Lawyers instruct their clients to make performative and fleeting modifications in comportment to appease judges or officers. But how do they guide their clients to routinize everyday behaviors and lifestyles seen as desirable and respectable by the state? Expanding on theories of social control, nonstate governance, and lawyering, this paper considers the role of lawyers who guide mixed-status couples applying for marriage-based green card and naturalization petitions in the United States. Interviews with immigration attorneys, paralegals, and nonprofit advocates reveal their three-step strategy to shape intimate dimensions of mixed-status couples’ lives that connote marital legitimacy. First, lawyers translate immigration law into personalized checklists that function as the blueprint of marriage that couples must follow. Then, lawyers instruct and correct their clients’ family behaviors so that they are enacted and documented in compliance with vague immigration law as interpreted by the archetypal immigration officer. Crucially, lawyers help couples routinize and painstakingly archive these curated lifestyles for ongoing adjudication. Findings suggest that nonstate actors like immigration lawyers are more than intermediaries who broker and coach; they become domestic counselors who, as indirect agents of the state, coerce subjects toward acculturation.

This essay assesses Susan Sturm’s What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions as a major contribution to Critical Race Theory, socio-legal theory, and the practice of institutional anti-racism. It argues that Sturm’s central achievement is to reframe anti-racism not as a discrete legal remedy or diversity initiative, but as a sustained institutional practice of navigating paradox. Drawing on Sturm’s earlier work on complex discrimination, the essay shows how her critique of formal adjudication and liability-centered antidiscrimination law develops into a broader theory of organizational transformation. Institutions, Sturm argues, are not race-neutral arenas; they reproduce racial hierarchy through norms, routines, role structures, and patterns of interaction that often appear ordinary or neutral. The essay emphasizes three linked dimensions of Sturm’s intervention. First, anti-racism requires working through contradictions rather than resolving them: race must be acknowledged because it is materially consequential, yet racial categories must also be destabilized because they help reproduce hierarchy. Second, institutions often become trapped in cycles of reform and retrenchment, producing what Sturm calls “Groundhog Day” dynamics in which diversity initiatives generate temporary movement but fail to alter underlying structures. Third, meaningful transformation depends on trust, linked fate, stretch collaboration, and organizational catalysts that can create durable forms of shared inquiry and collective action.

Why do poor caregivers resist rights-based framings of their situation even when directly exposed to institutionalized rights discourses? Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with caregivers, care recipients, and officials from Chile Cuida, a state assistance program grounded in the right-to-care framework, this article examines the rights consciousness of long-term, intensive caregivers in Santiago, Chile. We find that, despite significant political exposure to rights discourses, caregivers consistently frame their experiences in terms of familial duty rather than entitlement. Building on rights-consciousness literature, we identify three mechanisms that explain this pattern: cultural incompatibility, whereby caregivers resist framings that appear to contradict familial obligations; familial overspilling, whereby family-based relational expectations are projected onto bureaucratic actors; and bridging strategies, whereby caregivers invoke alternative cultural sources of entitlement – particularly notions of state duty toward the poor – to justify receiving assistance without challenging familial dominance. We argue that discursive exposure to rights frameworks is insufficient when it confronts deeply settled familial cultural repertoires, with significant implications for care policy in the region.

Law and society scholars have examined how nonlegal actors, or “legal intermediaries,” construct the meaning of compliance as they translate law into organizational practice and policy. This article applies the legal intermediaries framework to analyze how higher education professionals navigate federal and state immigration law to mitigate the impact of illegality on undocumented students at the institutional level. We find that staff work within the underdefined, flexible, and often complex dimensions of immigration law by developing “creative solutions,” or university-specific policies and practices that interpret and apply existing legal frameworks in ways that broaden access to opportunities for undocumented students. Staff proceed through four steps within this process: developing an understanding of one’s legal and professional context, implementing and troubleshooting solutions, raising awareness and mobilizing support across and beyond the institution, and institutionalizing workarounds. In the process, staff shape broader understandings and organizational treatment of (il)legality at their respective institutions. Through this analysis, we extend the literature on legal intermediaries to the immigration context. We also refine the processes involved in the organizational intermediation of compliance and identify the set of contextual factors that may facilitate or hinder the creative solutions process within and beyond higher education.

