Abstract The extent to which legal professions around the world facilitate and promote the careers of a diverse range of qualified candidates has been a focus for research and debate throughout the 21 st century. This essay discusses a significant contribution to this field, Robert Nelson, et. al.’s The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession , a comprehensive study of lawyers’ careers in the United States that draws on extensive quantitative and qualitative data. The essay considers the book’s findings in the context of the exponential rate of change in legal professions worldwide change which, however, has been constrained by the endurance of traditional features of professionalism, including its classed, gendered, and raced character. In line with the Bourdieusian stance taken by the book’s authors, the essay reflects on the continuing influence of social categories and their interaction both with each other and with institutional and wider socio-economic factors in a complex and many-layered process.
Abstract This review essay articulates methodological insights gleaned from Whitney Taylor’s The Social Constitution: Embedding Social Rights Through Legal Mobilization (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Through an analysis of how Taylor used interview and comparative methods, the essay addresses the opportunities and challenges of drawing on interview data to make sense of past events. It also explores the use of comparative methods, both comparing one country to another and comparing different regions in one country.
Abstract This study examines how Chinese university students’ legal consciousness is shaped by the tension between rights empowerment and repressive control in the context of anti-sexual harassment mobilization. Drawing on relational legal consciousness scholarship and extending work on relational repression, I argue that the legal dualism of the authoritarian state, which promotes rights through legislation while suppressing their assertion through stability maintenance, reaches students through their relational networks. Based on in-depth interviews with forty-eight students and seventeen institutional actors, supplemented by participant observation, this study identifies “concern for rights” and “concern for oppression” as two competing forces generated and transmitted through relationships. Contrasting these two forces, I propose a two-dimensional framework that maps four states of legal consciousness. Among them, “watchful awakening,” where students are fully aware of rights violations yet strategically constrained by oppression, emerges as predominant. The study traces how relational variables, including student positionality, institutional dependency, and university hierarchy, shift the relative weight of these concerns and propel students between different states. This framework reveals how the state’s contradictory signals are reproduced at the individual level through the very relationships that individuals depend on for support, solidarity, and survival.
Abstract This article explores how Chinese international lawyers used international law to assert fiscal sovereignty through income tax reform from 1935 to 1937. Despite Western imperialism preventing China from taxing foreign nationals, Chinese diplomats actively invoked international law to legitimize domestic taxation and challenge entrenched Western privileges within China. Based on diplomatic and public finance archives from Great Britain, China, Germany, and the United States, this article finds that Chinese lawyers systematically approached foreign taxation as a legal issue central to state building. In addition, international law influenced the decision making of treaty powers and foreigners residing in China, evidenced by their engagement with China’s legal arguments. Lastly, international law—particularly fiscal sovereignty doctrines—was ostensibly neutral but imperialist in character, disadvantaging emerging states through requirements they could not meet. This case reveals tensions between domestic reform and international power dynamics relevant to modern debates on global tax justice.
I wrote An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles to examine how contemporary movement lawyers built new legal regimes from the ground up to challenge economic inequality and promote immigrant worker power in America’s second-largest city. I did much of the research for the book—which included interviewing sixty-six key actors, building an archive of movement documents, and compiling detailed court and legislative records—during the Obama years, when Los Angeles was at the center of a wider resurgence of progressive social movement activism and innovative thinking about how to revitalize the labor movement after decades of retrogression. I did much of the final writing during a darker period: the unexpected first term of President Donald Trump, when writing felt like an act of resistance and the country seemed like it could still thwart twin infestations: Covid and the pestilence of Trumpism. I published the book as the Trump effort to overturn the 2020 election had just failed, and the nation walked back from a dangerous precipice.
Abstract Richard Abel’s five-volume book series, Defending American Democracy (2025), offers key insights into the transformation of a liberal democracy under modern, legalistic autocratic rule. As an in-depth study of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, it outlines how the Trump administration challenged and subverted laws and legal principles, exploiting the gaps in our democracy exposed by his predecessors. With an executive branch actively working beyond constitutional boundaries, Abel highlights one of the most pressing questions of our day—what do we do now? This review essay aims to respond to part of this question by contributing to emerging scholarship on resistance to autocracy and authoritarianism. It proceeds in two parts. The first part draws from and develops Abel’s accounting of resistance to autocracy in the United States. In doing so, it extracts a generally applicable typology of resistance methods and how they manifest under state repression or persecution. The second part of this essay adapts these categories and raises examples within electoral democracies that are facing similar conditions. In contemplating resistance “success stories” in similarly situated nations, the review essay aims to direct further attention to shared strategies for democratic resilience during a global decline in the rule of law.
This essay engages with Florian Grisel’s The Limits of Private Governance and uses it as a springboard to rethink the theoretical foundations of the social norms and private governance literature. Drawing on Grisel’s historical study of the Prud’homie de pêche of Marseille—a centuries-old institution that governed fisheries—as well as my own research on property and neighborhood governance in China, including Chinese Small Property and The Authoritarian Commons, the essay proposes a new framework: “social norms 2.0.” This approach views governance as a process of co-evolution in which norms, legal institutions, and political authority continuously reshape one another. By reframing private governance as a dynamic and relational process, the co-evolutionary model moves the field beyond conventional debates about whether governance emerges primarily from informal norms or from state support. The essay suggests that future research should focus instead on the recursive interactions through which social norms, legal institutions, and political authority jointly produce and transform systems of governance.
