Law &amp Society Review (LAW SOC REV)

Publications in this journal

• Article: “Humanitarian aid is never a crime”: humanitarianism and illegality in migrant advocacy.

  Maria Lorena Cook
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  ABSTRACT: I analyze the case of humanitarian pro-migrant activists in southern Arizona between 2000 and 2010 to explore how contending groups wield law and legality claims in a dynamic policy environment. Humanitarian activists both evade and engage the law. They appeal to a higher law to elude charges that they are acting illegally, while seeking assurances that their actions are within the law. Law enforcement agents rely on the authority and technical neutrality of the law in redefining humanitarian aid as illegal, while expanding their own claims to carry out humanitarian work. This case study of advocacy on behalf of “illegal” migrants highlights how both activists and those who enforce the law redefine legality in strategic ways.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2011; 45(3):561-91.
• Source

  Available from: rutgers.edu

  Article: The Invisible Black Victim: How American Federalism Perpetuates Racial Inequality in Criminal Justice.

  Lisa L Miller
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  ABSTRACT: The promise of civil rights is the promise of inclusion; yet the vast disparity in incarceration rates between blacks, Latinos, and whites stands as an ugly reminder of the nation's long history of race-based exclusionary practices. In this article, I argue that an important aspect of understanding race and the law in the twenty-first century is an appreciation of the American federal system that structures legal authority, political mobilization, and policy solutions and serves as an important and overlooked obstacle to more complete and sustained racial equality in crime and punishment in the United States. In contrast to the conventional wisdom about the role of the national government in protecting the rights of minorities and other disadvantaged groups, I suggest that crime and justice are arenas where the nationalization of issues has left the most important constituents behind. In fact, local crime politics provides a space where there is regular and ongoing articulation of the inclusionary goals of the civil rights agenda and sustained efforts to move forward in realizing that agenda through meaningful community involvement in promoting public safety, economic development, and social justice. This article explores these themes and offers a discussion of the linkages between federalism, racial inequality and crime, victimization and punishment.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(3-4):805-42.
• Source

  Available from: uchastings.edu

  Article: Do blind people see race? Social, legal, and theoretical considerations.

  Osagie K Obasogie
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  ABSTRACT: Although the meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries, one thread of thought unifies almost all of the many diverging perspectives: a largely unquestioned belief that race is self-evident and visually obvious, defined largely by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. This suggests that “seeing race” is an experience largely unmediated by broader social forces; we simply know it when we see it. It also suggests that those who cannot see are likely to have a diminished understanding of race. But is this empirically accurate?I examine these questions by interviewing people who have been totally blind since birth about race and compare their responses to sighted individuals. I not only find that blind people have as significant an understanding of race as anyone else and that they understand race visually, but that this visual understanding of race stems from interpersonal and institutional socializations that profoundly shape their racial perceptions. These findings highlight how race and racial thinking are encoded into individuals through iterative social practices that train people to think a certain way about the world around them. In short, these practices are so strong that even blind people, in a conceptual sense, “see” race. Rather than being self-evident, these interviews draw attention to how race becomes visually salient through constitutive social practices that give rise to visual understandings of racial difference for blind and sighted people alike. This article concludes with a discussion of these findings' significance for understanding the role of race in law and society.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(3-4):585-616.
• Article: Race categorization and the regulation of business and science.

  Catherine Lee, John D Skrentny
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  ABSTRACT: Despite the lack of consensus regarding the meaning or significance of race or ethnicity amongst scientists and the lay public, there are legal requirements and guidelines that dictate the collection of racial and ethnic data across a range of institutions. Legal regulations are typically created through a political process and then face varying kinds of resistance when the state tries to implement them. We explore the nature of this opposition by comparing responses from businesses, scientists, and science-oriented businesses (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) to U.S. state regulations that used politically derived racial categorizations, originally created to pursue civil rights goals. We argue that insights from cultural sociology regarding institutional and cultural boundaries can aid understanding of the nature of resistance to regulation. The Food and Drug Administration's guidelines for research by pharmaceutical companies imposed race categories on science-based businesses, leading to objections that emphasized the autonomy and validity of science. In contrast, similar race categories regulating first business by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and later scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encountered little challenge. We argue that pharmaceutical companies had the motive (profit) that NIH-supported scientists lacked and a legitimate discourse (boundary work of science) that businesses regulated by the EEOC did not have. The study suggests the utility of a comparative cultural sociology of the politics of legal regulation, particularly when understanding race-related regulation and the importance of examining legal regulations for exploring how the meaning of race or ethnicity are contested and constructed in law.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(3-4):617-50.
• Source

  Available from: stanford.edu

  Article: Legal mobilization in schools: the paradox of rights and race among youth.