While legal mobilization through litigation and legislative reform has been widely examined, less is known about how political and social actors engage constitution-making processes to advance or restrict rights. Latin America provides a particularly relevant context to study this phenomenon, given the region’s frequent constitutional replacements and the growing tendency of activists to use constitution-making itself when other institutional channels prove unresponsive. This article analyzes Chile’s 2021–2022 Constitutional Convention – the first phase of the 2020–2023 constitutional replacement process. Focusing on the constitutional mobilization of anti-abortion rights groups, we examine how, despite an unfavorable political opportunity structure and public opinion, they sought to roll back reproductive rights advances. Drawing on interviews, official records, protest event data, and public opinion surveys, we identify three main strategies employed by anti-abortion rights groups: reframing opposition to abortion within constitutional, natural law, and international human rights discourses; bundling conservative causes with broader appeals to protect life and property; and leveraging the referendum campaign to cast the draft constitution as a threat to national identity. Our findings demonstrate how constitutional replacement processes create distinct arenas for anti-rights mobilization, thereby contributing to the discussion on the “right against rights” in constitution-making contexts.

While immigration status is often arbitrarily ascribed, the moral meanings of undocumented status are central in the growing polarization and punitiveness of immigration politics in the United States. How do political actors construct the moral meanings of undocumented status and reason their preferred redresses? Existing substantialist approach’s search for a coherent list of moral traits is unable to locate the basis of such construction. Through interviews with a multiracial group of 65 Democratic and Republican activists, this paper identifies the relational meaning-making process underlying the construction of migrant morality, which I label as “Folk Durkheimian.” I find that, like Durkheim, activists believe that law exists to uphold social solidarities and therefore legal categories mark people as belonging or threatening to the social body. I further find that activists construct belonging and threat along two axes: similarity and division of labor. As both Democratic and Republican activists construct migrants as simultaneously belonging and threatening on different axes, both prefer the ambivalent redress of pathways to citizenship for a limited subset of migrants. This Folk Durkheimian understanding advances a relational and integrated framework for understanding morality, group politics, and punitive attitudes.

Organizations are often drawn into the contested work of criminal law enforcement. Through compulsory process and mandatory reporting laws, governments routinely conscript organizations such as hospitals, banks, and schools into assisting in surveillance activities whose legitimacy is socially contested. In recent years, conscription has been particularly pronounced with online platform companies, whose extensive collections of user data make them frequent sources of information and evidence for law enforcement agencies. How do actors in platform companies navigate compliance with such contested laws? While neoinstitutional theories of law emphasize how perceived compliance can protect organizational legitimacy, this article shows how perceived compliance with contested laws can also undermine it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with legal and operations staff for platform companies and law enforcement agents, this article explains how perceived compliance with contested laws can give rise to a legitimacy dilemma that organizational actors manage through symbolic ambivalence: compliance practices that signal both an organization’s responsiveness to a law, as well as its independence from the aims, consequences, and institutions associated with the law. The article also suggests organizational and legal conditions that shape how platform actors engage in symbolic ambivalence. These findings extend neoinstitutional theory by showing that the relationship between perceived compliance and legitimacy is not straightforward, but contingent, and by explaining how organizational actors manage the legitimacy dilemma brought about by that contingency.

¿Cómo reconcilian los académicos del ámbito socio-jurídico, que comparan las sanciones monetarias con “sacarle sangre a un nabo” o “sacarle sangre a una piedra,” estas expresiones con el hecho de que las multas y recargos constituyen una industria en expansión? Abordamos este enigma enfocándonos en lo que tal vez sea la experiencia más común con sanciones monetarias entre la población: las multas de estacionamiento. Dado que las multas de estacionamiento se adjudican en un ámbito legal fundamentalmente distinto al de las sanciones penales – que dominan la atención académica –, nos preguntamos si estos resultados pueden extenderse más allá del ámbito penal hacia el municipal. Usando a Chicago como estudio de caso, nuestra investigación analiza los determinantes estructurales de 11.3 millones de multas emitidas entre 2013 y 2017. Aplicamos una serie de modelos de conteo para predecir las tasas de incidencia de las multas a nivel de tracto censal, así como para estimar cuántas estuvieron sujetas a sanciones por impago. Lo que encontramos evidencia disparidades racializadas en cuanto a quiénes son el objetivo de estas sanciones y quiénes resultan más perjudicados por ellas. Para interpretar estos resultados, articulamos ideas clave de la teoría crítica de la raza empírica junto con desarrollos recientes de la teoría de la depredación.

