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["Journal of Law and Society, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article challenges the dominant socio‐legal focus on the nation‐state by placing emphasis on its margins. Based on a review of the vibrant scholarship in the socio‐legal literature, the article sketches the features of social facts that can be found in the interstices of national legal systems and professions. Though these facts are marginalized from the perspective of these systems and professions, their role is no less real in the global arena, in whose centres they are situated. The study of these facts raises methodological questions that this article seeks to address. By attempting to shift the research focus from one object to another, in particular, the article casts light on methodological debates concerning the need to define research categories on a preliminary basis.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article proposes that socio‐legal scholars study statutes and legislative drafting on their own terms. Legislative drafting may seem to have little relevance within approaches that emphasize law's wider social effects. Yet statutes can be defamiliarized, and the dynamics through which they are drafted better understood. This can help statutes to answer for their legal and social power and also assist scholars working in law and other disciplines to grasp the distinctiveness of legal doctrine.\nDrawing on findings from my current research, I argue that sociologies of legislative drafting could contribute to, and be informed by, two contemporary debates: first, the status of legal technical expertise, and second, the aesthetics of law. Unpicking these thickly knotted ontologies of law and drafting could be achieved through historical, ethnographic, and experimental visual methods. These methods potentially help us to tackle something akin to an ‘obviation of legal form’ through which statutory text is seen to be distinct from, and subservient to, law's legal and political substance.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 245-262, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nIn this conceptual article, we propose that legal professional decision makers’ transformation of narratives in court (encoding) influences their emotional attunement to the stories at hand. First, we argue that the process of encoding is linked to the strict demand for dispassion in legal settings. Second, we introduce three techniques that regulate the emotional processes at play during the encoding of law narratives: demarcation, fragmentation, and proximation. Demarcation and fragmentation produce emotional distance from narratives and their associated emotions, while proximation refers to the deliberate calibration of emotional attunement to law stories to enable legal decision making. Demarcation and fragmentation are sustained by background emotions of ease and interest when stories align with legal requirements, versus disinterest and irritation when ‘too many’ details are introduced. Proximation is regulated through the epistemic emotions of doubt and certainty. By scrutinizing the subtle emotions involved in legal encoding, we problematize the ideal of judicial dispassion.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 294-316, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nBased on cross‐national comparative research conducted in France and the United Kingdom, this article explores to what extent and under what conditions trade unions situated in different legal systems have turned to the courts to challenge discrimination at work. It investigates the interplay between a broad range of structural factors that offer specific opportunities, and the way in which trade unionists interpret contexts to promote legal mobilization in addition to or in place of other repertoires of action. In so doing, the article contributes to the understanding of anti‐discrimination law enforcement and the role of micro‐level actors in enabling litigation strategies.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 385-405, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article brings a legal perspective to bear on debates about invisible labour. It argues that we can better understand the causes and implications of invisible labour and its relationship with gender equality by engaging, first, with the law's role in constituting human labour as work, and, second, with how this role influences the way in which the law comes to conceptualize that work for the purposes of regulating it. The article focuses on two categories of invisible labour: reproductive labour, performed predominantly on an unpaid basis in the home, and invisible work, labour that is procured through a wage relation and produces a surplus for firms/organizations, but that is not recognized as such for the purposes of legal regulation. It identifies different dimensions of these categories of invisible labour, explaining them by reference to distinctive features of legal doctrine, while teasing out their socio‐economic, and often gendered, implications.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 263-276, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nIn this article, I ask whether contract law can learn anything from the #MeToo discussions of consent. When we juxtapose consent in these two contexts, two issues emerge. The first is whether consent is a valuable ethical tool in helping us to determine whether an agreement is ‘good’. This article argues that just as patriarchy makes a mockery of consent in negotiating sexual encounters, so too do free market economics make a mockery of consent and freedom to contract. The second issue is whether consent should be understood objectively or subjectively. While favouring the centralizing of a subjective approach as #MeToo did, this article also affirms the critical critique of objectivity and questions the objectivity/subjectivity dichotomy altogether. This article ends with a nod towards the theorization of contract as feminist and as relational.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 362-384, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\n‘Tied visa’ regimes are labour migration policies that condition migrants’ visas on employment with a particular employer, thus restricting their access to the labour market. This article considers how, under such regimes, control by the state shapes control by employers, and investigates the resemblance between official migration control policies and private means of control and coercion, amounting to forced labour and trafficking. The discussion includes the theoretical analysis and empirical consideration of a case study: the Israeli tied visa regime, regulating migrant workers and Palestinian workers. The consideration of two groups of non‐citizen workers, subject to different but related regimes, enables a novel analysis of the coercive impact of common labour migration policies, and of the justifications offered for such policies. The Israeli Supreme Court demonstrated some commitment to constitutional principles protecting non‐citizens, but later withdrew from these principles and justified tied visas on the grounds that they serve the perceived public interest.