  Calvin Morrill, Karolyn Tyson, Lauren B Edelman, Richard Arum
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  ABSTRACT: In this article, we analyze ethnoracial patterns in youth perceptions and responses to rights violations and advance a new model of legal mobilization that includes formal, quasi-, and extralegal action. Slightly more than half of the 5,461 students in our sample reported past rights violations involving discrimination, harassment, freedom of expression/assembly, and due process violations in disciplinary procedures. Students, regardless of race, are more likely to take extralegal than formal legal actions in response to perceived rights violations. Self-identified African American and Latino/a students are significantly more likely than white and Asian American students to perceive rights violations and are more likely to claim they would take formal legal action in response to hypothetical rights violations. However, when they perceive rights violations, African American and Asian American students are no more likely than whites to take formal legal action and Latino/a students are less likely than whites to take formal legal action. We draw on in-depth interviews with youth and adults—which we interlace with our quantitative findings—to explore the interpretive dynamics underlying these survey findings, and we offer several theoretical and methodological implications of our work.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(3-4):651-94.
• Article: Perceiving Discrimination on the Job: Legal Consciousness, Workplace Context, and the Construction of Race Discrimination.

  Elizabeth Hirsh, Christopher J Lyons
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  ABSTRACT: Despite the continued importance of discrimination for racial labor market inequality, little research explores the process by which workers name potentially negative experiences as race discrimination. Drawing on the legal consciousness literature and organizational approaches to employment discrimination, we assess the effect of social status, job characteristics, and workplace context on the likelihood that workers perceive race discrimination at work. Analyzing data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, we find that ascriptive status is associated with perceptions of discrimination, with African Americans, Hispanics, and women more likely to perceive racial discrimination, net of job and organizational controls. Results also suggest that workers with a greater sense of entitlement (as indicated by job authority, promotion experience, and union membership) and knowledge of legal entitlements (as indicated by education level and age) are more likely to perceive workplace racial discrimination. Other workplace conditions can signal fairness and decrease perceptions of racial bias, such as formalized screening practices and having nonwhite supervisors, whereas working among predominantly nonwhite coworkers increases the likelihood of perceiving discrimination. These findings suggest that personal attributions of discrimination vary across social groups and their environments, and demonstrate the importance of workplace context for understanding how individuals apply legal concepts, such as discrimination, to their experiences.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(2):269-98.
• Article: Race, urban governance, and crime control: creating model cities.

  Elizabeth Brown
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  ABSTRACT: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city of Seattle received federal Department of Housing and Urban Development “Model cities” funds to address issues of racial disenfranchisement in the city. Premised under the “Great Society” ethos, Model cities sought to remedy the strained relationship between local governments and disenfranchised urban communities. Though police-community relations were not initially slated as an area of concern in the city's grant application, residents of the designated “model neighborhood” pressed for the formation of a law and justice task force to address the issue. This article examines the process and outcome of the two law-and-justice projects proposed by residents of the designated “model neighborhood”: the Consumer Protection program and the Community Service Officer project. Drawing on the work of legal geographies scholars, I argue that the failure of each of these efforts to achieve residents' intentions stems from the geographical imagination of urban problems. Like law-and-order projects today, the geographical imagination of the model neighborhood produced a discourse of exceptionality that subjected residents to extraordinary state interventions. The Model cities project thus provides an example of a “history of the present” of mass incarceration in which the geographical imagination of crime helps facilitate the re-creation of a racialized power structure.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(3-4):769-804.
• Source

  Available from: aub.edu.lb

  Article: Tales of deviance and control: on space, rules, and law in squatter settlements.

