This article surveys writing about Wikipedia governance with special reference to what other social media and networking platforms can learn from it to better deal with misinformation. It samples 20 years of work ranging from writing in computer, media, and communication journals to more political science and sociolegal enquiries to focus on who governs Wikipedia, what is governed, and how it is governed. It shows that although commentators have suggested there is much to be learned from Wikipedia, its governance is more complicated than is sometimes assumed. Noting the difficulty of defining misinformation, it argues that Wikipedia's supposed success in dealing with it has much to do with its ability to redefine what it counts as such for its purposes. Hence, it is important to appreciate how other platforms may define it differently for their purposes.
Court-focused research is increasingly data driven, yet most available court data are organized around cases and institutions rather than the people who move through the legal system. As a result, existing quantitative measures provide a detailed picture of court activity from the courts’ perspective but reveal little about litigants’ cumulative experiences across cases and time. This article advances a people-first approach to court data that reorients the unit of analysis from cases to individuals, enabling new forms of empirical, legal, and policy analysis. The article surveys the current court data landscape, reviews methodological strategies for generating people-first measures from existing data sources, and examines how researchers and courts can address challenges related to privacy, deidentification, and data security. It argues that people-first court data can enhance transparency, support better-informed legal and policy decisions, and deepen understanding of how courts function for those who use them.
Amid the global intensification of surveillance through digital and biometric technologies, this review conceptualizes surveillance as the coproduction of law, technology, and state–society relations. Examining cases from China, India, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, it develops a spectrum of techno-legal coproduction shaped by the degree of alignment or contestation between law and technology. At one end, authoritarian synergy integrates legal and technological systems to consolidate control; at the other, rights-bounded contestation in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan constrains surveillance through legal safeguards, judicial oversight, and civic activism. India and Singapore occupy hybrid middle positions. Across these contexts, surveillance emerges through dynamic interactions among state, corporate, and civic actors. Future research should extend this comparative framework to additional Asian contexts and explore the transnational dimensions of surveillance, including the diffusion and hybridization of legal norms, the circulation of technologies and governance models, and the emergence of transnational networks of resistance and accountability.
A growing body of literature examines either how state and legal institutions directly classify and categorize people along the lines of sex, gender, and sexuality or how such institutions set the parameters by which other social institutions must do so. Synthesizing this scholarship, this article conceptualizes these related social practices as constellations of biopolitical sorting, or processes that regulate both individual bodies and broader populations in line with state classification efforts. This review focuses on three key areas that have been central to this line of research: identity, citizenship and immigration, and institutional access and placement. It reveals how processes of biopolitical sorting aimed at sex, gender, and sexuality cut across social domains to shape the life chances of regulated individuals, as well as to contour what the very categories of sex, gender, and sexuality mean across contexts. The article concludes with broad analytical takeaways from this body of research and a discussion of directions for future research, including a focus on artificial intelligence, state formation and maintenance, and the constitutive relationship of law and identity.
This article reviews research on unaccompanied minors—children under 18 who migrate alone and without legal authorization—who are subject to contradictory host country governance regimes that both exclude and protect them. I juxtapose legal scholarship examining the contradictory laws governing unaccompanied minors with sociolegal research that examines the gaps between the law in books and the law in action. The first part reviews scholarship examining legal provisions vis-à-vis unaccompanied minors, their inherent contradictions, and how these vary across contexts. I discuss debates on the intersection of age and migration, the best interests principle, and how refugee law falls short in protecting children. I next compare governance regimes in the European Union and United States. The second part shifts focus to the implementation of law by discussing how legal advocates and unaccompanied children engage with, contest, and reproduce ambivalent legal regimes. I end by suggesting avenues for future research.