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 277-293, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe fundamental assumption underlying plea bargaining is that it is ‘efficient’. Even ardent critics of plea bargaining often accept the assumption that it is efficient in being cost effective. For proponents, beliefs about plea bargaining's efficiency are used to argue that it is beneficial, even necessary, on pragmatic grounds. From this assumption about efficiency, volumes of laws and policies have been created. This article uses empirical data to demonstrate the flaws in this foundational tenet of plea‐bargaining logic. The article shows that, in reality, plea‐bargaining practices have imported their own inherent inefficiencies into the criminal process. These inefficiencies are detrimental not only to cost effectiveness but also to justice and fairness. Foremost among these inefficiencies are the (some argue iniquitous) game‐playing cultures that, ironically, policymakers have unintentionally fostered in striving for efficiency. The article demonstrates the pressing need to better recognize and understand these counterintuitive inefficient consequences of plea bargaining.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 317-338, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article looks at the development of the regulation of traditional herbal medicines in the European Union (EU) context and its effects in the United Kingdom (UK). Drawing on socio‐legal encounters with science and technology studies (STS), it explores how UK and EU stakeholders have struggled to regulate herbal products, and suggests that in order to tackle growing concerns about their safety, emerging EU legislation built on socio‐technical imaginaries of ‘tradition’. We argue that in doing so, the law also reshaped herbal medicines in the UK, rewriting their histories and potential futures by fostering new practices of herbal medicine making that sit precariously on the boundaries of what is lawful. Through an empirical exploration of the everyday landscape of herbal medicine in the UK, this article shows how the label of ‘tradition’ embedded in the new legislation transformed and unsettled the existing material practices and relationships that had underpinned herbal and traditional medicine.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 339-361, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe intermediary special measure was introduced by the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 (YJCEA) to assist vulnerable witnesses to give evidence in court. This article focuses on the role's relationship with its underpinning value of neutrality. Findings from 31 interviews with intermediaries in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as judges in Northern Ireland, suggest that this aspect of the role is problematic and deserves critical examination. Though there is a broad commitment to neutrality among intermediaries, the role's practice reveals latent tensions and contradictions that contribute towards what I term the ‘neutrality paradox’. This article uses the Bourdieusian concept of ‘illusio’ as an explanatory tool to examine deviations from the normative expectation of neutrality. It focuses on how intermediaries experience and conceptualize their own neutrality and explores how this can aid understanding of the role's scope and position within the criminal justice system.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 406-429, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article draws on the findings from The Bus Project (2018–2021) in Bristol, which found that children living in some of the most deprived streets in England cannot afford to visit the centre of their city. The article explains that the problem of children ‘not being on the buses’ is the consequence of a series of policy choices in bus governance. Empirically, the article demonstrates that the causes of bus immobility – cost, fear of the unknown, unfamiliarity, and unreliability – have clear detrimental effects on children's ability to access leisure and civic opportunities, independent travel, and education of choice. Theoretically, it argues that discrimination and equality law – the dominant legal paradigms for addressing inequality – have limitations in this setting when they do not explicitly provide for socio‐economic inequality. This article suggests that we could develop a concept of ‘advancement’, drawing on aspects of Section 1 of the Equality Act 2010 (still unimplemented in England, though in force in Scotland and Wales), moving beyond protected characteristics. As a policy, advancement could be implemented using administrative means, including existing data sets on free school meals or indices of deprivation. A concept of advancement could become a mechanism to enable us to address socio‐economic inequality as a ‘vehicle for justice’, just as buses are vehicles capable of facilitating spatial justice in practical terms.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 261-285, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe ways in which grievance procedures are used and perceived by incarcerated people raise important questions about the operation of procedural justice and legal consciousness and mobilization scholarship in settings where rights are especially vulnerable. This paper analyzes perceptions and usage of the grievance procedure for incarcerated people using survey data from people (N = 508) in three prisons in Ireland. We find that incarcerated people's views of the grievance procedures are generally negative, though some use it, especially those serving long sentences and those in segregation, with education level not significant in terms of usage. Additionally, having confidence in staff is associated with satisfaction with the procedure, as is the perception that one's rights are respected, showing important connections between perceptions of complaints and aspects of legal consciousness. We suggest a need for further situated analyses of procedural justice and legal consciousness, as well as practical requirements for complaints systems to elicit confidence among incarcerated people.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 167-187, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nIn recent years, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of immigrants facing removal from the United States, many of whom make a case for their right to be granted relief from removal and stay in the country. While immigrant men of color are disproportionately represented in both removal proceedings and contemporary sociopolitical constructions of immigrant criminalization, existing literature has largely overlooked the state's cultural logics involved in decision‐making about immigrant relief or removal. Drawing on theories of racialized masculinity and state gendering, I analyze how judges in immigration court utilize a politicized discourse of masculinity to justify legalization for immigrant men through their relational ties to US citizens. Using ethnographic observations of hearings for the Cancellation of Removal and the judicial decisions that support immigrant removal or relief, I develop a conceptual framework of “relational masculinity,” in which judges evaluate men as emotionally involved parents and partners in traditional family arrangements, raising culturally integrated Americans, and as economic providers of upward social mobility, to determine their deservingness for relief. These findings suggest that, alongside widespread gendered and racialized criminalization, the state also engages in an evaluation process to assess the masculinity of immigrant men who may be formally admitted into the United States. I argue that adherence to these gendered and racialized norms plays a key role in determining migrants' deservingness and membership, with important implications for how the state actively manages immigrant masculinity and bolsters caregiving support for US citizens, alongside heightened criminalization.