While prior research has focused on the role of cause lawyers in legal and social reforms within authoritarian regimes, the everyday practices of non-cause lawyers handling controversial cases remain unexplored. Drawing on 60 interviews with family lawyers and divorced women in Iran, this study directs attention to the everyday practices of ordinary lawyers, with a focus on divorce cases initiated by women, which are among the most challenging cases in Iran's family courts. The study introduces a typology to distinguish between lawyers who are outcome-oriented and those who are transformative-oriented. I argue that lawyers' perceptions of professional responsibility and their understandings of what counts as "meaningful reform" in a judiciary that is unreceptive to women's rights influence how they pursue legal mobilization against codified gender inequality within an authoritarian system. This study concludes by suggesting that future research should examine how lawyers' interpersonal interactions, as well as their educational and professional training, shape their approaches to challenging inequality and discrimination.
Through a qualitative analysis of case studies from Boston in the 1970s and 1980s, this article explores how police officers exploited sex workers in pursuit of department goals and personal desires, all while attracting opposition from sex workers and their allies, who likened cops to pimps. Examining police-sex worker interactions documented in the commercial press, alternative media, appellate court rulings, and police documents, this article incorporates the police-as-pimp metaphor to elucidate the nature of police discretion in the context of sex work. When dealing with sex workers, officers proved willing to choose lawlessness if it helped them accomplish other personal and professional goals. Yet this article goes beyond condemning individual police officers as pimp like. Rather, the metaphor applies to entire law enforcement institutions, whose structures and norms facilitated state exploitation of sex workers.
Abstract Criminal justice activism in the United States has traditionally focused on policing at the front end of the penal system or prisons at the back end. More recently, activists have expanded their efforts to the criminal court, which they see as mediating the path from arrest to incarceration. Bridging punishment and society with law and social movements, I study how activists diagnose and counter the problems of the court. Through an ethnographic and interview study in Oakland, California, I found that activists engage in interstitial power shifting or creating new avenues for collective action in the cracks of the court process and using them to shift power from legal officials to marginalized communities. This power shifting is ideological and material. First, activists challenge the idea that the court is a just institution and problematize how it obscures its activities from the public, dehumanizes defendants, and evades accountability to system-impacted people. Second, activists try to address these problems and reduce the court’s power through strategic interventions: court watch, participatory defense, and district attorney accountability. More broadly, this article offers a framework for analyzing collective action that does not operate fully within or outside of law but, rather, in the margins and cracks of legal institutions and processes.
Abstract Drawing on participatory research with grassroots organisers, activists, and legal practitioners, this article offers a pioneering account of how anticarceral feminists in Ecuador understand, negotiate, and resist international human rights (IHRs) amid severe prison violence and endemic violence against women (VAW). Key findings include the participants’ widespread scepticism towards IHRs as a tool for emancipation, which is influenced by the distinctive impact of penal violence on their survival strategies and reproductive labor. Notably, the penal apparatus criminalises women’s precarious livelihoods and extracts care work from those supporting incarcerated relatives and friends. Building on these findings, the article presents an anticolonial feminist critique of IHRs, demonstrating how rights-based frameworks can reinforce a penal system that causes gendered and racialised harm through human rights penality. The article then theorises “penal violence against women,” referring to a systemic harm inflicted on many women who encounter the penal system, even if they are not incarcerated or involved in a penal process. In response, participants prioritise community support, cooperative projects, and the redistribution of labor and resources over rights-based penal remedies. The article recommends considering penal violence in rights-based responses to violence against women (VAW) and calls for a fundamental rethinking of human rights commitments to penality.
Abstract This essay argues for a shift in sociolegal scholarship on lawyers’ careers from a framework centered on stratification to one attentive to reconfiguration under changing institutional conditions. Building on the findings of the After the JD project and related scholarship, we suggest that enduring hierarchies of race, gender, class, and professional prestige are increasingly reorganized through fragmentation of the professional field, technological change, shifting forms of capital, transformations in the social organization of legal work, and in politics and the economy. Rather than displacing earlier insights about inequality, we argue for extending them through a more dynamic account of careers, institutions, and professional change across time.
While a postwar consensus largely upheld the legitimacy of the administrative state, the past two decades have witnessed a surge of critiques not seen since the 1930s. This review essay traces the evolution of these attacks from libertarian legal scholars decrying the administrative government’s alleged constitutional violations to lesser-known populist conservative figures like John Marini and Ned Ryun who frame the same developments as a subversive plot against the executive branch. Contrasted with them are defenders of the regulatory state like William Novak, who argue both for the historical precedent of state intervention as well as for its democratic legitimacy. The essay closes with a review of liberal concerns about the administrative state—exemplified by Alan Brinkley’s critique of the New Deal—and considers how defenders and critics might be speaking past one another. The debate reveals deeper fractures in American political thought and potentially new avenues for research into the politics of the administrative state in the latter half of the twentieth century.
