Law & Society Review最新文献

US immigration law increasingly excludes many immigrants materially and symbolically from vital safety-net resources. Existing scholarship has emphasized the public charge rule as a key mechanism for enacting these exclusionary trends, but less is known about how recent public charge uncertainty has shaped how noncitizens and healthcare workers negotiate safety-net resources. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 80 safety-net workers and patients in three US states from 2015 to 2020, I argue that intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding public charge has extended a sense of surveillance into clinical spaces in previously unexamined ways. Drawing on theories of medical legal violence, system avoidance, and legal estrangement, I demonstrate how these dynamics undermined immigrants' health chances and compromised clinic workers' efforts to facilitate care. I also reveal how participants responded to this insinuation of legal violence in healthcare spaces by promoting situational trust in specific procedures and institutions.

The state has long relied on ordinary civilians to do surveillance work, but recent advances in networked technologies are expanding mechanisms for surveillance and social control. In this article, we analyze the phenomenon in which private individuals conduct surveillance on behalf of the state, often using private sector technologies to do so. We develop the concept of surveillance deputies to describe when ordinary people, rather than state actors, use their labor and economic resources to engage in such activity. Although surveillance deputies themselves are not new, their participation in everyday surveillance deputy work has rapidly increased under unique economic and technological conditions of our digital age. Drawing upon contemporary empirical examples, we hypothesize four conditions that contribute to surveillance deputization and strengthen its effects: (1) when interests between the state and civilians converge; (2) when law institutionalizes surveillance deputization or fails to clarify its boundaries; (3) when technological offerings expand personal surveillance capabilities; and (4) when unequal groups use surveillance to gain power or leverage resistance. In developing these hypotheses, we bridge research in law and society, sociology, surveillance studies, and science and technology studies and suggest avenues for future empirical investigation.

Despite some retrenchment, the litigation state remains alive and well. All this litigation has engendered intense debates over whether increased lawsuits represent a rising tide of justice or a flood of frivolous claims. Tort law has been at the center of these debates for decades, standing at the fault line between “tort tale,” “total justice,” and “mixed” narratives about the perils and benefits of litigation. In this article, we use a survey experiment to probe attitudes toward claims for workplace injuries in light of these narratives. We find that our participants held multifaceted views. On one hand, they favored making claims over doing nothing or asking family members for help and saw lawsuits as equally appropriate as filing a government claim or hiring a lawyer to send a demand letter. On the other hand, tort tale themes cast a subtle shadow over our participants' views. When told claimants did not rush to the courts in defiance of tort tale expectations, our participants saw the lawsuit as more justified. Indeed, the more remedies exhausted prior to litigation, the more justifiable the lawsuit seemed, even though repeated denials of claims might undermine faith in their merits. The bottom line, we contend, is that attitudes toward litigation reflect not only the choice of remedy but also how remedies are used, even when the underlying claim is meritorious—a point that could be useful to practitioners and advocates as they weigh claiming options as well as litigation and public communication strategies.

Why are hate crime cases so rarely prosecuted? Most states and the federal government have hate crime laws on their books, yet available data indicate few prosecutions in most jurisdictions. Drawing on case files and interviews with police and prosecutors in one jurisdiction, three institutional impediments to hate crime prosecution are identified: evidentiary inflation, by which law enforcement uses a higher burden of proof than what is required by statute; loose coupling between police departments and prosecutors' offices; and cultural distance between law enforcement and victims. Findings also reveal that advocacy groups and media can successfully increase the visibility of cases and draw the attention of prosecutors. The findings align with aspects of legal endogeneity theory and enhance our understanding of the role of organizations in constructing the meaning of law. The results also help explain why some laws are rarely enforced, even when they have support from key personnel in an organization.

The Law and Society meetings in 2019 are taking place in Washington DC at a time when many of our international friends are wondering whether they should travel to a place where the national president has made border crossings arbitrary and painful, denied visas to those coming from disfavored countries and in general trampled on the ideals that the United States has long preached. To take a stand against the damage being visibly done to both constitutionalism and the rule of law by the incumbent American administration, we picked “dignity” as the theme for these meetings (Figure 1).

But “dignity” was also encoded criticism, designed to ensure that the theme of our conference would not raise red flags on visa applications. We hoped that the Trump Administration would not find dignity as dangerous as we found it inspiring. And so here we are. Not all of our colleagues were able to join us; in particular, we are dismayed that nearly all of our Nigerian colleagues' visa applications were rejected. All the more reason for us to insist on dignity as our fundamental organizing principle, even if it is not at the moment honored by the country in which we meet.

Dignity is the heart and soul of many modern constitutions. The German Basic Law holds in Article 1 that “Human dignity is inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority” (Germany, Basic Law. 1949). The Colombian Constitution similarly leads with dignity in Article 1: “Colombia is a social state under the rule of law… based on respect for human dignity” (Colombia, Constitution, 1991). And the inspirational South African Constitution proclaims in Article 10 that “everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected (South Africa, Constitution, 1994).” But dignity has never been the organizing principle of the US Constitution, which has taken ideas of liberty—often honored in the breach—as its touchstone instead (Whitman, 2004).

Indeed, it is hard to say that a spirit of dignity characterizes our present moment. Just down the street from the hotel where we are meeting, President Trump occupies the White House, spewing forth daily insults and threats against the people and principles he refuses to honor. But constitutional endangerment is not just happening in the US. The threat to dignity from aspirational autocrats extends far and wide, as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and others fan the flames of hatred against their political enemies and legally remove (or ignore) the constitutional constraints on their power. Brexit in the UK was a campaign run and won by English nationalists who rejected the European project and its value constraints—and sent the rickety British constitution into crisis. Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland are undermining the