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 213-236, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nMitigating evidence in capital trials provides reasons for a life, rather than death, sentence. Research suggests that mitigation challenges jurors. We contribute to this area by analyzing federal verdict forms in capital cases, which allow jurors to write in their own mitigating factors, providing a direct, rare window onto their mitigation considerations. We use 205 forms from 171 juries to examine the frequency and content of these “write‐ins,” using a sentencing theory typically applied to judges, Focal Concerns Theory. We find that four of every 10 juries prompted to offer their own mitigation do so, producing 149 unique write‐ins, the majority of which introduces mitigation topics that differ from those listed on the verdict form. Surprisingly, jurors are less likely to offer write‐in mitigators in cases involving White defendants than others, even after controlling for support for other mitigating factors and for aggravating factors, which also predict write‐ins. Jurors' write‐ins reflect a traditional sentencing concern for blameworthiness, and consistent with Focal Concerns Theory, attention to the practical consequences of punishment. Jurors also offered concerns we term “procedural fairness.” Results indicate that juries' views are patterned in ways that are similar, but not identical, to judges' sentencing concerns.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 237-260, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nOne in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these “lifers” will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision‐making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person's remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional authenticity. Instead, remorse involves numerous elements, including the relationship between a person's past and present motivations, beliefs, and affective states. To understand how parole board members make sense of remorse, we draw on in‐depth interviews with parole commissioners in California, the state with the largest proportion of parole‐eligible lifers. We find that commissioners' remorse assessments hinge on their perceptions of lifers' relationships to law and carceral logic. In this way, relational legal consciousness—specifically, second‐order legal consciousness—functions as a stand‐in for the impossible task of knowing another person's heart or mind. We distinguish relational from second‐order legal consciousness and argue that understanding how they operate at parole hearings reveals the larger import of relational legal consciousness as a mechanism via which existing power relations are produced and reproduced, bridging the legal consciousness and law and emotion literatures.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 188-212, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nWhile federal anti‐employment discrimination laws have helped diminish inequality at work, discrimination persists, in part perhaps due to unequal handling of equal employment lawsuits. Prior research demonstrates that the definition of discrimination can vary based on local normative ideas, while another line shows that a judge's race or gender can shape how related lawsuits are handled. In this article, I draw on a set of EEOC workplace discrimination cases prosecuted in Federal Court and combine it with locality data, to analyze: (1) the impact of local context, specifically rurality, local political context, and southerness and; (2) how judges' race and gender interact with the local cultural‐milieu. Findings reveal that plaintiffs of colour in race discrimination cases fair worse in rural courts or before white judges. Meanwhile, white judges in conservative areas are more defendant friendly than those outside the in more liberal areas. Black judges, in comparison, are more plaintiff friendly in conservative areas when compared to black judges in more liberal areas. While female judges are generally more plaintiff friendly than male judges in sex cases, location has no discernible effect.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 286-308, June 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article investigates why cause lawyering organizations choose policy work and how policy agendas are set. Interviews and documents from eight legal organizations in the LGBTQ movement reveal that policy work expands the scope of conflict, giving organizations not only more opportunities to act, but potentially providing greater autonomy to lawyers by allowing them to build their own opportunities. Furthermore, policy agendas are not simply tied to litigation and resources. Organizations balance perceptions of opportunity and need with resource availability. These perceptions are often informed by collaborations with state and local organizations, facilitating communication between groups, organizers, and activists at different vantage points. Thus, the nature of a legal organization's multidimensional strategy, which expands opportunities to reach their goals, may be shaping what those goals are. These findings contribute to our understanding of cause lawyering tactics and agendas.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, EarlyView. ", "\nAbstract\nAs complex data‐driven systems are increasingly used to know and govern global problems, the terrain for socio‐legal studies research is rapidly changing. Both ‘the social’ and ‘the legal’ are transformed through processes of algorithmic regulation and automated decision making. In the security field, these changes are giving rise to novel global infrastructures for countering potential risks through the extraction, exchange, and analysis of vast amounts of data. This article critically examines the key methodological implications of these data infrastructures for socio‐legal research and argues that confronting these challenges requires a different approach to research methods – one that studies regulation and data infrastructures together, that is empirically attuned to socio‐material practices and emergent relations, and that is performative rather than representational in orientation. Drawing principally from actor–network theory, materiality‐orientated socio‐legal work, and critical security studies, this article outlines an experimental ‘method assemblage’ (‘infra‐legalities’) for knowing and intervening in global security infrastructures and explores the main features of this research approach. The focus of socio‐legal studies on ‘law in the real world’ – and its associated epistemological and methodological assumptions – needs to be challenged and modified to grapple with the problems posed by global security infrastructures and algorithmic regulation.