Efforts to understand racial inequality in policing often focus on the micro-level, examining the situational dynamics of police-citizen encounters. This Article explores racial inequality in policing from another angle: it asks how the police organization responds to and further constructs the surrounding urban environment. I examine a police department’s move toward local and decentralized approaches, captured in a redistricting reform and subsequent district-level strategies and initiatives. I draw on several sources of data, including public documents, in-depth interviews with decision makers and stakeholders, a year of ethnographic observation of police work in two districts, and data on calls for police service. I find that the police drew upon symbolic ideas that emphasized the violence of black neighborhoods and the economic value of white neighborhoods in developing local strategies. As they acted in relation to these distinctions, the police amplified disparities in service provision and social control, consolidating the character of an already segregated and unequal landscape

Scholars and politicians have sometimes presented bureaucracy as inherently conflicting with democracy. But bureaucrats themselves are rarely consulted about that relationship. In contrast, I draw on interviews and participant observation to illuminate how government administrators understand their own place in the government of Taiwan, one of the few successful third wave democracies. The administrators I work with root their own legitimacy not in separated powers or autonomous expertise, but in their ongoing collaboration with legislators and publics. They define their own accountability not just as executing legislative mandates but as producing them in the first place, and they figure bureaucracy as a key site for political participation. I put these views into historical context to elucidate how bureaucracy can compete for democratic bona fides with common democratic indicators like constitutions and elections. This article contributes to scholarship on the ethnography of bureaucracy, administrative accountability networks, and the internal law of administration. In particular, I stress the importance of administrative culture as a central aspect of political legitimation.

What are the effects of wearable police cameras on perceptions of the police? In this study, we report causal estimates from a crossover randomized controlled trial in Uruguay on the effects of use of body-worn cameras by traffic police on the perceptions of legitimacy and satisfaction by drivers ticketed for traffic violations. We pay particular attention to the effects on procedural justice—that is, perceptions of the fairness of the interactions between officers and drivers—without neglecting other features of legitimacy (i.e., effectiveness, distributive justice, and lawfulness). With the exception of lawfulness, wearable surveillance apparatuses showed improvements across all dimensions of legitimacy compared to control conditions, with medium to large effect sizes. The overall satisfaction from the police-public interaction was significantly higher when officers used body-worn cameras. These findings suggest that wearable surveillance technology can lead to enhanced perceptions of legitimacy across multiple dimensions, not just increased efficiency, as well as the perceived overall quality of police-public interaction.

This Article offers a qualitative examination of the ways in which Israeli legal actors reflect and construct cultural understandings of the relationship between inheritance and elder care in cases in which the deceased has bequeathed property to a caregiver. This Article demonstrates that Israeli courts and lawyers reinforce and promote a cultural schema of family as a pristine domain of unconditional love, albeit one that has been emptied of the daily responsibilities of fulfilling the basic physical needs of elderly kin. Such a cultural schema diminishes the traditional parameters of family responsibility in order to adapt to present circumstances of elder care, while continuing to privilege the custom of keeping money in the family. Hence, this article reveals how inheritance law supports and enhances class reproduction through the institution of the family.

In the wake of rape law reforms, lack of sexual consent emerged as a key element that defined sexual contact as criminal. Its presence modified the requirement of force or threat of violence, and it gained traction in campaigns to eradicate sexual assault. Little is known, however, about how prosecutors assess consent. In this article, I use the case of statutory rape to better understand the legal construction of sexual consent. By focusing on an age-based class of individuals who are sexually mature but still under the age of consent, I show how legal actors identify sexual victimization among youth. Drawing on interviews with forty-three prosecutors, I analyze prosecutorial decision making during the investigation, charging, and trial phases. I find that sexual consent is not simply a dichotomous legal category but rather a sociological process. Prosecutors define sexual victimization based on informal ideas about normative adolescent sexuality, reproducing social hierarchies based on age, gender, and sexual identity.

The role of fiduciary law in the development of North American capitalism has been overlooked by institutional economists, who interpret fiduciary law as a form of contract and make the judicial enforcement of contract central to the transaction-cost theory of economic development. This article argues that the emergence of distinctive, equity-based fiduciary laws and norms significantly influenced the development and growth of early-nineteenth-century American markets. Our historical research identifies lawyers as important economic actors, who served as catalysts for the emergence of this governance culture. Lawyers adopted fiduciary principles that allowed them to become trusted intermediaries, thereby addressing the agency-cost problems inherent in complex economic exchange that vex the institutionalists’ contractual account of economic development.

Social movements have increasingly incorporated legal strategies into their repertoires of contention. Yet, both sociolegal and social movement scholarship lack a systematic and theoretically coherent way to conceptualize legal mobilization. In fact, scholars disagree (sometimes in fundamental ways) about what constitutes legal mobilization, which has resulted in conceptual slippage around how the term is used. This article proposes a more self-conscious approach that will facilitate the aggregation of findings across studies. To do so, it sets forth a systematic conceptualization of legal mobilization and situates it within a typology of uses of the law. It also contextualizes the typology with respect to emerging literatures within social movement and sociolegal scholarship and proposes areas for further research that would benefit from a more rigorous conceptualization of legal mobilization.

Despite a number of compelling entrapment claims in post-9/11 US terrorism cases, these claims have nearly always failed. While previous research suggests possible reasons for this almost complete failure of the entrapment defense, no research has yet systematically examined the mechanisms responsible for this result. Drawing on thirty-seven interviews with individuals with in-depth knowledge of particular cases, as well as textual analysis of court decisions and quantitative analysis of a terrorism database, this article identifies several factors contributing to the entrapment defense’s failure. These include strategic choices by defendants to plead guilty or use other defenses, prosecutorial misconduct, evidence manipulation by informants and police, deficient entrapment doctrines, and procedural irregularities. Consistent with the general trend of counterterrorism law enhancing government power while reducing accountability, the multiple opportunities for authorities to manipulate the legal process leave defendants with little realistic chance of acquittal on entrapment grounds.

How do authoritarian states define and communicate notions of appropriate work conduct and professional excellence? This article examines three channels of communication used by the Chinese state to signal professional expectations to the bar: the bar exam, the administrative rules governing lawyers, and the state-sanctioned National Outstanding Lawyer Award. We find that China’s state narrative about “the good lawyer” celebrates lawyers willing to work closely with the authorities and asks more stringent critics to separate private beliefs from public behavior. In contrast to assumptions often made in research on authoritarian law, this article highlights how lawyers can participate in politics without opposing the regime and how much work goes into curating an appealing state strand of legal professionalism rather than relying on coercion alone. We end with a call for future work on “varieties of legal professionalism” to better understand which state signals are most visible and persuasive to different segments of the Chinese bar, as well as the conditions under which alternate ideas about professionalism gain traction.

In Visions of Social Control (1985) Stanley Cohen provided a typology of scholarly works on the punitive turn: “uneven progress,” “good intentions-disastrous consequences,” and “discipline and mystification.” This Essay applies these categories to recent punishment and society scholarship, finding a clear preference for the third category, arguing that current works do not merely point to systemic evils—they impute bad intent to individuals in the system. Against this current, I identify two works—James Forman’s Locking Up Our Own (2017) and Heather Schoenfeld’s Building the Prison State (2016)—and show the strengths of analyses that take individual actors on their own terms. Finally, relying on the recent example of the Ban the Box initiative—a well-intended but failed policy—I argue that flexibility in viewing actors’ motivations, rather than relegating them to the role of cogs in a system fraught by inherent flaws, is important not only for scholarly accuracy but for policy and strategic reasons.