ABSTRACT We examine the reception of Russia's post‐2012 conservative turn by the country's legal academics. Based on a nationally representative survey of 3766 academic lawyers conducted in May–June 2022, we test how demographic, professional, and regional factors influence support for conservative policies. We uncover significant differences across age cohorts and professions: older lawyers, graduates of departmental law schools, and those with law enforcement backgrounds are more supportive of conservative measures, while younger scholars, those involved in international academia, and residents of major cities tend to hold more liberal views. In line with popular opinion, support for “gay propaganda” legislation is uniformly high among legal scholars. In contrast, scholars are critical of state surveillance and compulsory religious education. These findings supplement recent critiques of Karpik and Halliday's “legal complex” theory by demonstrating not only that lawyers may hold diverse and conflicting political values, but also that this variation is systematically associated with different forms of professional socialization, institutional location, and transnational academic engagement. The article thus shows how distinct segments of the legal profession become embedded in broader social and political networks that shape their orientations toward liberal and illiberal legal change. The article also contributes to the broader discussion on the role of legal elites in authoritarian settings by demonstrating that they do not form a united liberal front yet nor are they fully aligned with the conservative state agenda.
ABSTRACT In the United States, a robust data ecosystem aggregates and shares public records about people that may ultimately appear in Internet search results for a person's name. These records can include stigmatizing information and operate outside public policy efforts to conceal negative information from regulated background screening processes. Our study assesses the Internet search results of 225 people who have been charged or convicted of crime to identify patterns for what types of records appear online and for whom. We find that approximately 1 in 5 people in the sample have criminal records on the Internet, which varies by jurisdiction, time since arrest, and severity of offense. We further examine whether being eligible for different types of record “remediation” policies impacts informal Internet search results. We identify 173 people who benefited from criminal record remediation (67 had their entire record sealed). Internet search results for crime information appear even for those with partial remediation (27.4%–42.5%) or fully sealed records (10.4%–20.9%). Our findings point to how a varied informational policy landscape in the United States contributes to the continued existence of public criminal stigma, even amidst efforts to conceal such information from specific contexts.
In April 2014, then-President Barack Obama announced an initiative to grant clemency to thousands of federal prisoners serving long sentences for non-violent crimes, targeting a reduction in racial disparities in drug-crime sentences. Critiques of the initiative's implementation abound, but 1715 people ultimately received clemency-more than under any previous president. We investigate Obama Clemency Initiative outcomes, focusing on the total pool of clemency applicants. Using clemency applicant data from the Office of the Pardon Attorney combined with "inmate locator" data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, we construct a dataset of the 20,464 individuals who applied for clemency and had their petitions reviewed during Obama's presidency. After the Initiative was announced, overall demographic patterns of reviewed applicants shifted, becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race and age (but not sex). Notably, the proportion of White petitioners who applied for and received clemency more than doubled, while the proportion of Black petitioners who applied for and received clemency declined, suggesting that the Initiative's aims of equity were not fully realized across racial groups. We consider the theoretical implications of these patterns for understanding the role of clemency in the legal system and its potential as a tool of policy reform.
Contemporary criminal justice systems have increasingly prioritized efficiency as a key guiding principle in their institutional processes. This research examines the role of defense counsel to analyze whether and how lawyers strategically adapt their advocacy methods as they balance the demands of procedural efficiency with their professional ethical duty to safeguard defendants' rights and interests. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with defense counsel in the People's Republic of China (China), our findings manifest a widely held professional tenet among Chinese lawyers - 'early defense is the best defense'. In short, optimal advocacy is contingent upon timely and tactical involvement at the pre-trial stage. As police and procuratorates assume greater discretionary power in shaping case resolutions, the capacity of defense counsel to intervene promptly and effectively during the investigatory and prosecutorial processes is critical in ensuring favorable outcomes for defendants. Yet, this strategic advantage gradually diminishes as the case progresses into the formal adjudication phase. At both trial and appellate levels, defense counsel face significant limitations in their power to persuade judicial authorities to overturn prior decisions made by their institutional counterparts.
To receive justice in the legal system, one must be seen by the legal system; this is as true for nonhuman animal victims of crime as it is for human victims. Situating animal cruelty within the invisible crimes framework, this paper highlights the paucity of research on prosecutions and sentencing under animal welfare law. Due in part to a lack of transparency in the public and private institutions that regulate animal welfare, our understanding of how animals are recognized within legal systems has so far relied heavily on critiques of animal welfare legislation as written. Drawing on an original database of Australian prosecutions of cruelty cases (n = 552) involving "pet" animals, this paper offers new, empirically centered perspectives on the legal treatment of animals. It calls for an expansion of the invisible crimes framework to include "invisible victims" and supports recent calls for animals to be recognized as crime victims.