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 118-150, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article is concerned with how statutory duties structure regulatory decisions. Rather than focusing on the role of the courts, we explore statutory interpretation by a regulator as a quasi‐autonomous exercise, with external influences and internal norms and customs. To investigate this further, we conducted a series of semi‐structured elite interviews with senior members of the energy ‘regulatory community’, past and present. Energy regulation has been selected as a case study due to the controversies in recent years over the legitimate limits of economic regulation, as successive governments have imposed broader public interest goals on the regulator, resulting in a proliferation of statutory objectives. This increased complexity has arguably obscured the appropriate contours and rationales of economic regulation. Nevertheless, it is unrealistic to completely separate regulatory policy and politics.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 23-47, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article is a unique investigation of the interaction between sociocultural perceptions of women in Malaysia and reforms implemented in that jurisdiction to promote gender diversity on corporate boards. It adopts a law and social movements perspective to better understand the legal reforms that have emerged, often amid fraught interactions between the state and women's rights activists due to their conflicting conceptions of gender roles. The article draws on empirical data to shed light on the practical workings of the reforms, ascertaining the perspective of insiders through interviews and examining the composition of the boards of 30 of the largest listed companies. While an increase in the representation of women on corporate boards suggests that the reforms have facilitated progress towards gender equality, such progress must be viewed in the context of prevalent conservative perceptions of gender roles, and sustained state resistance against women's rights activists, which together impede progress towards substantive equality.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 3-22, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe case for greater judicial diversity has generally been constructed in terms of the need to appoint more women and those from minority ethnic groups. This article shifts the focus from demographic to cognitive diversity. Drawing on new insights and methodologies from the behavioural sciences on judges’ personal values and analysing the relationship between demographic diversity and values diversity, it sets out the case for the potential benefits of values diversity on the United Kingdom Supreme Court. The article argues that values are already implicitly taken into account in judicial appointments and challenges the claim that seeking values diversity among the Justices would inevitably lead to a United States‐style partisan political court. It proposes greater openness around values in the judicial appointments process to make explicit what is currently tacit and to lift the judicial values blackout, which has given rise to a ‘don't‐ask‐don't‐tell’ approach to the role of Justices’ values in decision making.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 71-92, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article reviews the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights for litigants in person (LIPs). LIPs operate in a system that was not designed for them and so challenge the norm of fully represented parties that the system has evolved to expect, creating potential risks for their Article 6 rights. The jurisprudence on Article 6 reveals the centrality of effective participation as a requirement for fulfilling the right to a fair trial. The article views the jurisprudential interpretation against original and significant empirical research data on how LIPs participate in civil and family court processes. It applies a conceptual analysis of legal participation to consider what might constitute effective participation in court proceedings and, through the empirical evidence, categorizes the intellectual, practical, emotional, and attitudinal barriers that LIPs face in their legal proceedings, which can constitute risks to their rights under Article 6.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 151-169, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nCan judicial mediation within a settler state's justice system improve the experience of dealing with child welfare services for Indigenous parents? Interviews with social workers, lawyers, and judges in the Canadian province of Quebec yield little basis for optimism. Adapting judicial mediation will not suffice to decolonize dispute resolution between Indigenous individuals and the state. Mediation fits uneasily with the severe power disparity in this setting. Moreover, the cautious nature of participants’ recommendations signals the limited adaptive capacity of the settler state's system of civil justice. The recommendations exemplify relatively superficial accommodation, rather than deep engagement with legal pluralism and Indigenous difference. Constraints on the state system's ability to adapt are both legal and cultural. This study contributes to literatures on Indigenous and colonial legal cultures in relation to child welfare, on access to justice for Indigenous peoples, and on mediation in Canada and elsewhere.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 93-117, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nSince 2010, the Environment Agency of England has had a range of flexible tools at its disposal to deal with misconduct. One such sanction, enforcement undertaking, is akin to a settlement where the regulator and the offender agree to deal with the breach through a range of promises that may restore and remedy the environmental harm caused by the offence. The majority of these undertakings further require the offender to make donations to charitable environmental causes to improve the environment. However, there is little transparency around the latter promise. Consequently, this article details the findings of a pilot study interrogating the specific implementation of a subset of enforcement undertakings in the North East of England. The article argues that a more transparent enforcement process would address some of the accountability problems arising from the findings, which show that ‘community benefits’ operate as an offset mechanism instead of as a restorative enforcement mechanism.