Law & Policy最新文献

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in welfare hearings in French-speaking Belgium, this article explores how judges decide between irregular migrants claiming social assistance and the public welfare administrations refusing such claims. Investigating these cases helps to analyze how members of the bench establish truthfulness and ponder the social and political consequences of their decisions. In these contexts, irregular migrants, despite being the more disadvantaged party to the case, regularly win against the state. At the theoretical level, this article provides a counterpoint to two general trends in sociolegal and migration studies. First, it nuances the idea that judicial proceedings generally tend to further or reproduce inequalities by showing how courts can, under certain conditions, help uphold migrants' rights against the state. Second, it highlights the importance of law and formal institutions in the governance of precarious migrants.

What drives individuals to become immigration attorneys? Although much has been written about what motivates people to become lawyers broadly, little is known about the motivations and backgrounds of immigration attorneys. It has been suggested that immigration attorneys are “cause lawyers,” motivated by a desire to engage in immigration activism, advocacy, and reform. Drawing upon a national study of immigration attorneys conducted during Donald Trump's first presidential term, this paper explores the role of these and other established motivations for practicing law in the immigration context—including law school socialization, economic incentives and working conditions, and the social backgrounds, personal values and identities of lawyers. Interview findings reveal that immigration attorneys are not cause lawyers, at least not as traditionally defined in the sociolegal literature. Implications for the immigration bar and the future of immigration reform are discussed.

This research examines the ability of the United States Supreme Court to influence behavioral change by federal environmental agencies through theories of Supreme Court power and principal–agent dynamics. I use a series of case studies to demonstrate Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers responses to publicly salient Supreme Court decisions, finding that agencies tend to behave as agents of the Supreme Court, even when faced with unpopular decisions.

The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a tiny office in the United States Department of Justice, was designed to hold the executive branch to the law. But in practice, the office has often played a role in the expansion of presidential power. We analyze the publicly available OLC opinions from Trump's first term to understand whether, to what extent, and how lawyers in OLC provided legal scaffolding for President Trump's expansion of presidential power. We find that the OLC under the first Trump administration did expand power, but it did so in a manner largely consistent with previous administrations. The Trump OLC reinforced previous extensions of presidential power more frequently than it introduced novel extensions of power, citing OLC precedent from both Republican and Democratic administrations. We also note the prevalence in these opinions of language associated with the Unitary Executive Theory, a constitutional theory once considered radical that has been adopted by the conservative legal movement. Thus, even though the Trump OLC was functionally similar to previous administrations in advancing presidential prerogatives through its opinions, how it justified these reinforcements and extensions of power is functionally different from Democratic administrations—and, as some have argued, more dangerous.

Nearly 40 children per year die in hot cars in the US. In the aftermath of a “hot car death,” police make decisions about arrests, and prosecutors determine what type of punishment, if any, a parent should face. These cases offer a unique opportunity to compare parents responsible for the accidental death of their children, highlighting the interplay of gender and race in sociolegal responses. By focusing on similar circumstances with differing parental identities, this research illuminates how intersecting social factors influence perceptions of blame and responsibility. Drawing on focal concerns theory and notions of blameworthiness, our project examines the role that parental gender and race play in the arrests, charges, and convictions in hot car death cases. We analyze 267 hot car deaths between 2000 and 2019. We find that mothers and non-White parents are more likely to be arrested and face harsher prosecution: they are criminally charged more often than fathers and White parents. Non-White mothers are treated most harshly. These findings illuminate inequities in the criminal justice system and underscore the need for communities to raise awareness and for new policies rather than criminalizing hot car deaths.

The recent establishment of Chinese Community Corrections (CCC) has been heralded as a lenient turn in China's criminal policy, and a welfarist approach to promoting the well-being of offenders through state-sponsored rehabilitation services. Despite growing research on the operational meaning and functions of the CCC, the effect of offenders' participation in rehabilitation on their satisfaction with justice has yet to be adequately explored. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with offenders in community corrections, and guided by the procedural justice framework, this study examines the lived experiences of offenders and the impact of their participation in rehabilitation on their perceptions of justice. The analysis reveals that offenders experience a process of what we call “manufacturing compliance,” navigating complex bureaucratic requirements derived from the state's priority of maintaining stability. This calls into question the presumed therapeutic effect of offenders' involvement in the CCC and further suggests an unintended negative impact of unmet expectations. The implications of these findings for the administration of the CCC as a genuine channel of penal welfare are discussed.

Jurisdictions nationwide have taken to implementing bail reform, with some pursuing the broad abolition of cash bail. Depending on the actor leading the reform, these efforts face differing obstacles to successful implementation. Philadelphia has been a leader in prosecutor-led bail reform, as the progressive District Attorney's Office (DAO) implemented its second round of reform, which attempts to simulate a no-cash bail system by limiting pretrial recommendations to either $999,999 bail or release. Drawing on observational case-level data (n = 96) and the framework of sociolegal gap studies, the current study aims to document the policy's application. First, by capturing departures by the DAO and agreement by judicial magistrates, the presence of a gap between the policy's vision and its implementation is detected. Second, to understand why a gap may be occurring, responses to the policy are qualitatively analyzed. Findings demonstrate that guidelines were adhered to by the DAO and agreed to by judicial magistrates in only 16.7% of cases. Qualitative results suggest that the reform faces considerable challenges in implementation, including institutional resistance/hesitation and courtroom workgroup adaptations. This research, despite its convenience sampling and limited generalizability, has significant policy implications, both within Philadelphia and for the broader progressive prosecutor movement.