This review synthesizes research on the relationship between gun regulations and gun violence, focusing on cross-national, comparative perspectives and the conceptual and methodological challenges that hinder systematic global analysis. Although substantial evidence from the United States demonstrates that stricter firearm laws are associated with reductions in homicides, suicides, accidents, and mass shootings, the United States represents an extreme outlier in both regulatory permissiveness and levels of gun violence. Consequently, findings from that context may not easily generalize to countries with stricter baseline regulations. The review identifies three central challenges for advancing comparative research. First, the measurement of gun law restrictiveness remains inconsistent, as many studies rely on proxy indicators such as firearm availability rather than direct assessment of legal provisions and implementation quality. Second, cross-national data on gun violence suffer from gaps, inconsistencies, and limited comparability, complicating robust empirical analysis. Third, causal identification is still rare outside the United States, where quasi-experimental methods have begun to illuminate policy effects. Addressing these challenges requires improved data infrastructure, more precise measurement of regulatory design and enforcement, and broader use of causal research designs. The review calls for interdisciplinary and cross-national collaboration to build a stronger evidence base for effective gun policy worldwide.
Given the troubling state of law and democracy today, we are in an important moment to consider the unique contributions that legal anthropology and closely related fields provide to studying the lived practices of human meaning-making in moments of conflict and the politics of their resolution. This overview of those fields occurs on the sixtieth anniversary of two famous symposia convened by Professor Laura Nader that dramatically shifted the direction of the subfield of legal anthropology, a development we briefly review along with contributions of other earlier scholars. Turning to recent scholarship in legal anthropology, we examine how newer research moves forward from those roots, alongside research gathered under the rubric of New Legal Realism. These studies document law's irreducibly ideational and material dimensions, demonstrating the need for a humanistic empiricism in legal studies. We suggest that social science and legal scholarship should collaborate in exploring the normative universes in which social groups operate, staying open to studying the “ought” as well as the “is.”
Settler ecologies are the processes by which settler administrations imagine, construct, govern, discipline, and police nature, nonhuman animals, and Indigenous or otherwise marginalized communities. This article focuses on the role of law in constituting and advancing settler ecologies. It examines how legal regimes animate the colonial administration of nature across multiple geopolitical settings, including Palestine-Israel, the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Kenya. Drawing on these diverse observations, the article identifies three central legal technologies of settler ecologies: juxtaposition, which refers to law's capacity to generate and stabilize oppositional categories; frontier ecologies, which detail how doctrines such as terra nullius and legal instruments like protected areas expand and cement law's reach into new materialities; and hyperlegality and criminalization, which transform the violence of conquest into a routinized apparatus of environmental governance. Together, these three legal technologies of settler ecologies trace a continuum—from law's work of ordering and differentiation, through its territorial projection, and finally to the bureaucratic governance of life. The article concludes with just legal ecologies, exploring how Indigenous, local, plural, and more-than-human legalities might unsettle the premises and start to heal the traumas of settler ecologies, while affirmatively offering other ways of living with the earth. Throughout, the article illustrates that settler ecologies are not peripheral to law but foundational to law's material conditions and conceptual underpinnings.
A quarter century ago, Henry Steck branded corporatization the “most fashionable and ominous buzzword in contemporary academic circles.” Because this epithet “seems to say everything—or else very little,” it does more to frustrate than to facilitate critical inquiry. Specifically, this charge obscures the fact that most US universities are legally constituted as corporations. As is true of corporations generally, the academic corporation is a self-governing entity insofar as it possesses the authority to make rules that bind those subject to its jurisdiction and determine disposition of the assets it owns. The university's incorporation within a financialized capitalist economy, however, subverts the academy's capacity to exercise the powers that define all corporations and hence to rule its own affairs. Therefore, it is not the university's corporatization but its effective disincorporation that saps the academy's autonomy and so renders it subject to capture by hostile powers and subordination to purposes not its own.