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 193-217, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe rules by which a claimant establishes whether a defendant owed her/him a duty of care vary depending on the type of injury that she/he has suffered. In cases involving physical injuries, the rules are relatively straightforward; in psychiatric injury cases, the claimant must go to greater lengths to establish a duty. It is therefore harder for claimants with psychiatric injuries to recover damages from the careless defendants who wronged them. This discriminatory effect has long been a subject of criticism. This article employs the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) to add another voice to the critical chorus. The CRPD, which the United Kingdom has ratified, prohibits discrimination on the basis of ‘psychosocial disability’ – that is, mental impairment. Since the special rules are engaged by, and applicable to, such disabilities, the law of negligence conflicts with the CRPD. The article concludes that the CRPD strengthens the case for reform.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 48-70, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nDespite some interest in a so‐called ‘sociology of arbitration’, there is still a notable lack of literature addressing why arbitrators, as a group, have not engaged in the patterns of behaviour usually associated with other professionals. The divergence from such patterns is so broad that, in many respects, arbitration would not fit with traditional sociological definitions of an organized profession. Most notably, arbitrators lack full‐time engagement in this role and are not bound by licensing requirements. This article proposes that this discrepancy ultimately relates to the arbitral market's particularities and the regulatory competition allowed by the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. The article concludes that these same characteristics have, however, allowed international commercial arbitration to maintain one of the hallmarks of a profession: control over its own affairs.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 49, Issue 1, Page 170-192, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThough it is widely accepted that United Kingdom (UK) surrogacy laws are in need of reform, how they should be reformed remains a matter of considerable disagreement. This article explores a new regulatory suggestion: labour law. Building on the extensive sociological and anthropological literature that has conceptualized contract pregnancy as a form of work, it considers whether and how this might translate into a new regulatory framework, drawing on the Sex Work Is Work movement for inspiration. Though recognizing that this would require substantial changes to some of the present features of UK surrogacy law, it shows that there may be significant potential in this pre‐existing set of protections, improving the position of surrogates without dramatically changing the culture of the practice.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 122-145, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nWe examine consensual and coercive police–citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, popular legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages people to self‐regulate, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. But can consensual and coercive police–citizen relations be so easily disentangled in a city in which many people fear crime, where the ability to use force can often be palpable in even mundane police–citizen interactions, where some people fear police but also tolerate extreme police violence, and where the image of the military police as “just another (violent) gang” has significant cultural currency? Legitimacy has two components—assent (ascribed right to power) and consent (conferred right to govern)—and consistent with prior work from the US, UK, and Australia, we find that procedural justice is key to the legitimation of the police. Yet, the empirical link between legitimacy and legal compliance is complicated by ambivalent authority relations, rooted in part in heightened cultural expectations about police use of force to exercise power. We finish the paper with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 53-77, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe article analyzes Israel's ecclesiastical court system through the prism of Weberian theory to both empirical and theoretical ends. On the empirical level, it aims to illuminate a grossly understudied socio‐legal arena—the communal Christian courts in the Middle‐East. On the theoretical level, it seeks to reclaim the Weberian concept of kadijustiz, which refers to “formally irrational” legal systems. In recent decades, scholars have engaged in a process of “blaming” that discredited the conceptualization of Islamic law as kadijustiz and resulted in the concept's erasure from socio‐legal theory. After renaming it to the more neutral and non‐Orientalist richterjustiz, we employ this new‐old concept to analyze Israel's ecclesiastical courts and demonstrate its theoretical and analytical merits. The article concludes with several theoretical propositions, which draw on the empirical case study and contribute to the refinement of Weberian theory.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 28-52, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe Lactation at Work Law amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to mandate employer accommodation of employees' breast milk expression. Interviews with employees, human resource specialists, and supervising managers in nine industries found that some organizations' supervising managers, who initially perceived accommodations only as a legal mandate furthering managerial goals, over time changed to understanding lactation accommodations through a children's‐health lens that created morality‐driven motivations for legal compliance–a “moralization of the law.” Educational discussions with lactating employees not only provided these supervising managers with insights into lactation at work, but also sensitized them to ethical issues surrounding lactation accommodations.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 6-27, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nIn settler colonial states such as Canada, tax is central to political ideas that circulate about Indigenous nations and people. The stories that are told about Indigenous peoples by ‘taxpayers’ often involve complaints about budgets, welfare, and ‘unfair’ tax arrangements. The paper theorizes how informal ‘tax imaginaries’ and ‘taxpayer’ subjectivities are forged through state policy and how ostensibly fiscal concerns are imbricated with white political entitlement that erodes Indigenous legal and political sovereignty. By tracing the construction of taxpayer concerns and tax myths as forms of fiscalized racism, the paper demonstrates the importance of tax to settler colonialism and the shape of Indigenous‐settler relations. Taxpayer subjects are not just legal or material positionings in relation to tax and the state, but powerful subjects that refigure political problems as ‘fiscal’ and construct Indigenous people and nations through racialized repertoires of property and possession.