Law & Society Review最新文献

This article draws from a qualitative study of people's responses to China's population control policies to analyze the relational formation of legal consciousness within and across different types of relationships. It demonstrates that our expectations of others and theirs of us regarding how to respond to law change significantly when we situate ourselves in different types of relationships. The fluid boundaries of relationships in Chinese society also make it essential to think and plan relationally and holistically across different types of relationships to come up with strategies to resist or comply with the law. During this process of relational formation of legal consciousness, law interacts with and reshapes social norms to determine the (un)availability of alternative mechanisms based on the individual's social and financial status.

There is growing interest in social movement actors as knowledge producers, but many movements have limited ability to access or produce credible, authoritative information. Building on sociolegal scholarship and social movement studies, we show how movements can overcome knowledge gaps they have via-à-vis state authorities and contribute to public knowledge through institutional tactics. We argue that features of the process of legal mobilization activate mechanisms that bolster movements' credibility, reveal or generate information, and thereby facilitate social movement knowledge production. We theorize these dynamics by analyzing environmental activism against U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea, which allows us to leverage most similar legal contexts and types of claims to identify and illustrate the mechanisms.

Existing scholarship finds that having an attorney in immigration legal proceedings increases the chances of a favorable outcome. This work, however, often acknowledges that the representation effect is underexplained: selection may explain outcomes, and variation among attorneys is difficult to assess. Through 103 interviews with attorneys who practice immigration law in three organizational environments (nonprofit legal services, private firms, and corporate law firm pro bono programs) in two East Coast areas, this paper argues that attorneys' sorting of clients between different types of legal organizations helps explain the representation effect. Attorneys define what type of case is a “good fit” for their representation, selecting cases they think they can help increase the probability of a favorable outcome. However, what they define as a “good fit” varies by attorneys' practice environments, and centers not only on the facts or characteristics of a client and their case, but also attorneys' organizational constraints. By documenting the central role of practice environment variation and its organizational constraints on attorneys' case selection, this paper helps explain the representation effect and its implications for increasing vulnerable immigrants' access to legal representation in the United States.

In Protection from Refuge: From Refugee Rights to Migration Management, Ogg adeptly traces the evolution of refugee law and protection through persistent legal mobilization. She spans two decades of refugee litigation and traverses across multiple, pluralistic legal regimes, taking account of judgments of courts from the North American, European, and African continents. This ambitious project sets out to understand what the legal concept of refuge is, and how (legal) decision-makers conceptualize and decide to litigate such a notion. In this way, Ogg shows how decision-makers engage with the concept of refuge, conceptualize disparate protection needs or vulnerabilities, and dispense or withhold “the remedy: refuge” (p. 194), finding that, over time, refuge has become increasingly held out of reach, but through sustained legal mobilization, also has the potential to become more broadly attainable.

Ogg structures the book's findings across eight chapters, each of which has its own focus and well-structured subsections, drawing on a wide database of case law to dissect the understandings, rationale and justifications upheld by decision-makers. In Chapter 1, Ogg sets the stage, outlining the academic, legal and societal context, methods used, theoretical toolkit, and scope. Notably, she includes the perspectives of those seeking refuge, drawing on several memoirs published. In doing so, she both gives a voice to refugees, while avoiding the frequent re-traumatization and/or exploitation that refugees can experience in the research process. The rich experiential contributions are presented alongside academic and legal conceptions of refuge. In Chapter 2, Ogg outlines the debates around refuge as concept and place, engaging with the history of “refuge” in a societal and legal sense, as well as the function of refuge, both in its idealized conception and real-world application. Refuge, concludes Ogg, can be understood as having “restorative, regenerative and palliative functions that address refugees' past, present and future” (p. 54) but are not always present in practice. In this way, the book appeals to a broad audience, from students and newcomers to dialogues around refugee law, to more experienced legal scholars and practitioners.

Drawing on a feminist framework, Ogg addresses the crucial role of an intersectional and gender-sensitive approach to litigating refugee law, which resonates with the life and work of legendary scholar-practitioners such as the late Rhonda Copelon (Zarkov et al., 2011). Illustrative of this approach, in Chapter 3 Ogg draws attention to the gendered and intersectional aspects of decision-makers' application of categorical, experiential, or blended categorical and experiential reasoning, while simultaneously examining the particular vulnerabilities of women. Accordingly, she shows how the parent–child relationship plays out in the Kenyan courtroom with regards to notions of refugeehood an