Providing pro bono legal services is an important professional obligation that ensures that people who cannot afford representation still realize their rights. Unlike impact litigation, which seeks to overturn unjust laws or create new rights, pro bono direct legal services are not typically seen as oriented toward creating social change. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with thirty-six lawyers and non-lawyer legal volunteers, this article explores how bearing witness became a mechanism that blended pro bono services with social movement-like collective action to transform direct legal services within two liminal legal environments, the U.S.–Mexico border and immigration detention. These activities included (1) asserting and publicizing truth in the face of misconceptions and misinformation so the American public understood what was occurring and demanded policy change, (2) recruiting more volunteers to assist asylum seekers and in turn speak out, and (3) documenting the human impact of immigration laws and policies to ensure future harms would not occur. Because interviewees took part in up to three waves of interviews between 2019 and 2023, I also address the perceived outcomes of these efforts, including that interviewees felt that they increased knowledge and shifted some individuals’ perspectives.

Sociolegal research has long found that most people “lump” their problems rather than pursue legal remedies. This study examines how social media transforms legal consciousness and mobilization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 100 families who experienced the same birth injury, and 37 legal and medical professionals, we analyze how online communities shape perceptions of medical injury, blame attribution, and legal action. We find that parents often experience profound guilt, believing they are responsible for their child’s injury. However, participation in online support groups reframes their understanding of the injury, shifting their guilt toward medical providers and fostering legal claims. Our findings show that social media serves as a new “structuring structure,” shaping legal consciousness across geographic and social class boundaries. Social media serves as a powerful force in shaping parents’ perceptions of their child’s injuries as legally actionable, challenging existing assumptions about why people do or do not pursue legal action. By examining how online communities facilitate the transformation from guilt to blame and encourage legal mobilization, this study contributes to broader sociolegal debates about the role of digital technologies in shaping contemporary legal consciousness.

What do we mean by backlash against rights? How does backlash vary? What explains its variation? Although backlash is recognized as a crucial problem in the legal mobilization literature, it is treated as a residual category. This paper proposes a conceptual apparatus and research agenda for its identification and analysis. We propose a definition of backlash that distinguishes it from ordinary legal mobilization, and identify key dimensions along which backlash varies – actors, realms, tactics, goals, and outcomes. We propose typologies to explore how backlash differs across these dimensions. For each dimension, we offer criteria to distinguish between the different forms of backlash, use examples to illustrate their particularities, and propose hypotheses regarding the factors that may explain variation. The main innovation of our approach is the concept of veiled backlash, which occurs in the backdoor of state agencies when regressive networks have dominant influence thereon. We claim that veiled backlash often employs pseudolegal tactics, which are difficult to detect and challenge, thus increasing the likelihood of backlash’s success. We further argue that veiled backlash tends to be cumulative; it has the ambitious goal of curtailing pro-rights policies or state agencies, yet it can go unnoticed because it relies on tactics that appear like ordinary legal mobilization.

This article discusses how the state’s failure to respond to the needs of a marginalized community leads to a sense of being undeserving among its members, a sense that significantly shapes their legal consciousness. Focusing on Chinese immigrants’ reluctance to discuss contracts openly and invoke the law to seek redress in Canada, this article challenges the approach of blaming culture for some immigrants’ different perceptions of and relationships with the law in the host country. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this study argues that the host country’s devaluation and non-recognition of foreign credentials, its lack of intervention in predatory practices targeting vulnerable immigrants, and its failure to provide adequate legal resources accessible to immigrants with diverse language and cultural backgrounds, all work in tandem to push Chinese immigrants away from contracts and keep them from turning to law for help in Canada. Drawing on vulnerability theory and legal consciousness scholarship, it develops a multi-level legal consciousness framework to connect micro-level experiences with macro-level forces to understand how individuals who share the same marginalized identities participate in reproducing structural inequalities within their own communities due to state inaction.

Judicial rulings on expert evidence determine which specialized knowledge enters the courtroom and, in doing so, shape the credibility of litigants and the legitimacy of their claims. This article examines how disparities in litigant status shape the judicial gatekeeping of expert evidence and how this process relates to the ideological context of the legal forum. Using data from a probability sample of 811 Daubert rulings from United States District Courts, our multinomial logistic regression models show that, overall, higher status litigants are more successful in excluding opposing evidence and in overcoming exclusionary motions. However, this aggregate relationship masks a pronounced ideological divide. Specifically, higher status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to conservative judges while lower status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to liberal judges. These findings illustrate how trial court decisions reflect broader institutional and ideological forces and suggest that ideological contexts can either amplify or temper structural inequalities in the courtroom.

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.