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 78-100, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThe legal profession claims a duty of public service that calls on lawyers to volunteer their time through “pro bono” work (i.e., free legal service). And increasingly law firms strongly endorse pro bono and even remunerate time that is provided to clients without charge. But what happens when pro bono is mandated by the law firm, even compensated? Is altruism undermined? Drawing on a survey of 845 lawyers, we develop an integrated theoretical model to account for how volunteering takes place in the course of legal work. The analysis reveals psychological traits, collective norms, economic exchanges, and organizational dimensions shape lawyers' pro bono work in intriguing ways with marked distinctions emerging when pro bono is remunerated by firms. Collective norms known to foster altruistic behavior appear most relevant to pro bono that is outside the job (i.e., unpaid), while organizational supports and constraints as well as economic exchange factors appear most salient to pro bono that is compensated within firms. We argue that a theory of pro bono work requires a more refined understanding of the forces promoting helping behaviors across several dimensions: whether to help, how much to help, and with or without compensation.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 56, Issue 1, Page 101-121, March 2022. ", "\nAbstract\nThis paper seeks to understand how decision‐making works at the first appearance hearings (Custody Hearings) in Brazil, an initiative that intends to make the Brazilian criminal justice system more accusatorial. We used primary data gathered in the hearings between April and December 2018 in nine Brazilian states. Binary logistic regression models were applied to identify the variables that affect the odds ratios of pretrial detention. Results indicated a high level of homology between the prosecutors' requests and the judges' decisions, even when controlling for the characteristics of offense and offender, which precludes any direct openness to the defense. Decision‐making in the Custody Hearing reinforces the inquisitorial characteristics and the institutional features of the Brazilian Criminal Justice System, suggesting that the reforms carried out over the last years were not able to change how actors operate on a daily basis.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue S1, Page S88-S103, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nAs legal phenomena have become entangled with information and communication technologies, and the internet in particular, it is important for socio‐legal researchers to engage with online‐focused methodological approaches. This article contributes to this need by offering an exploration of some significant theoretical and methodological problematics presented by ethnographic approaches to internet research. Drawing on the methodological literature and reflections on my own research experience, the article discusses how internet‐mediated ethnography differs from other online‐focused approaches and considers the relationship between online and ‘traditional’ ‘real‐life’ ethnography. The article suggests that notwithstanding its internal diversity and fluid boundaries, internet‐mediated ethnography is a distinct approach to research, albeit one that bears a ‘family resemblance’ to traditional ethnography and offers advantages in terms of flexibility, depth of analysis, and understanding of the social contexts surrounding mediated life.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue S1, Page S59-S73, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nArising from the spatial turn in the social sciences, metaphors and material practices of movement have developed into methodological tools for studying the transitory moments of everyday life. This article explores how socio‐legal scholars can use movement as method to trace law in the everyday of civic space. The research draws upon a project that explored how bodies, materials, concepts, and administrative processes are set in motion in the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury, England, where births and deaths are registered on the mezzanine floor of the municipal library, museum, and art gallery. The article teases out some of the challenges of journeying with law, in architectural settings where legal activity has not been explicitly designed for, but where it nonetheless surfaces in fleeting moments. Movement as method, I argue, expands the socio‐legal toolkit for examining spaces of law and bureaucracy while challenging assumptions made in socio‐legal studies about the buildings typically inhabited by lawyers in the Global North.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue S1, Page S28-S43, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nIn this article, I reflect on the praxis of doing qualitative interview research involving intellectually disabled people as participants. I explore the ways in which ethical and legal norms work together to shape what is possible in research with intellectually disabled participants. I use stories from the field to explore issues of recruitment and sampling, working with ‘gatekeeper’ organizations, accessible information and informed consent, and data sharing and open access. As these reflections demonstrate, undertaking fieldwork involving intellectually disabled participants presents multiple challenges for socio‐legal researchers. They also show that many of the challenges are surmountable, offering concerns, considerations, and solutions that can, and perhaps should, be considered by all socio‐legal researchers who wish to ensure that all of the voices of society are included and reflected in their research.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue S1, Page S10-S27, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article contends that feminist methodologies offer rich and diverse insights for the production of socio‐legal knowledge. Recognizing the pioneering work of early feminist methodologists, it explores three key issues that feminist methodologies bring into sharp relief: a push beyond the scientific method, reflexivity, and reciprocity. Drawing upon a case study relating to the long‐elided voices and narratives of English sexual violence support workers, the article goes on to discuss the process of applying feminist methodologies in practice. It frames engaging with feminist methodologies during empirical work as a continuous process of becoming, a rigorous project of critical reflection undergirded by the challenges of translating feminist theory into practice. The process of becoming a feminist methodologist is explored here as an evolving and messy labour of commitments, apprehensions, and realizations, and as a way of doing research that recognizes the impossibility of unstitching ourselves from the claims to knowledge that we make.