Administrative burden describes the learning costs, psychological costs, and compliance costs people face when attempting to interface with the government, particularly in seeking a benefit. Algorithmic and automated processes offer the potential of reducing administrative burdens, but scant empirical research has determined to what, if any effect. This study uses the case of criminal record expungement in two policy contexts: traditional, court petition-based systems and newly enacted automated systems, to understand if and how administrative burden persists, and whether and how these burdens operate differently in the context of the criminal legal system. Drawing on interviews with 105 expungement-eligible people, we find that while automated expungement schemes shift the burden from petitioner to state to initiate the process, automation inadvertently creates new administrative burdens via failure to notify, partial clearances, and opaque data processes. Furthermore, respondents described how automation failed to provide a sense of confirmation from the state that their sentence was truly completed, rehabilitation had been acknowledged, or that collateral consequences should no longer wield the same power. Overall, we argue that leveraging automation to reduce burdens must include information availability by design; otherwise policy reforms may fail to fully achieve their goals.

Many legal disputes are resolved through settlement. The dominant theory explaining settlements – known as “bargaining in the shadow of the law” – assumes that litigants are informed, rational actors inclined to bargain toward a settlement prior to court proceedings. Yet many settlements are negotiated after litigants have appeared in court expecting to go to trial. This article argues that court organizational mechanisms play an undertheorized role in facilitating settlement agreements. To build theory on organizational mechanisms, we examine the case of eviction settlements. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in a California eviction court, we find that organizational rules and workgroup norms funnel mostly unrepresented tenants – sometimes, in coercive ways – into unregulated hallway conversations with landlord attorneys and/or participation in the court’s mediation program. Through relational interactions with legal professionals in these organizational spaces, tenants are taught the risks of trial and the benefits of settlement. As a result, most tenants in our sample come to recognize their legal culpability and view settlement agreements as legitimate, even as their negotiated settlements reproduce their housing insecurity. We discuss implications for bargaining theory and research on housing insecurity.

Neoliberalism, once an economic doctrine responding to the failures of liberalism, has become a widely used concept in sociolegal scholarship. Law and society scholars often invoke it to explain sociolegal and punitive phenomena such as mass incarceration, inequality, and state transformation. But the concept’s analytic power is undermined when scholars conflate neoliberalism as a sociohistorical process with neoliberalism as a universal cause. Drawing on an intellectual history of neoliberalism’s evolving meanings, I identify two problems – ubiquity and a lack of counterfactual imagination – that limit its theoretical utility in sociolegal research. I argue that neoliberalism should be theorized as a contingent, sociohistorical process; only then can it function as a theory with meaningful consequents.

Although democracy is at the core of the U.S.’s self-image, the laws granting civic rights have long been designed to exclude some Americans, highlighting a fundamental tension between the democratic ideal and group interest. Echoing past racial exclusions, contemporary felony disenfranchisement policies and a racially unjust criminal legal system combine to continue to disenfranchise Black Americans disproportionately. Public opinion on these policies presents opportunities for or barriers to reform, so we seek to understand public opposition to ending felony disenfranchisement. Using two recent national surveys from the American National Election Studies, we explore two explanations rooted in the social contexts from which relational civic rights consciousness emerges: one reflecting varied commitments to democratic norms and one rooted in racial threat. Even after controlling for politics, a commitment to democracy is associated with support for allowing those convicted of a felony to vote, while concerns about threats to White privilege are associated with opposition. Critically, the relationship appears conditional: commitments to democracy fail to produce support for voting rights among those who are preoccupied with maintaining White privilege. Implications for people’s support for the legal rights of others, for democracy and for legal change are discussed.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

Scholars trained in disciplines like anthropology, history, law, political science, and sociology helped to give rise to the field of law and society over the past two generations. What theories does law and society offer those disciplines in return, and are scholars in those fields looking back to law and society? To answer these questions, this article, which introduces a symposium celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Law & Society Review, brings together scholarship across disciplines to share the possible future influence of law and society on the disciplines. This theoretical and forward-looking inquiry invites us all to reflect upon law and society’s contributions over the past two generations and to consider what law and society will contribute to the next generation of interdisciplinary – and disciplinary – scholarship.