This review proposes discussing racial justice in land restitution as a sociolegal problem of entanglement rather than one of linear repair. Drawing on research in law, anthropology, sociology, political theory, and critical race studies, race is conceptualized as a modality of belonging, a form of territorialized governance as well as ordered through property relations. In dealing with racial injustice, restitution is shown to operate as an ambivalent legal technology that both enables redress and risks reproducing inequality. Engaging Indigenous land claims in settler states, reparations for slavery, postapartheid restitution, Israel/Palestine, and Latin American plurinationalism as a set of paradigmatic cases, the review highlights how specific racial injustices are addressed in differential and unequal ways, unevenly redistributing recognition, authority, and futurity. The analysis shows how claims of exclusive victimhood run the risk of eclipsing coexisting as well as new injustices—a process captured through the notion of hegemonic subalternity. Moreover, terrestrial, anthropocentric, and planetary biases further complicate restitutionary imaginaries. The review's central contribution lies in arguing that, under conditions of intersectionality, entanglement, and varying dimensions and scales of injustice, legal–political institutions may bring backward-looking reparative justice and present- and future-oriented (re)distributive justice into closer alignment through processes of mutual approximation. Such a convergence may be framed as opening a cautiously post-racial horizon—one that neither erases the history of race nor falsely relies on formal equality but seeks to render race increasingly nondeterminative for structuring future inequalities.
Building upon Stewart Macaulay's earlier observations that spectator sports convey important images and meanings about legal authority in everyday life, this review considers how organized sports constitute an influential field of legality. Focusing on the regulation of violence, we explain how the management of on- and off-field violence helps to ensure the social acceptability of certain forms of aggression and secures the profitability of commercial sports. To do so, we survey research on how the regulation of ritualistic violence helps legitimate sports-related violence and complicates athletes’ consent to violence, responses to gendered harms and organizational violence in sports, and how regulatory activities in sports enable other forms of violence. We conclude by considering sociolegal lessons from the study of sports. Like the logics of law, sports rarely aim to end violence but instead negotiate their entangled relationships with violence as they attempt to control and channel its distribution.
Opinion tribunals are extrajudicial mechanisms established by civil society to respond to failures of judicial and investigative bodies, particularly international criminal tribunals, in addressing serious human rights violations. This review presents a critical appraisal of the significant literature on tribunals of opinion through a thematic organization of their three main objectives: legitimization, the search for truth and justice in the context of impunity for serious human rights violations, and contribution to legal reform. The findings reveal a persistent gap between claimed objectives and demonstrable outcomes. The limited quantifiable impact of opinion tribunals, however, is likely symptomatic of their perception as illegitimate by entities authorized to produce law, who consequently do not refer to them. Nonetheless, the work of opinion tribunals is a reminder that truth and justice are plural concepts, essential for acknowledging the experiences of victims of human rights violations, and for exploring alternative paths to justice, beyond (inter)national tribunals.
This review offers a methodology for the comparative analysis of different sociolegal research cultures by tracing the distinct trajectories of their scholarly communities and academic traditions. Drawing on sociolegal studies and the sociology and history of science, we examine both microsociological (individual) and macrosociological (structural) dimensions to reveal how historical contingencies, institutional dynamics, and personal scholarly pathways have shaped each national approach to nondoctrinal legal scholarship. Employing four conceptual heuristics (intellectual histories, institutional economies, epistemic communities, and scholarly agency), we highlight the interplay between biography and academic structure, challenging dominant narratives of disciplinary development. While acknowledging the interdisciplinary and contested nature of sociolegal scholarship, we propose a comparative case study methodology through which to disentangle, and make sense of, the complexity of sociolegal studies in different cultures.
What is the relationship between law/state and self? Studies of subjectivity, which refers to the relationship between self and power, seek to answer this question. Subjectivity compels us to consider how state power imposes norms, categories, and regulations through which selves are made up and become recognizable. Through this subjectivation process, we reproduce, legitimize, or at times challenge the power of law and state. To foreground the stakes of inclusion/exclusion and recognition/nonrecognition embedded in questions of subjectivity, we review literature on people at the margins of citizenship—migrants, welfare recipients, and criminalized people—where law/state is forcefully and pervasively present, even in the deep corners of their selves. We explore four levels of the subjectivation process: ( a ) bureaucratic, organizational, and knowledge infrastructures; ( b ) fragmented and uncoordinated subjectivation processes; ( c ) predicaments experienced by migrants and marginalized citizens in establishing their deservingness; and ( d ) complex relationships between strategic performance and self-transformation.
