This article asks how legalism emerges in policy fields long governed by informal coordination and weak legal enforcement, focusing on Japan’s consumer finance regime. It develops the concept of “processual legalism,” in which legalism is understood not as an all-or-nothing regime type but the cumulative result of recurrent interactions between courts, bureaucracies, legislators, and cause lawyers. The article identifies three core mechanisms: institutional friction, generated by regulatory ambiguity and uneven enforcement; normative reframing, through which lawyers transform moralised, individualised grievances into structural injustices; and consensus realignment, as judicially articulated norms are integrated into administrative and legislative reforms. Together, these mechanisms illuminate legalism as a contingent process rather than a structural condition. While legalism is episodic in its activation, the institutional changes it generates are incremental and consensus-dependent, revealing important varieties of legalism within coordinated market economies.

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.

Cet article explore les effets ambivalents des mobilisations juridiques autochtones, dans un contexte de faible État de droit, à partir d’une étude de cas approfondie de la communauté Xákmok Kásek au Paraguay. Malgré une victoire devant la Cour interaméricaine des droits de l’Homme, les résultats matériels restent limités. Toutefois, le recours au droit joue un rôle important en légitimant les luttes et en structurant les actions collectives. L’analyse repose sur un travail de terrain mené à Asunción et dans le Chaco en 2022, incluant quarante-six entretiens, l’étude de documents juridiques et l’accès aux archives d’ONG. Théoriquement, l’article mobilise les travaux sur les mobilisations juridiques dans les régimes hybrides et autoritaires. Il montre que le droit, bien qu’imparfait, peut renforcer la visibilité et la légitimité des revendications. Cette contribution éclaire les usages stratégiques du droit dans des contextes répressifs et invite à reconsidérer ses effets au-delà des victoires formelles.

What does conducting law and society scholarship have anything to do with wilting blooms? In this essay, Lynette J. Chua makes the connection between the two through her reminder to law and society scholars to study the taken-for-granted, an intellectual project that has become all the more urgent as politicians and activists contest concepts such as citizenship, gender, territories, religion and rights. She also calls upon fellow law and society scholars to be humble – for the significance and impact of our research, like flowers, could come and go with the seasons.

Fossil fuel companies no longer deny anthropogenic climate change in litigation, but they challenge the validity of climate science in establishing legal responsibility. Research on climate litigation, social movements, and legal mobilization has focused primarily on plaintiffs’ perspectives, showing how they use the judicial process as a site of knowledge production. This article shifts the focus onto defendants, conducting an analysis of scientific disputes in major climate change lawsuits and developing a typology grounded in both empirical analysis and theoretical insights for studying their arguments about science and evidence. Corporate defendants build evidentiary counter-narratives, challenge the substantive quality of plaintiffs’ claims, and contest the scientific integrity of compromising evidence. The future impact of such litigation will hinge on how courts evaluate climate research as legal evidence, and whether corporate defendants are successful in their efforts to reframe, undermine, and discredit the science.

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.

As private actors turn to international courts (ICs), we argue that judges can adopt pro-individual rights agendas to promote their own legitimacy. By leveling the odds for disempowered individuals and spotlighting their rights claims, ICs rebut charges that they are playthings of the powerful and cultivate support networks in civil society. We assess our theory by scrutinizing the first IC with private access: the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Established as an economic court and alleged to conceal a pro-business bias, we leverage original data demonstrating that the ECJ publicizes itself as protector of individuals and matches words with deeds. The ECJ ‘levels’, favoring individuals’ rights claims over claims raised by businesses boasting better legal teams. The ECJ then ‘spotlights’ pro-individual rights rulings via press releases that lawyers amplify in law journals. These findings challenge claims that ICs build legitimacy by stealth and the ‘haves’ come out ahead in litigation.

This article engages in a theoretical exercise, tackling an intentionally provocative question: is there such a thing as too much access to justice? Conventional wisdom suggests that barriers to access to justice ought to be low. Countless reform efforts put in place throughout the world have sought to expand access to justice and strengthen judicial institutions. What happens when access to these institutions is expanded? Who takes advantage of that access? Who is left behind? Weaving together scholarship on the unintended consequences of legal reforms and empirical examples from access to justice experiments in Canada, China, Colombia, India, Russia, South Africa, and the United States, this article shows how lowering material barriers to access to justice can: (1) increase strain on the legal system, (2) raise but fail to live up to expectations about the possibilities claim-making, (3) reinforce existing inequalities, and (4) offer limited and perhaps inadequate solutions.

Contemporary political science research suggests historically low public faith in judicial institutions. However, modern years have seen a proliferation of “court-watching” groups that harness volunteer observation to increase accountability in the courts. While these trends may seem in conflict, this article suggests that, in the absence of faith in traditional judiciary systems, court watching acts as a decentralized, grassroots method of legal participation, allowing engagement in the American socio-legal system. We address this relatively under-analyzed area of legal activism by establishing an original dataset (n = 59) that tracked court watch groups as of 2024. Our dataset includes the mission, jurisdictional focus, and major accomplishments of each court-watching group, providing a useful starting point for the analysis of court watching as a growing area of legal socialization. We also establish a four-part definition of “court watching,” which builds on existing scholarship. We proceed with descriptive analysis of our database and findings, providing brief vignettes of well-established or unique court-watching groups and preliminary observations. Based on these preliminary findings, we assert that these volunteer organizations are well positioned to increase civic engagement and democratic faith in US legal proceedings among broad populations and thus deserve further attention from socio-legal scholars.

This Article offers a first comparative analysis of the evolution of U.S. corporate personhood doctrine and the “freedom to conduct a business” under Article 16 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It argues that, over the past fifty years, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have both contributed to the rise of neoliberalism by using these legal doctrines to shield market mechanisms from democratic intervention. While SCOTUS has expanded and deepened corporate personhood, granting new and more powerful protections under free speech and religious freedom to corporations, the CJEU has similarly interpreted the “freedom to conduct a business” to weaken labor protections and different market regulations. This unexpected convergence contrasts with the CJEU’s ostensibly social mission and underscores the dangers of an uncritical expansion of Article 16. But despite this shared goal, this Article highlights the divergence in the approaches of SCOTUS and the CJEU through insights from comparative political economy. Differences in legal mobilization, the role of courts in political disputes, and the political economy of industrial relations have shaped each doctrine’s development. These findings are useful for legal reformers developing different strategies to curb corporate power in both jurisdictions.

The Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) is a civil society organization that was created in 1985 to advance women's substantive equality. Political science scholarship in the early 2000s focused significant attention on LEAF—unanimously characterizing the organization as among the most successful groups involved in legal mobilization in the post-Charter era. However, we know very little about the organization's advocacy outside of the courts. To address this limitation, we provide an analysis of all the advocacy-related activities undertaken by LEAF between 1985 and 2022. The findings illustrate that beginning approximately in 2006, LEAF diversified its “collective action repertoire” to undertake more political mobilization, while also dedicating greater attention to issue areas such as Indigenous rights. Our study challenges the judicial-centric approach adopted in previous studies of LEAF and underscores the importance of studying advocacy through a longitudinal lens and with approaches that account for the dynamism of civil society.