Law & Society Review最新文献

This article examines the performative aspect of face-to-face interactions among various legal actors and defendants in routine criminal trials in China. Using 105 trial videos as empirical data, the author develops a face-work framework to understand how an individual judge's “face”—signifying judges' legal and political roles, and their professional status—is established, protected, and enhanced during courtroom interactions. The study shows that the legal face of judges can be established by some characterizations of the nature of criminal trials such as the demarcation of legal space, the speed of the trial, and the apprising of rights to the defendants. Nevertheless, the legal face can also be disrupted by trial interactions due to judges' lack of judicial authority. Hence, Chinese judges maintain their authority through the establishment of their political face. They also use both their political face and legal face to establish their situational professional status. These interactions often lead to punitive and coercive measures against defendants in trials. While the article focuses on routine criminal trials in China, the face-work framework has the potential to explain courtroom interactions in other types of social contexts and legal proceedings.

Much of school bullying involves students policing the gender roles and sexuality of other students. The proliferation of antibullying laws presents an opportunity to formally punish and mark gendered harassment as unacceptable. However, when this form of peer policing involves girls, administrators often consider it to fall outside the purview of the law. We use bracketing theory to understand how middle school administrators in New Jersey assess whether student behavior violates a statewide harassment, intimidation, and bullying law. We find that, according to administrators, violations require relational asymmetry between an aggressor and victim: an imbalance of power and disproportionate participation. Administrators rarely see gendered harassment as bullying because of the relational stereotypes they attach to girl students, which often preclude interpretations of relational asymmetry. We discuss how gender beliefs among administrators and “bracketing failures” explain the ways antibullying laws allow hegemonic beliefs about gender and sexuality to remain untroubled.

Based on ethnographic research, this article shows how legal orders are being established in spaces where the state law is absent. The case of refugee camps—often discussed as sites of legal limbo and state of exception—seems to be a space of legal pluralism. However, when observing local legal practices, this pluralism is dissolved into a powerful local camp law. This characteristic type of legal order is produced by social camp-specific mechanisms, camp materiality as well as the remaking of pre-camp structures. Therefore, refugee camps should be viewed as extraterritorial spaces with a high degree of legal autonomy that enables and forces residents to create a local camp law. The findings of this study add to the literature of law and order in camps and to the debates on plural configurations in extraterritorial spaces.

Studies on international legal mobilization often analyze the mobilization efforts of activists at a single international court. Yet we know little about how activists choose among multiple international institutions to advance social justice claims. Drawing on comparative case studies of Turkish and British trade union activists' legal mobilization efforts and case law analysis, I show that activists, guided by their lawyers, probe multiple avenues to identify the legal institution with the highest judicial authority and is most responsive to activists' claims. Once they identify their target institution, the iterative process between a responsive court and activists' strategic litigation can build a court's jurisprudence in a new issue area, even if the court provides limited de jure rights protections. Activists primarily use international litigation strategy to leverage structural reforms at the domestic level and to set new international norms through precedents.

For 30 years, U.S. immigration policy has increasingly focused on enforcement. This article goes beyond cataloging the harms of such policies to document the processes by which they become more or less salient in the lives of children of immigrants over time. In-depth interviews with 86 young adults raised in New York show that enforcement policies shape children's lives either through lived experiences of enforcement episodes or through diffuse fears arising from indirect threats. Qualitative analysis of narratives of (a) deportations post-incarceration, (b) removals, (c) arrests and detentions (d) direct threats, and (e) diffuse fears identifies characteristics related to each that may affect children even after they age into adulthood.