Comment les professionnels du droit et de la médecine construisent-ils, au tribunal, le statut légal et l’état mental des patients, et comment ces derniers participent-ils à ces constructions? Cet article s’appuie sur l’analyse de 300 audiences à Paris et à New York, au cours desquelles des personnes hospitalisées sans consentement demandent leur sortie. Dans les deux villes, les tribunaux rejettent la grande majorité des requêtes. Ils le font en mobilisant, selon des modalités propres à chaque système, des répertoires juridiques et des capacités de contrôle qui transforment les patients en différents types de sujets utilisables: des personnes dont les droits sont formellement pris en compte à l’audience, mais qui sont néanmoins classées comme nécessitant les interventions sans consentement que la psychiatrie a les moyens d’assurer. À Paris, les professionnels du droit insistent sur les garanties procédurales tout en s’en remettant aux évaluations médicales du consentement des patients, entendu comme une disposition sous-jacente à accepter un traitement au long cours. À New York, les avocats contestent plus directement l’expertise psychiatrique, mais négocient avec médecins et patients autour de la compliance, comprise comme une acceptation de court terme de la médication. L’article propose ainsi de déplacer le regard des figures de sujets autonomes que les dispositifs médico-légaux et sociaux hybrides prétendent produire vers des formes plus contingentes et situées de sujets utilisables, qui rendent possible la coopération professionnelle et le traitement institutionnel dans un contexte de ressources limitées et d’extension des droits des patients.

This essay examines how Law and Society approaches have transformed historical analysis by reconceptualizing law as constitutive of social reality rather than as an isolated formal system. Tracing this methodological revolution from 1960s American legal history through scholars like J. Willard Hurst and Lawrence Friedman to 1990s legal consciousness studies by Patricia Ewick, Susan Silbey and Sally Engle Merry, the essay demonstrates how these frameworks reveal law as lived experience operating through documentary practices and administrative procedures rather than overt coercion. Through examples from British colonial Singapore and Hong Kong, the analysis shows how legal mechanisms normalized authority, how marginalized subjects strategically navigated plural legal systems and how legal transformations eventually became invisible within naturalized landscapes. Law and Society approaches provide historians with three crucial innovations: revealing agency through strategic legal engagement, reconceptualizing power as operating through capillary networks of documentation, and reframing historical transformation as gradual reconfiguration of legal categories that denaturalizes what appears inevitable.

The relationship between political science and sociolegal scholarship is, at it’s best, a constitutive one. This essay argues that the two fields of study have taken turns illuminating important aspects of law, politics, and social life – responding, in turn, to the theoretical and empirical findings of each other. Law and Society scholarship, in particular, presses political scientists to rethink their foundational assumptions about the rule of law, the power of institutions, and the meaning of judicial decision-making and processes. Some of this rethinking may result, as we posited on the panel which gave rise to this work, in a fruitful “undisciplining” of the field, and re-imagining of the political.

We argue that the far-right is turning to law and legal institutions to institutionalize its extreme agendas but does so in the name of democratic values. Right-wing attempts to affirm and repress rights speak to the duality of democracy, often hinging on the perceived worthiness of rights along cultural and ethnic boundaries while still espousing equality for all. To understand and explain this phenomenon, we bring together socio-legal literature and far-right scholarship and focus on the understudied but significant Swedish case, often viewed as exceptional. We analyze critical events within the Swedish polity, such as the free speech crisis over the Quran burnings and recent reforms of the Tidö Agreement, the governing document of the right-wing coalition government, which is deeply influenced by the far-right Sweden Democrats. Empirical evidence shows how right-wing movements go beyond conventional right-against-rights expectations of authoritarian or strongman tactics to instead advocate for liberal values.

Kwalitatieve interviews onder 100 verdachten in Nederlandse strafzaken bieden inzicht in de vraag of ervaren procedurele rechtvaardigheid ertoe doet voor verdachten en, zo ja, welke componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid voor hen van belang zijn. Het epistemologische vertrekpunt van dit onderzoek verschilt van de kwantitatieve studies die het onderzoeksveld domineren, doordat dit onderzoek nagaat welke componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid respondenten eventueel zelf ter sprake brengen in plaats van respondenten te vragen naar vooraf bepaalde componenten van procedurele rechtvaardigheid. De grote meerderheid van de respondenten bracht zelf kwesties ter sprake die met procedurele rechtvaardigheid te maken hebben. Zes componenten vormden de kern van hun rechtvaardigheidspercepties: (1) informatie waarop beslissingen zijn gebaseerd, (2) bejegening, (3) gepaste aandacht, (4) neutraliteit, (5) inspraak en (6) zorgvuldigheid. Hoewel deze componenten overeenkomen met de literatuur over procedurele rechtvaardigheid, noemden respondenten sommige componenten vaker – en andere juist minder vaak – dan men op basis van de literatuur zou verwachten. In het bijzonder speelt neutraliteit een belangrijke rol in de Nederlandse rechtbankcontext die hier werd onderzocht.