This symposium focuses on judicial politics at the micro level. Its aim is to shed light on justice in action, drawing on an ethnographic approach to explore the routine decision-making practices of judges and other legal actors, and to study their interactions with citizens and politicians. Each article is based on close observation of the interactions between legal professionals and administrative actors who are at the frontline in local and lower courts. By examining a variety of jurisdictions around the globe, the articles in this symposium offer fresh insight into “judicial politics on the ground.”

Although judges were included in the street-level-bureaucracy (SLB) group by Lipsky (1980), sociolegal scholars have barely used this theoretical framework to study them. This article aims to specify their position with respect to SLB in order to bridge the gap between public administration and sociolegal research. Specifically, using a cross-national ethnography of judicial institutions, it compares family trial judges' practice on the ground in France and Canada. General conditions separate them from the core SLB group: encounters with clients are less direct; discretion is more legitimate. However, French judges are far closer to the SLB group than their Canadian counterparts regarding public encounters and case processing. As such, the accuracy of the SLB framework depends on professional and cultural patterns that combine differently in these two national contexts.

Between the 1970s and 1990s, political scientists in the United States pursued a distinctive research program that employed ethnographic methods to study micro politics in criminal courts. This article considers the relevance of this concept for court researchers today through a case study about bail decision making in a lower criminal court in Australia. It describes business as usual in how decisions are made and the provision of pretrial services. It also looks at how traditionalists and reformers understood business as usual, and uses this as a critical concept to make visible micro politics in this court. The case study raises issues about organizational change in criminal courts since the 1990s, since there are fewer studies about plea bargaining and more about specialist or problem-solving courts. It is suggested that we need a new international agenda that can address change and continuity in criminal courts.

This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial) from the 1920s until the 1960s. It argues that with the emergence of the “social question”—the concern for improving the lower classes' working and living conditions to promote the nation's modernization and prevent political radicalization—the Chilean legal profession committed to legal aid reform to escape a professional identity crisis. Legal aid allowed lawyers to claim they had a new “social function” advocating on behalf of the poor. However, within legal aid offices, lawyers interacted with female social workers who acted as gatekeepers, mediators, and translators between the lawyers and the poor. This gendered professional complementarity in legal aid offices helped lawyers to put limits on their new “social function”: it allowed them to maintain legal aid as a part-time activity that did not challenge the structure of the legal system as a whole.

International law dictates that actors in armed conflicts must distinguish between combatants and civilians. But how do legal actors assess the legality of a military operation after the fact? I analyze a civil proceeding for compensation by victims of a German-led airstrike in Afghanistan. The court treated military video as key evidence. I show how lawyers, judges, and expert witnesses categorized those involved by asking what a “military viewer” would make of the pictures. During the hearing, they avoided the categories of combatants/civilians; the military object resisted legal coding. I examine the decision in its procedural context, using ethnographic field notes and legal documents. I combine two ethnomethodological analytics: a trans-sequential approach and membership categorization analysis. I show the value of this combination for the sociological analysis of legal practice. I also propose that legal practitioners should use this approach to assess military viewing as a concerted, situated activity.

Mental health courts (MHCs) offer community-based treatment in lieu of criminal prosecution for chronic offenders with psychiatric disabilities, and MHC judges enjoy expanded powers to achieve the court's objectives. Because scholars know little about how judges transition into a new occupational role in the problem-solving courtroom, this ethnographic study of four MHCs in the United States focuses on how judges learn to orchestrate their responses to treatment noncompliance in this novel court setting. The goal of this article is to examine the professionalization of MHC judges and the emergent craft of therapeutic adjudication. To achieve this goal, I investigate judicial strategies for motivating, questioning, and defending participants accused of wrongdoing. I conclude that the art and practice of problem-solving justice requires judges to rise to the larger institutional challenges embedded in the alternative courtroom, a process I call the politics of benchcraft.

This article analyzes how the lower criminal courts in Chile transitioned from an inquisitorial to an adversarial justice system between 2000 and 2005 as part of the Criminal Procedure Reform. Drawing on the frame analysis of the street-level bureaucracy and judicial ethnography, I examine the transition between two different types of judicial bureaucracy from the perspective of the actors who implemented the reform. The study is based on in-depth interviews with officials and judges of both inquisitorial and adversarial courts, administrative managers of the new courts, and actors who designed the administrative reorganization of lower criminal courts. The study involved a three-month, weekly observation in an inquisitorial court in Santiago de Chile. The article emphasizes the specificity of the Chilean judiciary, where both inquisitorial and adversarial criminal courts still coexist.