  Jean-Louis Van Gelder
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  ABSTRACT: In Latin American cities, around a third of the urban population lives in tenure situations that can be designated as informal, yet variation in the ways and extent to which these arrangements do not comply with law is extensive. Furthermore, informal dwellers often employ a variety of strategies to legitimize and ultimately legalize their tenure, implying a dynamic rather than a static relationship between illegality and legality. Conceiving of land tenure in dichotomous terms, as simply being either legal or illegal, therefore, fails to reflect this diversity, nor does it capture the evolving nature of the relationship between informal settlements and the state system. Drawing from the development of squatter settlements in Buenos Aires, this article proposes an alternative perspective and shows how settlements alternate strategies of noncompliance with adaptation to the state legal system to gradually increase their legality.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(2):239-68.
• Article: The penology of racial innocence: the erasure of racism in the study and practice of punishment.

  Naomi Murakawa, Katherine Beckett
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  ABSTRACT: In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Countervailing sociolegal changes render this framework particularly problematic. On the one hand, the definition of racism has contracted in antidiscrimination law and in many social scientific studies of criminal justice, so that racism is defined narrowly as intentional and causally discrete harm. On the other hand, criminal justice institutions have expanded to affect historically unprecedented numbers of people of color, with penal policies broadening in ways that render the identification of racial intent and causation especially difficult. Analyses employing the penology of racial innocence examine the ever-expanding criminal justice system with limited definitions of racism, ultimately contributing to the erasure of racial power. Both racism and criminal justice operate in systemic and serpentine ways; our conceptual tools and methods, therefore, need to be equally systemic and capacious.
  Law &amp Society Review 01/2010; 44(3-4):695-730.
• Article: Legal Consciousness and Responses to Sexual Harassment.

  Amy Blackstone, Christopher Uggen, Heather McLaughlin
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  ABSTRACT: Studies of legal mobilization often focus on people who have perceived some wrong, but rarely consider the process that selects them into the pool of potential "mobilizers." Similarly, studies of victimization or targeting rarely go on to consider what people do about the wrong, or why some targets come forward and others remain silent. We here integrate sociolegal, feminist, and criminological theories in a conceptual model that treats experiencing sexual harassment and mobilizing in response to it as interrelated processes. We then link these two processes by modeling them as jointly determined outcomes and examine their connections using interviews with a subset of our survey respondents. Our results suggest that targets of harassment are selected, in part, because they are least likely to tell others about the experience. Strategies that workers employ to cope with and confront harassment are also discussed. We find that traditional formal/informal dichotomies of mobilization responses may not fully account for the range of ways individuals respond to harassment, and we propose a preliminary typology of responses.
  Law &amp Society Review 09/2009; 43(3):631-668.
• Source

  Available from: SSRN

  Article: The provision of public goods under Islamic law: origins, impact, and limitations of the waqf system.

  T Kuran
  Law &amp Society Review 02/2001; 35(4):841-97.
• Article: Pursuing rights and getting justice on China's ethnic frontier, 1949-1966.

  N J Diamant
  Law &amp Society Review 02/2001; 35(4):799-840.
• Article: Who is the guilty party? Rights, motherhood, and the problem of prenatal drug exposure.

  K D Zivi
  Law &amp Society Review 02/2000; 34(1):237-58.
• Article: Blood justice: courts, conflict, and compensation in Japan, France, and the United States.

  E A Feldman
  Law &amp Society Review 02/2000; 34(3):651-701.
• Article: Lesion of the will: medical resolve and criminal responsibility in Victorian Insanity Trials.

  J P Eigen
  Law &amp Society Review 01/1999; 33(2):425-60.
• Article: Deterrent Effects of the Police on Crime: A Replication and Theoretical Extension

  Robert J Sampson, Jacqueline Cohen
  Law &amp Society Review 01/1988; 22(1).
• Article: The right to refuse treatment: four case studies of legal mobilization.

  Neal Milner
  Law &amp Society Review 02/1987; 21(3):447-85.
• Article: The catalytic effect of a federal court decision on a state legislature.

  K Moss
  Law &amp Society Review 02/1985; 19(1):147-57.
• Article: The origin of insanity as a special verdict: the trial for treason of James Hadfield (1800).

  R Moran
  Law &amp Society Review 02/1985; 19(3):487-519.
• Article: Judicial decisions in civil commitment: facts, attitudes, and psychiatric recommendations.

  Virginia Aldigé Hiday
  Law &amp Society Review 02/1983; 17(3):517-30.