Building on ethnographic fieldwork in welfare hearings in French-speaking Belgium, this article explores how judges decide between irregular migrants claiming social assistance and the public welfare administrations refusing such claims. Investigating these cases helps to analyze how members of the bench establish truthfulness and ponder the social and political consequences of their decisions. In these contexts, irregular migrants, despite being the more disadvantaged party to the case, regularly win against the state. At the theoretical level, this article provides a counterpoint to two general trends in sociolegal and migration studies. First, it nuances the idea that judicial proceedings generally tend to further or reproduce inequalities by showing how courts can, under certain conditions, help uphold migrants' rights against the state. Second, it highlights the importance of law and formal institutions in the governance of precarious migrants.
What drives individuals to become immigration attorneys? Although much has been written about what motivates people to become lawyers broadly, little is known about the motivations and backgrounds of immigration attorneys. It has been suggested that immigration attorneys are “cause lawyers,” motivated by a desire to engage in immigration activism, advocacy, and reform. Drawing upon a national study of immigration attorneys conducted during Donald Trump's first presidential term, this paper explores the role of these and other established motivations for practicing law in the immigration context—including law school socialization, economic incentives and working conditions, and the social backgrounds, personal values and identities of lawyers. Interview findings reveal that immigration attorneys are not cause lawyers, at least not as traditionally defined in the sociolegal literature. Implications for the immigration bar and the future of immigration reform are discussed.
In 1992, Colorado's citizens enacted Amendment 2, a ballot initiative that prevented governmental entities from extending antidiscrimination protections to gays and lesbians. That same year, Oregon's voters rejected a similar measure. At first glance, it may seem that queer rights advocates experienced a loss in Colorado and a victory in Oregon. But the story is much more complicated than this simple framing suggests. This article draws on extensive original archival research to analyze these historical events, focusing on a striking paradox at the heart of Amendment 2: the initiative was simultaneously a stunning rebuke to the queer rights movement and a series of notable victories for gay and lesbian rights advocates. It uses the history of both the Colorado and Oregon ballot measures to build a new typology for evaluating social movement success, one that categorizes outcomes as comparative, adversarial, and contingent victories. This reformulation offers scholars a more robust framework of analysis for identifying wins, losses, and draws. It also helps contemporary social movements better assess their potential to secure essential gains.
Under what conditions do courts implement mechanisms of social participation in judicial decision-making? Over the last two decades, Latin American constitutional and supreme courts have been opening themselves up to the public through institutional innovations such as public hearings and the acceptance of amicus curiae briefs. This paper analyses such court behavior from a comparative perspective. Theoretically, we argue that the implementation of these mechanisms requires both the presence of a court composition that values openness (ideational factors) and the contextual incentives to use them (with strategic considerations). Our empirical analysis consists of three steps: First, to assess the frequency of use and influence of the mechanisms in practice, we designed an expert survey and implemented it in 10 Latin American countries during the course of 2022. Second, three in-depth studies of Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay allowed us to explore the causal relationship between the conditioning factors and the degree of court openness. Third, we briefly evaluate the impact of court openness on trust in high courts. Only the consistent and regular use of social-participation mechanisms can help to improve trust, and our empirical analysis shows that this has only happened in the case of Colombia.
Nearly 40 children per year die in hot cars in the US. In the aftermath of a "hot car death," police make decisions about arrests, and prosecutors determine what type of punishment, if any, a parent should face. These cases offer a unique opportunity to compare parents responsible for the accidental death of their children, highlighting the interplay of gender and race in sociolegal responses. By focusing on similar circumstances with differing parental identities, this research illuminates how intersecting social factors influence perceptions of blame and responsibility. Drawing on focal concerns theory and notions of blameworthiness, our project examines the role that parental gender and race play in the arrests, charges, and convictions in hot car death cases. We analyze 267 hot car deaths between 2000 and 2019. We find that mothers and non-White parents are more likely to be arrested and face harsher prosecution: they are criminally charged more often than fathers and White parents. Non-White mothers are treated most harshly. These findings illuminate inequities in the criminal justice system and underscore the need for communities to raise awareness and for new policies rather than criminalizing hot car deaths.