While research on legal mobilization shows how social movements contribute to the definition and implementation of rights, it remains excessively centered on litigation to the detriment of administrative rights enforcement. This article maps out how street-level bureaucracies impact rights enforcement by distinguishing between allocation, access, and process, and analyzes how social movements intervene in these three aspects. It then focuses on allocation, using the case of French disability policy to analyze the forms of advocacy deployed by movement actors who take part in the rights allocation process at the local level. The article argues that conformity to institutional norms derives not so much from a pressure to conform as from the knowledge and experience of the limited means locally available to make rights effective. Further, it shows how advocacy is reframed from the defense of individual claims to a role of scrutiny and control of the bureaucratic allocation of rights.

How do activist plaintiffs experience the process of human rights litigation under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS)? Answering this question is key to understanding the impact on transnational legal mobilization of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., in which the US Supreme Court sharply limited the scope of the ATS. Yet sociolegal scholars know remarkably little about the experiences of ATS litigants, before or after Kiobel. This article describes how activist litigants in a landmark ATS class action against former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos faced a series of strategic dilemmas, and how disagreements over how to resolve those dilemmas played into divisions between activists and organizations on the Philippine left. The article develops an analytical framework focused on litigation dilemmas to explain how and why activists who pursue ATS litigation as an opportunity for legal mobilization may also encounter strategic dilemmas that contribute to dissension within a social movement.

This analysis examines the effects of administrative templates on legal responses to domestic violence. The discussion focuses on a set of intake forms deployed by a team of grassroots workers who routinely attend Toronto's specialized domestic violence plea courts to enroll defendants into counseling programs. Although these documents are nothing more than mundane, administrative forms, they are crucial to generating the formations required to govern domestic violence through the criminal justice and community partnerships on which the plea courts rely. Along with redefining the responsibilities of the legal and grassroots actors involved in the court network, the documents also generate and formalize notions of wrongdoing that prove to be far more effective in resolving cases than traditional guilty pleas. This analysis illuminates how forms permit the retreat and reassertion of state sovereignty as required in legal regimes involving devolution. It also underscores the methodological importance of constitutive analyses of documents to illuminating machinations of penal power.

Despite longstanding concern that the commercialization of legal practice is antithetical to professionalism, corporate law firms have dramatically increased their pro bono participation over the past few decades. What explains this paradox? This article examines the organizational and institutional determinants of pro bono participation across an elite field of large law firms. I find that pro bono work is only partly rooted in internal organizational dynamics and that the institutional environment appears more important for explaining variation in pro bono participation. These findings indicate that large firms may be more drawn to pro bono work as a social process tied to professional status and legitimacy than to concrete, rational organizational goals. Moreover, these findings point to the importance of the interstitial space that these firms inhabit between the legal profession and corporate market as an especially important factor in facilitating, rather than dampening, pro bono participation.

Jeanine Bell's Hate Thy Neighbor: Move In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing offers an in-depth look at the central role that violence has and continues to play in maintaining segregated housing patterns.

Jeannine Bell's Hate Thy Neighbor: Move In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing provides an account of racist violence as a tool for maintaining housing segregation that challenges perceptions of rising tolerance and demonstrates the importance of understanding racism as a structural feature of social organization. Bell shows how some perpetrators of move in violence deploy claims about “property values” as a defense against charges of racism. The use of such claims starkly illustrates how colorblind racism allows assertions of racial privilege to resonate as neutral articulations of rational self-interest. The desire to defend racial privileges persists as a significant practical barrier to racial equality even when tolerance increases.

This essay explores contemporary racial harassment, hate crimes, and violence targeted at African Americans and other racial minorities who have moved to white neighborhoods in the 1990s and 2000s, as described in my book Hate Thy Neighbor: Move In Violence and the Persistence of Segregation in American Housing. The essay details the experiences of blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans who face race-based hate crimes upon integrating white neighborhoods. This violence is not limited to a specific geographic area of the United States, and is an important factor in continuing patterns of racial segregation. Social segregation and the failure of existing law to address this violence are important factors in its survival. Analyzing the roots and causes of such violence, the essay calls for greater attention to the enforcement of legal remedies designed to address neighborhood hate crime.

Ed Rubin's provocative new book, Soul, Self, and Society: The New Morality & the Modern State (2015), attempts to capture the relationship between morality and the state. It maintains that that there are three comprehensive moral systems: the morality of honor that characterized feudal relationships and survives today in failed states and urban gangs, the morality of higher purposes that linked individual self-worth and state legitimacy to a shared belief system, and the morality of self-fulfillment that entrusts development of a moral code to each individual and sees the role of the state as creating the conditions for individual flourishing. This review essay argues that Rubin's work is critically important in explaining that the idea of self-fulfillment combines public tolerance with private discipline, and rests on obligation as well as freedom. It suggests, however, that if the new morality were to truly take hold, it would weaken the links between citizen and state that make the system possible.