Since the turn of the millennium, the field of global labor history has seen a flood of publications and the establishment of associations worldwide, contributing significantly to the renewal of labor history and history in general. After a brief introduction to global labor history, this article discusses some of its key issues, particularly the relationship between labor regulation and historical labor dynamics. These discussions critically evaluate the conceptual and historical tensions between free and unfree labor. This includes the tensions and historical significance of legal versus economic coercion and the relationship between legal theory and legal practice (law in action), particularly the use of judicial archives to study the limits and possibilities for workers, slaves, serfs, and indentured migrants to utilize the law. Finally, building on this, the article considers the huge debate on legal pluralism in labor relationships.
Existing research suggests that a defendant's displays of remorse, frequently used to make attributions about their character, can act as valuable evidence for decision-makers in legal contexts. However, assessing remorse is a subjective process implicitly limited by human cognition, often stemming from expectations about how remorse should be expressed and whether some individuals are even capable of feeling it. This can lead legal decision-makers to potentially misread and discount a defendant's true feelings of remorse as disingenuous. Recent empirical work suggests that this social cognitive phenomenon, known as remorse bias , can lead to adverse outcomes for some defendants in the legal system—especially for those with personal characteristics that are commonly socially stereotyped or quite different from decision-makers’ backgrounds. This article provides an overview of the concept of and recent empirical literature surrounding remorse bias in the legal system, including its impacts on decision-making and potential implications.
This article reviews cultural sociological approaches to law and considers how they may sharpen analysis of social crises. As the United States faces myriad law-related crises, such as rising authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and police violence, the cultural study of law has become an urgent endeavor. Culture constitutes and shapes law, especially in unsettled times. Five concepts have dominated the cultural study of law: rules, norms, frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness. Future research would benefit from more precise considerations of how rules and norms operate in unsettled times. One way forward is specifying how frames, cultural capital, and legal consciousness shape and are shaped by changing rules and norms. Moreover, future research could leverage each concept to sharpen understandings of social control, inequality, and regulatory compliance in understudied contexts, along understudied axes of stratification, and with respect to the infusion of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, into the law.
Technologies play a central role in decision-making processes within criminal legal systems, creating what we call technologies of criminalization. These tools are based on the idea of calculated truths about future riskiness, but they often reinforce structural biases that underlie the concept of criminality. Their development and use demonstrate efforts to define the abstract criminal: a notion that embodies the presumed natural realities and discoverable aspects of criminality believed to be objectively discoverable and statistically predictable. This perspective neglects the socially constructed nature of criminality and the impact of human biases in the design and implementation of these technologies. Three interlinked processes drive their adoption: quantification, prediction, and pathologization. By examining neuroscientific, genomic, and algorithmic technologies, we critically assess their social impacts and the risks of exacerbating social inequalities under the facade of technical neutrality. Finally, we emphasize the increasing involvement of private industries in criminalization processes.
Agroecology is emerging as a transformative alternative to industrial food systems, combining research and practice to strengthen agroecosystem resilience and support the well-being of small-scale food producers. Using a systems-based approach, it integrates the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of food systems. Advocacy by researchers and social movements has brought agroecology to the mainstream agenda, prompting scholars to explore the regulatory reforms necessary to enable it. However, agroecology requires more than new legal frameworks. Existing laws and regulatory approaches often conflict with agroecology's holistic, transdisciplinary principles. This review outlines an emerging agroecological approach to law, focusing on property regimes and the interplay between institutionalization and bottom-up governance. It describes how socio-legal analysis can help address the structural and scalar challenges of aligning legal systems with agroecology, while also illustrating how integrating agroecology's transdisciplinary framework into socio-legal analysis can serve to reconceptualize the relationship between legal and ecological systems.
