A growing body of sociolegal scholarship focuses the study of law away from formal texts and legal institutions and toward the experiences and perceptions of “everyday” citizens. This study introduces seventeen “radical” environmentalists who engage a repertoire of tactics that includes some actions that involve relatively severe forms of illegality. This research seeks to investigate the role of civil disobedience and lawbreaking within the radical environmental movement and the corresponding legal consciousness of movement actors. Utilizing ethnographic fieldwork and content analysis, this analysis suggests that Ewick and Silbey's (1998) three‐tiered model of legal consciousness is an operative starting point, but could be enhanced through theoretical expansion. This study proposes a new category of legal consciousness—Under the Law—that views the law as the protector and defender of a social order that is fundamentally illegitimate. Under the Law is qualitatively different from existing conceptualizations of legal consciousness and reaffirms the mutually constitutive nature of law and society.

Under what conditions can US courts contribute to policy change? This article shows how a case study can be used to test and develop a theory of judicial policy making answering this question. In The Hollow Hope (1991, 2008), Gerald Rosenberg theorizes that judicial policy making is constrained by the limited nature of constitutional rights, the lack of judicial independence, and the judiciary's inability to implement its rulings. Ninth Circuit injunctions protecting the Northern Spotted Owl and orders to manage ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest invalidate and help reformulate Rosenberg's theory. These rulings show how judicial interpretations of statutes, regulations, precedent, and facts allow judicial policy making if these interpretations are accepted by the legal and political culture when Congress and the presidency are too divided to override them. The owl rulings also show how statutes facilitate the implementation of judicial rulings, a point not developed by Rosenberg, while additionally providing further evidence for Rosenberg's specification of conditions allowing implementation.

This article examines the process of fragmentation to understand how the process of establishing new school districts results in high metropolitan‐area segregation. Using educational and census data, the article examines how the political process of creating new school districts in Jefferson County, Alabama, changed the nature of segregation. School segregation remained high from 1960 to 2005, but while in the late 1960s segregation of students was predominantly within districts, by 2005 segregation was primarily between districts. Over time, school district boundary lines gained meaning in terms of the characteristics of the district residents. In creating separate districts, local control has the same effect as earlier de jure laws of maintaining racial segregation in the Birmingham area, with few prospects for overcoming boundaries that divide students and opportunities along racial lines. Local control within the current judicial context will define separate populations and maintain or increase metropolitan segregation.

This article employs a new framework for legal change, the recursivity of law, to explain why China's criminal procedure law has cycled through numerous reforms between 1979 and 2008 without improving the conditions of lawyers' criminal defense work. The authors argue that Chinese lawyers' difficulties in criminal defense have deep roots in the recursive nature of the criminal procedure reforms. In particular, those difficulties were produced by interactions of the four mechanisms of recursivity (indeterminacy of law, contradictions, diagnostic struggles, and actor mismatch) in both lawmaking and implementation. The empirical analysis shows that these mechanisms are linked in pairs and in sequence. This logic of change offers an integrated interdisciplinary approach to the enactment and implementation of law in other times, places, and areas of law.

The phenomenon of child sexual abuse has been widely acknowledged across many societies, including Ghana. Efforts to address this problem in Ghana have yielded limited success because this type of child abuse is severely underreported. This study explores the relevance of three cultural factors, namely, patriarchal nuances, (child) rape myth acceptance, and a “collective shame problem,” to the understanding of the problem of nondisclosure of child sexual abuse in Ghana. Evidence from an exploratory study provides support for the importance of these factors. The findings are discussed and the need for further research highlighted.

The last thirty years in anthropology, as well as in linguistics and in many of the other social sciences, have been characterized by a shift in theoretical focus from structure to practice. In The Language of Law School: Learning to “Think Like a Lawyer” (2007), linguistic anthropologist and law professor Elizabeth Mertz has brought this practice perspective to bear on the extraordinary linguistic and cultural venue that is the first‐year law school classroom. In revealing the linguistic realities of teaching new students to “think like a lawyer,” she raises fascinating questions about the relationship between language and thought, the subtle effects of legal education, and the nature of law itself.

Viviana Zelizer's recent book, The Purchase of Intimacy (2005), presents an innovative theory of how social and legal actors negotiate rights and obligations when money changes hands in intimate relationships—a perspective that could change how we understand many things, from valuations of homemaking labor to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund. This essay describes Zelizer's critique of the reductionist “Hostile Worlds” and “Nothing But” approaches to economic exchange in intimate relationships and then explains her more three‐dimensional approach, “Connected Lives.” While Zelizer focuses on family law, the essay goes beyond that context, extending Zelizer's approach to transfers of genetic material and concluding that her approach could point toward a more equitable resolution of disputes in and about these markets.

A growing empirical literature examines the role of incarceration in labor market outcomes and economic inequality more broadly. Devah Pager's book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (2007), offers compelling evidence that employment opportunities for former prisoners—especially black former prisoners—are bleak. I review Pager's methods and findings, place them in the context of previous work, and discuss the relation of race to a criminal record. I then explore several lines of related research that investigate the increasing reach of criminal punishment into various social realms. One goal of this essay is to draw research on economic inequality into the law and society literature.