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue S1, Page S74-S87, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nOral history is a surprisingly under‐utilized resource in socio‐legal studies. This article explores some of the theoretical and experiential reasons for this deficiency. It begins with an overview of both fields to date, including instances of intellectual collaboration. It then considers tensions between qualitative and oral history interviews under the overlapping themes of preservation, accountability, and agency. The concluding section develops these theoretical arguments in light of ongoing ‘real‐world’ work in transitional justice. I argue in favour of a flexible, pragmatic, and imaginative response to the politics of oral history preservation and a more critical approach to the relationship between oral history, law, and politics. This is designed to encourage the collection and preservation of material that is otherwise side‐stepped, censored, or destroyed. Such an approach would yield benefits not only for the vexed process of ‘dealing with the past’ in post‐conflict societies but for socio‐legal scholarship more generally.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue S1, Page S104-S117, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article looks at a methodology that is often neglected in discussions about gathering qualitative data in socio‐legal circles in favour of the ubiquitous semi‐structured interview. We argue that the unstructured interview is underpinned by distinctive ideas about the autonomy of the subject in research and is particularly well suited to the ‘bottom‐up’ approach favoured in much law and society scholarship. The unstructured interview, with its focus on interviewee‐led narratives and structure, is ideal for elusive or under‐researched concepts. In this article, we outline its benefits by using the example of researching the highly subjective notion of time. In doing so, we make the case that methodologies can never be discussed in isolation but rather only in response to the issues thrown up by a particular set of research questions.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue S1, Page S44-S58, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe role played by pictures in the formation of our legal imaginations is one that has attracted the attention of socio‐legal scholars. Research in this field is on the rise and diversifying. However, to date there has been little engagement with, or reflection on, the methods and methodology that researchers have deployed in their turn to pictures as data. The goal of this article is to explore a range of methodological issues by way of several different types of pictures: paintings, photographs, and moving pictures with sound generated by way of lens‐based digital technologies.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 55, Issue 4, Page 657-679, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nConventional wisdom assumes that the public wants judges that will simply interpret and apply the law as it is written. However, existing evidence shows a substantial portion of the American population supports the doctrine of popular constitutionalism. Using two experiments involving the use of social science in legal decisions, we show that popular constitutionalists evaluate the judiciary using a different set of criteria than legal traditionalists. For legal traditionalists, using social science in legal decisions is perceived as an undesirable nonlegal influence and reduces acceptance of a court decision. For popular constitutionalists, social science is perceived as objective evidence that can be used to understand the practical effects of a decision and increases acceptance. We conclude by discussing the need for more research on popular constitutionalists, as little is known about how this group evaluates the judiciary and interprets its actions.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 55, Issue 4, Page 634-656, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nSubstantial research and policymaking have focused on the importance of lawyers in ensuring access to civil justice. But do lawyers matter more in cases decided by certain types of judges than others? Do lawyers matter more in certain political, legal, and organizational contexts than others? We explore these questions by investigating removal proceedings in the United States—a court process in which immigration judges decide whether to admit noncitizens into the United States or deport them. Drawing on over 1.9 million removal proceedings decided between 1998 and 2020, we examine whether the representation effect (the increased probability of a favorable outcome associated with legal representation) depends on judge characteristics and contextual factors. We find that the representation effect is larger among female (than male) judges and among more experienced judges. In addition, the representation effect is larger during Democratic presidential administrations, in immigration courts located in the Ninth Circuit, and in times of increasing caseload. These findings suggest that the representation effect depends on who the judge is and their decisional environment, and that increasing noncitzens' access to counsel—even of high quality—might be insufficient under current circumstances to ensure fair and consistent outcomes in immigration courts.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 55, Issue 4, Page 563-586, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nIn no domain of global health has there been more talk of rights than in HIV/AIDS, yet little is known about how the right to HIV/AIDS care is mobilized at the clinic level. Drawing on interviews and field observations in the United States, South Africa, Thailand, and Uganda, we analyze the legal consciousness of caregivers in five HIV clinics. We identify three organizational factors—clinics' focus on the distribution rather than the adequacy of existing resources, the duties for caregivers that patients' rights create, and the dominant norms of exchange in healthcare—that help to explain the low penetration of formal rights talk into clinics despite its prevalence outside them. However, we also observe that within clinics, rights may accrue differently than public discourse about rights might lead us to expect. We find that patients often benefit from highly localized, tacit de facto rights that develop gradually over time with the support of state health infrastructure, clinic resources, and professional norms and commitments. These rights would be unlikely to stand up in a court of law but nevertheless have substantial impact on patients' access to care.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 55, Issue 4, Page 614-633, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nInternational criminal law has developed significantly over the past 20 years since the establishment of the ad hoc Tribunals and International Criminal Court. Much scholarly attention has focused on the politics and jurisprudence of these courts, with particular focus on the prosecution of sexual and gender‐based violence. This article adds to the literature with comparative, qualitative research with survivors of conflict‐related forced marriage in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, revealing context‐specific understandings of marriage, consent and harm. We argue women exercise “tactic agency” in captivity in ways that are, taken together, “law‐making” in their contestations over the socio‐legal categories of marriage. Their contestations of marriage impact the norms within rebel groups as well as the development of new crimes against humanity in international criminal law. Building on the empirical findings, we argue that prosecution of crimes against humanity and reparation programs ought to be flexible and responsive enough to capture the varied experiences of women and girls abducted in war for purposes of sexual exploitation.