This research examines the ability of the United States Supreme Court to influence behavioral change by federal environmental agencies through theories of Supreme Court power and principal–agent dynamics. I use a series of case studies to demonstrate Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers responses to publicly salient Supreme Court decisions, finding that agencies tend to behave as agents of the Supreme Court, even when faced with unpopular decisions.
The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a tiny office in the United States Department of Justice, was designed to hold the executive branch to the law. But in practice, the office has often played a role in the expansion of presidential power. We analyze the publicly available OLC opinions from Trump's first term to understand whether, to what extent, and how lawyers in OLC provided legal scaffolding for President Trump's expansion of presidential power. We find that the OLC under the first Trump administration did expand power, but it did so in a manner largely consistent with previous administrations. The Trump OLC reinforced previous extensions of presidential power more frequently than it introduced novel extensions of power, citing OLC precedent from both Republican and Democratic administrations. We also note the prevalence in these opinions of language associated with the Unitary Executive Theory, a constitutional theory once considered radical that has been adopted by the conservative legal movement. Thus, even though the Trump OLC was functionally similar to previous administrations in advancing presidential prerogatives through its opinions, how it justified these reinforcements and extensions of power is functionally different from Democratic administrations-and, as some have argued, more dangerous.
The recent establishment of Chinese Community Corrections (CCC) has been heralded as a lenient turn in China's criminal policy, and a welfarist approach to promoting the well-being of offenders through state-sponsored rehabilitation services. Despite growing research on the operational meaning and functions of the CCC, the effect of offenders' participation in rehabilitation on their satisfaction with justice has yet to be adequately explored. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with offenders in community corrections, and guided by the procedural justice framework, this study examines the lived experiences of offenders and the impact of their participation in rehabilitation on their perceptions of justice. The analysis reveals that offenders experience a process of what we call "manufacturing compliance," navigating complex bureaucratic requirements derived from the state's priority of maintaining stability. This calls into question the presumed therapeutic effect of offenders' involvement in the CCC and further suggests an unintended negative impact of unmet expectations. The implications of these findings for the administration of the CCC as a genuine channel of penal welfare are discussed.
The collateral consequences of justice involvement have become the subject of much reform activity in recent years. Drawing from a sample of 284 news articles, the present study uses content analysis methods to identify and examine the dominant frames that characterize collateral consequences in public discourse as a problematic feature of criminal justice policy and practice. The analysis finds that reform discourse draws primarily on a formal penal benchmark of gross disproportionality, which highlights the extreme disconnect between minor direct punishments for low-level offenses and the long-term collateral barriers that a person faces because of their criminal record. Gross disproportionality corresponds to a vision of reform that seeks to recalibrate collateral consequences according to the structure of direct punishment, an approach that may render collateral consequences more formally penal as a result of the reform process itself.
ABSTRACTJurisdictions nationwide have taken to implementing bail reform, with some pursuing the broad abolition of cash bail. Depending on the actor leading the reform, these efforts face differing obstacles to successful implementation. Philadelphia has been a leader in prosecutor‐led bail reform, as the progressive District Attorney's Office (DAO) implemented its second round of reform, which attempts to simulate a no‐cash bail system by limiting pretrial recommendations to either $999,999 bail or release. Drawing on observational case‐level data (n = 96) and the framework of sociolegal gap studies, the current study aims to document the policy's application. First, by capturing departures by the DAO and agreement by judicial magistrates, the presence of a gap between the policy's vision and its implementation is detected. Second, to understand why a gap may be occurring, responses to the policy are qualitatively analyzed. Findings demonstrate that guidelines were adhered to by the DAO and agreed to by judicial magistrates in only 16.7% of cases. Qualitative results suggest that the reform faces considerable challenges in implementation, including institutional resistance/hesitation and courtroom workgroup adaptations. This research, despite its convenience sampling and limited generalizability, has significant policy implications, both within Philadelphia and for the broader progressive prosecutor movement.
