Current LSR Issue

Individuals routinely engage in instrumental transactional legal behavior, from generating tax returns to signing leases to negotiating employment terms. While some individuals undertake these activities equipped with the skills, knowledge, and capacity to behave strategically, others do not. In this article, we introduce the concept of legal actuation to describe this legal behavior and theorize its role as a source of inequality under the law. Using estate planning as an empirical example, we consider how variation in legal actuation may serve to reproduce economic inequalities and investigate the role of legal socialization, knowledge, and capability as mechanisms of advantage. In doing so, we draw attention to an understudied dimension of everyday legal behavior that has important implications for equal justice and the relationship between law and inequality.

Undocumented status impedes immigrants’ workplace claims to legal rights and better treatment. But what happens when they obtain lawful permanent residency – does the reluctance to make claims in the workplace change? If so, how? Drawing on timeline interviews, I examine changes in the relational legal consciousness and reported workplace claims-making of 98 formerly undocumented Latino immigrants. Most respondents reported increased willingness to engage in, and follow through with, workplace claims. However, gendered differences emerged. Men’s claims largely revolved around wage negotiations, moving to a better paying position, and enforcement of legal rights with an attached monetary value. They were also more likely to frame claims as legal rights. In contrast, women’s claims largely revolved around better work treatment, access to job benefits, and workplace accommodations. They were also more likely to frame claims as moral rights. I explain these outcomes as a function of three relational mechanisms: lawful status being understood relative to experiences being undocumented; gendering in the legalization process; and social ties promoting gendered expectations of lawful permanent residency. My findings highlight the importance of gendered differences in relational legal consciousness and how lived reference points (e.g., prior undocumented experience) inform how legal consciousness changes over time.

Law and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasilegal, and/or extralegal processes. Based on a national random survey of teachers and administrators, and in-depth interviews with educators in California, New York, and North Carolina, we find an integral relationship between gender inequality and experiencing rights violations, choices about rights mobilization, and obstacles to formal mobilization. Compared to complainants, those accused of rights violations – especially male administrators – are more likely to use quasilegal and legal mobilization to defend themselves or to engage in anticipatory mobilization. Actors in less powerful status positions (teachers) most often pursue extralegal mobilization to complain about rights violations during which they engage in rights muting as a means of self-protection; when in more powerful status positions, actors use rights muting as a means of self-protection and to suppress the rights claims of others. This paper concludes with implications for future research on rights mobilization in school workplaces amidst changing political and demographic conditions.

Sociolegal scholarship has long noted the many ways in which the law is interpreted and selectively applied by human decision-makers. Yet, the processes underlying one of the most significant discretionary waypoints in the criminal legal process – prosecutorial charging decisions – remain opaque. Using data from interviews and focus groups with prosecutors in three midsized jurisdictions, we propose a model of charging that integrates legal considerations, social identity, and organizational constraints. We find that felony prosecutors weave together legal and extralegal factors, often relying heavily on criminal history, to evaluate defendants’ moral character. Based on their evaluation of a defendant’s character, prosecutors charge strategically to secure a final disposition and sentence they view as appropriate for the defendant. Prosecutors’ identities and experiences act as lenses through which they interpret case facts in their evaluation of defendants’ character. However, the level of discretion provided by their chief prosecutor and the culture of the court community in which they work condition the process by which prosecutors achieve their desired outcomes for cases.

This article investigates the career trajectories of Hong Kong solicitors during two historical turning points, specifically 1994–1997 and 2018–2021, when hundreds of lawyers left private practice to pursue alternative career options such as business and finance, government and politics, or relocation to other countries. Data are sourced from the career mobility records of law firm partners reported in 336 monthly issues of the Hong Kong Lawyer journal between 1994 and 2021, as well as other relevant archival sources. The research examines the underlying forces that led these law firm partners to abandon their high-status positions and pursue alternative career paths during these pivotal moments in Hong Kong’s history. The findings suggest that the career trajectories of these elite professionals are not solely based on individual choices but are also shaped by their social origins and the physical and social spaces that influence their careers over time. This study contributes original insights into the complex interplay between individual, spatial and temporal factors that drive career mobility among legal professionals.

Critics point to increasing private lawsuits filed by students accused of campus sexual assault as evidence that Obama-era Title IX guidance overcorrected and favored victims at the expense of the due process rights of the accused. This overcorrection narrative powerfully reshaped the debate surrounding campus sexual assault and ultimately contributed to the rescinding of the guidance. Existing analytical tools from legal mobilization scholarship – emphasizing the deployment of litigation by social movement actors – are not equipped to identify the origins and dissemination of this political narrative. Drawing from legal complaints, media coverage and interviews with lawyers, we show how private practice attorneys with no visible movement ties helped craft the overcorrection narrative from individual lawsuits by (1) embedding political claims in legal filings, (2) amplifying the narrative in media and (3) collaborating with advocates in quantifying the litigation trend. We extend prior scholarship and illustrate how lawsuits can be both a vehicle of political storytelling and the story itself. We further argue that the ideology of liberal legalism can mask the politics of private lawsuits, making litigation a useful tool for social movement efforts to mobilize support for legal reform.