\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 55, Issue 4, Page 539-562, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nHealth care rights for transgender and/or nonbinary people have dramatically expanded in recent years, including in insurance coverage for the treatments and procedures they need. Yet, trans people themselves still identify health insurance problems as a top priority for research and policy change because of significant difficulties gaining and using coverage. Wrangling over coverage determinations happens through multiple types of interactions, bureaucratic, interpersonal, and medical. When these interactions become difficult, it is because key terms such as medical necessity are both powerful and indeterminate. This study examines how trans people and health care intermediaries navigate the health insurance process and contest the meaning of medical necessity in coverage determinations. These disputes constitute the ground‐level reality for instantiating health care rights to gender affirming care. Relying on analysis of contract language and 32 interviews with people who sought gender‐affirming care and allied professionals, we find that health insurance policy language, interpretation, and implementation often create disadvantages and barriers for trans people who attempt to access care. Our study highlights how the contested life of insurance policy terminology produces a reality for rights but also details the mechanisms through which insurance‐mediated care is a socially contested and negotiated process\n"]

["Law & Society Review, Volume 55, Issue 4, Page 587-613, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nA common policy response to female genital mutilation/cutting (“FGM/C”) is the enactment of criminal prohibitions. The implementation of such prohibitions requires significant state capacity, which is often associated with the coercion. We examine compliance with anti‐FGM/C law in Burkina Faso and Kenya, two countries which are thought to have markedly different state capacity and where the practice of FGM/C has been widespread. Using a hard‐case comparison and both qualitative and quantitative approaches, including a list experiment to elicit accurate responses regarding the current state of FGM/C practice, we find that Burkina Faso and Kenya have achieved comparatively similar compliance with their respective anti‐FGM/C laws. We explain this surprising finding by pointing to the different implementation approaches taken by each state, one coercive and one facilitative, and the degree to which those approaches were well‐matched to the attitudes of their respective populations. This paired comparison suggests that coercively weak states may still be able to secure compliance with their laws. It also suggests that academics and policymakers alike should consider the numerous other capacities states possess beyond simple coercion.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 549-572, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThe climate crisis puts real pressure on legal guarantees of public participation in decision making. This pressure comes from a number of directions, but we are particularly concerned with the technocratic erosion of routines of participation, in a turn to expertise rather than democracy for legitimate decision making. At the same time, populists resist the constraints imposed on their power by legal rights of participation. We argue, however, that the climate crisis, while putting pressure on participation, also reinforces its necessity, and the limitations of technocratic decision making. Politics is unavoidable, even and especially in a crisis. Law, or its silence, contributes to the context, the place, and the meaning of participation, and we study its strangely underexplored role in shaping participation on the ground.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 669-689, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nWhile the majority of Western legal systems continue to insist on the existence of only two genders, a demand for the recognition of non‐binary gender identities has become increasingly visible. Numerous individuals have gone to court demanding recognition of their identities beyond the binary, with varying degrees of success. This article provides a novel lens through which to consider these contemporary legal claims. Through an exploration of historical and cultural examples of gender beyond the binary, more specifically Byzantine eunuchs and Indian hijras, this article analyses the regulatory forces that permit and promote the existence of non‐binary genders. A better understanding of societies that have carved out a space for genders beyond the binary can offer important insights into both the benefits and the dangers of the legal recognition of a third gender.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 690-712, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nThis article explores how Mary Shelley's Frankenstein engages with notions relating to mens rea. It constructs a reading of the creature as Victor's double, and therefore a manifestation of his guilty mind. Utilizing interdisciplinary literary‐legal methods, the article employs the central relationship in Frankenstein as a means of illuminating and critiquing the ways in which criminal law reproduces and perpetuates gendered notions of behaviour in relation to what is deemed a justified emotional response in the partial defences of provocation and loss of control. It concludes that Frankenstein helps to expose these gaps in legal discourse and ultimately destabilizes binaries of gendered criminality.\n"]

["Journal of Law and Society, Volume 48, Issue 4, Page 645-668, December 2021. ", "\nAbstract\nDrawing on in‐depth interviews, observation, and legal sources, this article examines how rejected asylum seekers experience their status and the legal regulations related to it, and how they react as a result. Their legal consciousness must be understood in the light of their illegal status, which makes them keenly aware that legal regulations and power structures decisively affect their everyday lives. They are ‘outside the law’ yet struggling to become insiders. While they all use legal services in their individual struggles, their engagement in collective counter‐hegemonic struggles is greatly affected by social relations, networks, and culture. Honneth's theory of recognition is used to expand the narrative of ‘dissenting collectivism’ within legal consciousness scholarship and capture the collective resistance of the marginalized. Unlike studies portraying these migrants as fearful of any involvement with the authorities, this article demonstrates that individual experiences of injustice and violated expectations of recognition can lead to collective resistance and mobilization.\n"]