Law & Society Review最新文献

How does a potential juror's association with the criminal legal system matter during jury selection? Growing scholarship examines statutory exclusions of people with felony convictions, sometimes characterizing felon-juror exclusion as a collateral consequence of mass incarceration. Less research has considered whether court officials seek to exclude potential jurors based on lower-level forms of contact or perceived association. We draw on interviews with 103 lawyers and judges in a Northeastern state to examine how court officials think about juror bias in relation to criminal legal association beyond felon status. We find that court officials often seek to remove people perceived to be offenders with lower-level forms of system association as well as people perceived to be crime victims. These exclusionary efforts extend to also exclude perceived offenders' and victims' social networks. These practices are racialized and gendered, likely contributing to the systematic exclusion of marginalized racial/ethnic groups and women. This article expands the collateral consequences literature in two ways: first, by revealing how collateral consequences can be conceptualized not just in relation to people criminalized by the law but also in relation to those whom the law constructs as victims; and second, by underscoring how collateral consequences feed back into the system to reproduce its unequal administration.

Lower state courts are the focus of both international and national access to justice policies and programs but remain understudied in Uganda. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographically informed research on citizen engagement with a busy magistrates' court in post-war northern Uganda, we show the diverse reasons why citizens appeal to the rule-of-law in places where state authority is contested. In a context of limited statehood, against a backdrop of high-levels of corruption and inefficiency in the judicial system, people turn to lower state courts for normative, pragmatic, and tactical reasons that are not well captured by conventional measures of procedural justice. Our findings extend theory on citizen-authority relations in a global context, shedding light on contextual meanings of legitimacy, trust, and corruption in places where lower state courts are deeply problematic sites for achieving justice.

Different from “judicial repression,” stability justice targets ordinary individuals under the guise of formal judicial procedures, to maintain both social stability and governance legitimacy. Drawing on published judgments and the authors' interviews with judges and prosecutors in China, we find that, in conjunction with the gradual abandonment of traditional violent repression strategies, stability justice has been employed as an alternative tool for managing petitioning activities at the local level. Through the covertly biased application of legal rules and procedural norms, petitioners accused of threatening social stability receive longer terms of pre-trial detention, higher rates of detention before politically sensitive periods, longer custodial sentences, and fewer opportunities for probation. Our findings add new fuel to studies on comparative judicial politics and shed light on judicial behavior in contemporary China.

How and to what extent do defense actors use publicity in trials of protesters in contemporary Russia? Why do they fight over strategic uses of publicity if “everything is decided in advance”? Drawing on original ethnographic research, this article finds, first, that publicity accompanies legal resistance to politicized prosecutions and is inventively used by the defense. Second, mobilization of publicity creates opportunities for the defense to bargain with and keep the prosecution in check. Third, the relationship between publicity and legal resistance in repressive settings is ambiguous. Some human rights lawyers embrace publicity and others avoid it. I argue that this divergence should be interpreted in relation to lawyers' embeddedness in different professional ecologies. At the same time, lawyers' publicity strategies are altered by the interactional dimension of the trial. The latter manifests itself on two levels: at the micro-level of a courtroom and in the public sphere where different publics engage in debates that interfere with lawyers' defense strategies. This paper has broader implications for the analysis of defensive legal mobilization in dual legal systems beyond the Russian case.

Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in lower criminal courts and in one unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office in Santiago, Chile, I explore the way in which criminal offenses considered flagrant are treated by the Chilean criminal justice system. Citing the literature on legal technicalities, I describe how flagrant criminal offenses are constructed through practices that make it possible for the actors involved to avoid directly referring to the alleged facts. From their identification on the streets by police officers to their reassignment to a different unit of the Public Prosecutor's Office or their adjudication at a criminal court, flagrant criminal offenses are defined by a specific way of approaching the alleged facts, which is translated into specific organizational and documentary practices. The role of these practices contrasts with the apparently marginal role that the detention in flagrante delicto plays in the mechanics of criminal law. As a technicality, the flagrant character of a criminal offense conveys certain epistemological assumptions about how to determine what happened and what exactly constitutes the criminal offense. More specifically, it conveys assumptions about what cannot, for the moment, be known and that can, therefore, be ignored throughout the bureaucratic and judicial process.

