability. Following self-enforcement theories, this study argues that to be self-enforcing and enduring, a constitution should be viewed as “fair” by every group in society to create a supporting constituency. This study suggests that an inclusive process can result in a “fair” constitution, which is deemed beneficial to every group in society and garners their willingness to defend and support the terms of the constitution. Confirming this argument, our statistical analysis shows that inclusive constitutions have 54 percent lower risk of replacement than noninclusive constitutions.

Across the developed world, citizens typically file many more administrative appeals than administrative lawsuits. Yet, in contrast to the rich literature on court decisions, little is known about the determinants of administrative appeals decisions. We seek to fill this scholarly gap. An important feature of administrative review panels is that typically only some of their members have professional legal training. Drawing on original data on Japanese prefectural-level Administrative Complaint Review Boards (ACRBs), we show that ACRBs with more private attorneys rule more often against agencies. Consistent with a socialization perspective, we find preliminary evidence that ACRBs with more experienced private attorneys rule more often against agencies. We also find that, consistent with insights from both political insurance theory and the literature on technocratic appointments, more recently elected prefectural governors are more likely to appoint more private attorneys to ACRBs and that governors’ ideological orientations have little effect on their choices.

Judicial authority relies heavily on the reader’s perception that judges make fair and legitimate decisions. Do such perceptions rest primarily on the reader’s agreement with the decision? Or does an opinion’s reasoning style, as distinct from outcome, impact a reader’s perceptions of legitimacy? In this study, we test whether incorporating elements of procedural fairness into judicial opinions impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, distinct from their agreement with the decision. In doing so, we also test whether members of the public are sensitive to elements of procedural fairness in written judicial opinions — a different context from the interpersonal interactions in which procedural fairness has been most often studied. We ran two survey experiments that sort participants into four conditions, varying the outcome of the case and whether the judicial opinion employs elements of procedural fairness. After reading a procedurally fair or one-sided opinion, participants reported on their perceptions of fairness and judicial legitimacy. We found strong support for the hypothesis that agreement with the outcome impacts readers’ perceptions of fairness and legitimacy, and weak support for the hypothesis that procedural fairness impacts these perceptions.

Deliberation is routinely considered an essential component of a jury trial, contributing to the quality of fact-finding and confidence in jury verdicts. Unlike all other countries that use juries, Brazilian jurors do not deliberate. Instead, under the Brazilian jury system’s “incommunicability rule,” they submit their votes individually, without discussing the case with one another. How jurors approach the task of individual decision making and how they view and experience this notable absence of deliberation are unknown. The aim of this article, which is part of a broader research project on jurors’ decision making in femicide trials in Brazil, is to understand these experiences and views of Brazilian jurors, especially regarding the incommunicability rule. The research used qualitative methods, including ethnographic observations of trials and semi-structured interviews of jurors. The majority of jurors voiced support for the current practice, explaining that refraining from deliberation would ensure their impartiality. However, 41 percent of the jurors said that they would have liked to deliberate with others to exchange and debate views. Interviews also shed light on how the absence of deliberation affected the decision process and jurors’ satisfaction with the overall jury experience. This research contributes to an ongoing debate in Brazil over the incommunicability rule.

In 1915, a Denver murder case became a national story, not because of the identities of the perpetrator or victim but because of a reluctant trial witness: Judge Ben B. Lindsey. A pioneer of Progressive Era juvenile justice, Lindsey was charged with contempt of court for refusing to disclose the details that a twelve-year-old boy shared with him. His refusal led to a six-year-long battle over ideas of confidence and secrecy between a juvenile court judge and a minor. This article analyzes the murder trial and consequent contempt of court case as reflective of a clash over questions of law, justice, and public interest and highlights the role of ordinary people, including children, in debating these ideas. It argues that, as legal actors engaged in a conflict between legal formalism and socialized law, members of the public debated their own perceptions and vernacular understandings of law, justice, and the role of the juvenile court.

A growing number of Medicaid programs have expanded to employ family members to provide long-term home care to individuals with disabilities, challenging the traditional wisdom that the law systematically denies the economic value of family caregiving. This article qualitatively studies a novel dataset of fair hearing records arising out of one of these programs—New York State’s Consumer-Directed Personal Assistance Program (CDPAP)—and makes two contributions to the literature on care, disability, and the welfare state. First, this article explores the new public/private boundary of care when the state limitedly expands its public care responsibility by compensating some family caregiving, providing a more nuanced picture of how the legal system both values and undervalues care. Second, it contributes to disability law scholars’ debate about medicalization by studying how medicalization works as a state legibility project in the context of state-supported disability care. Especially for traditionally undervalued social goods such as care, medicalization provides some metrics, albeit highly constrained, to make its value visible. Meanwhile, through capturing care recipients and their families’ more expansive understandings of care’s value, this study reveals the constraints of these metrics and supports making the relational dimension of care legible to the state.

The history of legal aid in South Asia has hitherto been restricted to appendages or short overviews in writings orientated towards its contemporary. This article offers the first archivally grounded study of the birth of the legal aid movement in early twentieth-century colonial India, focusing specifically on the Bombay Legal Aid Society. It pursues three major lines of inquiry. First, I consider the transnational intellectual networks between India and America upon which early Indian legal aid thinking developed. Second, I tackle the fraught politics of doing legal aid in interwar Bombay, a period marked by anticolonial nationalism and strong trade union organizing. Finally, the article examines why the BLAS succeeded in building strong working relationships with existing social welfare societies, state institutions, and like-minded legal professionals, but failed to garner considerable interest from the working classes it sought to serve. I argue that these struggles point to the hard limits of legal aid in the colony but also present a valuable window into the Bombay working classes’ legal consciousness. The article thus contributes to ongoing efforts at globalizing the history of legal aid and to the small but growing study of the legal profession in colonial South Asia.

Judges in Vietnam have increasingly been called upon by the state and society to resolve new social and economic problems. However, the expansion of judicial authority presents a problem for Vietnam’s authoritarian government, which wants courts that can resolve social problems without challenging state interests. This study draws on empirical research to explore whether judges in Vietnam’s authoritarian polity can harness legal reasoning to extend their authority. It uses a novel theoretical framework based on systems theory to understand how judges determine who is entitled to benefit from the law, which norms are appropriate to particular cases, and how such norms might direct them to reach decisions. Data from case studies and interviews with judges reveal that courts in Vietnam are increasingly using legal reasoning to manage the interaction between legal and extralegal norms, which is a decision-making process with the potential to expand judicial authority over socially significant disputes.

Richard Abel’s five-volume book series, Defending American Democracy (2025), offers key insights into the transformation of a liberal democracy under modern, legalistic autocratic rule. As an in-depth study of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, it outlines how the Trump administration challenged and subverted laws and legal principles, exploiting the gaps in our democracy exposed by his predecessors. With an executive branch actively working beyond constitutional boundaries, Abel highlights one of the most pressing questions of our day—what do we do now? This review essay aims to respond to part of this question by contributing to emerging scholarship on resistance to autocracy and authoritarianism. It proceeds in two parts. The first part draws from and develops Abel’s accounting of resistance to autocracy in the United States. In doing so, it extracts a generally applicable typology of resistance methods and how they manifest under state repression or persecution. The second part of this essay adapts these categories and raises examples within electoral democracies that are facing similar conditions. In contemplating resistance “success stories” in similarly situated nations, the review essay aims to direct further attention to shared strategies for democratic resilience during a global decline in the rule of law.