Because the civil rights movement accomplished many successes via litigation, advocacy communities regard courts as bulwarks against the legal enshrinement of oppression targeting vulnerable minorities. Advocates of LGBTQ equality are no different, identifying the judiciary as critical to eradicating discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Standing alone, however, Supreme Court holdings revising the scope of civil rights for sexual minorities represent a change in policy formulation rather than implementation. Judicially directed reformulations of public policy require cooperation by officials responsible for implementation, and compliance rates with judicial directives vary. Here, I analyze state responses to two Supreme Court decisions involving sexual minorities: Lawrence v. Texas, decriminalizing sodomy, and Obergefell v. Hodges, invalidating state same-sex marriage bans. Although adherence to Obergefell was swift and nearly universal, compliance outcomes for Lawrence have been uneven, as some states continue to enforce statutes that are materially equivalent to the "homosexual conduct" law reviewed in Lawrence. I argue compliance with Lawrence has lagged compared to Obergefell for the following three reasons: (1) linguistic imprecision in Lawrence; (2) divergent views of the right(s) at issue in each case; and (3) the absence of a federal executive regime credibly committed to the case's outcome.
What if we could save lives just by listening to women? "'Why Would I go back There?': Medical Mistrust and the Maternal Mortality Crisis" explores this question through birth narratives from people whose experiences made them hesitant to seek out any medical care. According to the CDC, over half of maternal mortality happens after people leave the hospital, and between 60% and 80% of maternal deaths are preventable. Understanding why these parents are not seeking care is integral to ending preventable maternal deaths. While health policy advocates have developed policies to remove structural and economic barriers to postpartum services, there are still patients who will not return to the hospital, even for lifesaving care. This article explores one possible reason why. Based on interviews with over 100 people who gave birth, this article joins scholars who view medical mistrust as a fundamental barrier to policy compliance. People will only return to the hospital if they think it will be better for them to do so. With an experience-conscious view in mind, this article ends with relevant policy recommendations gathered from health programs designed to bring trust back into maternal care.
For more than two decades after Gregg v. Georgia (1976), use of the death penalty greatly expanded across the United States. Since 2000, however, it has declined significantly. Perhaps the most notable explanation for this decline is the contemporary focus on wrongful convictions. In this paper, we aim to contextualize the modern death penalty decline, and its connection with innocence, through the theoretical lens of social movements and collective action. We argue that dual opportunities reshaped the modern anti-death penalty movement. First, the McCleskey v. Kemp (1987) ruling affirmed the federal courts' resistance to abolition and inspired activists to begin shifting toward state-level political abolitionism. Activists then took advantage of the developing interest in wrongful convictions. Specifically, innocence-related abolitionist activities in Illinois reinvigorated the anti-death penalty movement, expanded the advocacy network, and fundamentally reframed the debate around capital punishment in the United States. We suggest that, collectively, these dual opportunities reshaped the anti-death penalty movement into one that emphasized strategies reaching beyond constitutionality and propelled the movement into the twenty-first century with a foundation for successful political abolitionism.
Formal complaints and disciplinary processes constitute a mandatory aspect of organizational responses for addressing sexual harassment in many jurisdictions. However, previous research has found that reporting parties are not well served by such processes. In particular, Ahmed (Complaint!; 2021) argues that the institutional climate that enables harassment or discrimination to occur-including its gendered dynamics-also shapes how complaints about harassment are handled. Building on Ahmed's work, this article analyses how gender "gets into" formal reporting processes for sexual harassment within organizations. It draws on interviews with 18 students and staff who went through a formal institutional reporting process for gender-based violence or harassment in UK higher education between 2016 and 2021. Using Connell's theorization of "gender regimes," we outline how "dimensions of gender" within organizations affected different stages of formal reporting processes, including how evidence was gathered during reporting processes, as well as how it was assessed. These findings demonstrate that gender regimes-via gender relations of power, gendered "attachments and investments," and "gender-neutral" processes-can override formal processes and affect outcomes of sexual harassment reporting. These findings explain how gender regimes contribute to the failure of sexual harassment complaints to be upheld within organizations.
Increasingly scholars have argued that, if the United States is to reduce Black-White disparities in incarceration, it is necessary to move away from race-neutral efforts and ensure that policies consider race. Despite this perspective, criminal legal policies have almost exclusively been race-neutral, with one general exception at the state level: racial impact statement reform. Although racial impact statement reform exists now in 10 states, no scholarship has empirically examined the implications of this approach for racial disparities in imprisonment. Using a mixed methods approach, we begin to fill this gap by examining the implications of Minnesota's racial impact statement reform on Black-White imprisonment rate disparities. Our quasi-experimental results do not suggest that Minnesota's reform reduced Black-White disparities in imprisonment. Our legislative analysis suggests that the null effects we observed were likely due to the fact that racial impact statements are responses to legislation that has already been proposed, and that the legislation proposed in Minnesota was not sufficient to significantly address Black-White imprisonment disparities, regardless of the extent to which these statements impacted the votes of legislators.