This study examines whether there is popular support for a restrictive immigration policy aimed at denying safe haven to human rights abusers and those affiliated with terrorism. We designed a public opinion survey experiment that asks respondents to evaluate whether low level or high-level Taliban members who otherwise qualify for refugee status deserve immigration benefits. We found that a majority of respondents did not immediately deny a visa to low-level worker. Looking at respondents' explanations for their decision, we find two distinct clusters of reasons that we classify as either circumstantial–focused on the particularities of the case–or categorical–focused on general attributes of the applicant. We suggest that domestic and international criminal law logics about acts and intentions, as well as roles and responsibilities, are reflected in beliefs about deservingness in this distinct immigration context, and may support more generous attitudes toward those seeking refugee status. Many respondents using circumstantial reasoning saw a distinction between the jobs potential immigrants have done in their pasts and what they actually believe, underscoring the fraught dynamics of armed conflict in which people may be swept up in violence they do not support.

States have begun to pass legislation to provide automatic relief for eligible criminal records, potentially reducing the lifelong collateral consequences of criminal justice involvement. Yet numerous historical examples suggest that racially neutral policies can have profoundly disparate effects across racial groups. In the case of criminal record relief, racial equity in eligibility for a clean slate has not yet been examined. We find that in California, one in five people with convictions met criteria for full conviction relief under the state's automatic relief laws. Yet the share of Black Americans eligible for relief was lower than White Americans, reproducing racial disparities in criminal records. We identify two policy amendments that would reduce the share of Black men in California with convictions on their criminal records from 22% to 9%, thereby narrowing the difference compared to White men from 15 to seven percentage points. Put another way, an additional one in seven Black men currently has a conviction record, compared to their White counterparts. This would decline to an additional one in 14 if both hypothetical policy amendments were incorporated. We close with discussion of criminal history data quality limitations, which pose a second key challenge to equitable implementation of automatic criminal record relief reforms nationwide.

This article discusses how administrative practices shape immigration detention policies, addressing both administrative discretion in detention orders and their judicial supervision. Due to vaguely formulated legal criteria and ineffective ex-post judicial supervision, the authorities have considerable discretionary powers in ordering detentions for noncompliant and criminalized noncitizens. Instead of being a measure of last resort, immigration detention is used in a routine manner, with little individual assessment, for the enforcement of removals and the prevention of irregular migration, as well as extensively for crime prevention. The findings demonstrate the role of the police as the main actor in the detention system in Finland, with significant implications for the formation of detention policies.

Diversifying police forces has been suggested to improve “police-minority relations” amidst national uprisings against police violence. Yet, little research investigates how police and black civilians—two groups invoked in discourse on “police-minority relations”—understand the function of diversity interventions. We draw on 100 in-depth interviews with 60 black women civilians and 40 police from various racial and ethnic backgrounds to explore how they understand the function of racial diversity in policing. Findings highlight discrepancies in how these two groups frame the utility of racial diversity in policing, revealing conflicting epistemologies of race and racism. Police draw on an epistemology of racial ignorance (Mills 1997, 2007, 2015) to selectively accommodate race-conscious critique while denying the history and power dynamics between the institution and minority communities. Conversely, black women civilians, grounded in a standpoint epistemology (Collins, 1986, 2009), emphasize the historical roots of policing, along with collective memories, and lived experiences to understand the relationship between the institution and minority communities. Through a comparative analysis of these frames, we theorize dominant/state-sponsored discourse on diversity and police-minority relations as form of racecraft (Fields & Fields 2012, 2014) that serves to legitimize negligible institutional change to policing in an era of renewed scrutiny of police racism.