Since the early 2000s, many of the left groups that spurred the alt-globalization movement have embraced directly democratic organizing and the creation of ethical relationships and subjectivities far more than they have pursued projects to reform legal and political institutions. These practices are often described as prefigurative because people are working to build alternative possible futures in the here-and-now outside of dominant statist and capitalist rationalities. In this essay, we ask if prefiguration can also involve imagining legal forms anew. Drawing on Amelia Thorpe, Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property (2020), we discuss contemporary efforts to use the language, form, and legitimacy of law to imagine it otherwise, efforts that occur through various kinds of direct actions rather than primarily through appeals to courts, legislators, or other state officials. In so doing, we point to an emergent field of critical and sociolegal scholarship that we call prefigurative legality.

In this article, we examine how courts make decisions in religious exemption cases that implicate LGBT rights in a wide range of contexts including education, employment, and medical care. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis of 50 federal cases decided between 1990 and 2020, we demonstrate a shift in how anti-LGBT sentiment is expressed by parties bringing religion-based claims—from a broad condemnation of LGBT identity to a narrow condemnation of same-sex marriage—and find that courts are more likely to rule in favor of the latter. We show how courts construct competing understandings of harm and religious freedom depending on the context of the case and whether the setting is deemed public or private. Our analyses shed light on the shifting and competing meanings about religion, sexuality, and public life in the United States.

The Philippine Supreme Court is considered one of Asia’s most activist courts. During the regime of President Rodrigo Duterte (2016–22), however, concerns grew about its independence. This article investigates determinants of the Court’s behavior since the country’s return to democracy in 1987, with particular attention to “loyalty effects”—the likelihood that justices will vote for the government more often when the president who appointed them is in office. Drawing on a data set of seventy major political cases and sociobiographic profiles of the eighty-six justices who voted in them, we test for variables, including freshman effects and strategic defection toward the end of a presidential term. We find that early years on the bench are closely associated with a vote for the appointer’s administration, and the end of a presidential term is weakly associated with a vote against. Under the Duterte administration, voting preferences have been more aligned with the appointer, and factional alliances of justices appointed by different presidential administrations mirror political alignments. These results have practical implications for the fragile constitutional democracy in the Philippines and contribute to understanding of loyalty dynamics in less institutionalized judicial settings.

As a form of land ownership, condominium enables subdivision and produces local government. Designed to facilitate the production of apartments as distinct parcels of land, ownership within condominium now dominates many urban housing markets. In some jurisdictions, including British Columbia, condominium (labelled strata property) may also be deployed to subdivide land for single-house lots within a structure of private local government. The principal effect of extending condominium to unbuilt land is not to enable subdivision, which is something that was already possible and common, but, rather, to endow groups of single-house lot owners with fiscal capacity and governing authority to assume important aspects of local government. Through an analysis of bare land strata property in British Columbia, we reveal how the condominium form, which brought an architecture of ownership and government from the homeowners association of the American suburbs to the North American city, has spread back from the city into the suburban, exurban, and rural, producing a sprawl of ownership within private local government.

This article draws on a case study of how Massachusetts treatment courts responded to the COVID-19 pandemic to address two intersecting theoretical and policy questions: (1) How do actors who work within criminal legal organizations use the law to solve complex social and political problems? (2) How do organizations working within multiple, fragmented organizational fields respond to an exogenous shock? The findings draw on interviews with eighty-four treatment court judges and practitioners and build from neo-institutional approaches to the study of courts to show that legal actors and organizations pursue pragmatic approaches, strategically adapting to their external environments through buffering, which is protective, and innovation, which is transformative. Each strategy reflects the courts’ autonomy or dependence on other organizations in the criminal legal and social service fields. The findings also provide insight into the social process of legitimation as personnel aligned beliefs with adaptation strategies, shifting understandings of surveillance practices and the utility of sanctions to meet overall court goals.

Despite prior negative experiences with the law and licensure barriers, individuals with conviction histories are increasingly seeking entry into the legal profession. To understand their unique educational journeys from a joint stigma and legal consciousness perspective, we conducted in-depth interviews with prospective, current, and former law students with criminal convictions. Findings reveal that early disadvantage and subsequent system involvement provided them with valuable insights into their place in the carceral system. This realization prompted empathy for similarly situated others, a desire to pursue social justice reform, and the deliberate choice to access the power of law to that end. Thus, rather than averting people from the profession, a conviction history can serve as a driving force for pursuing a career in law.

This study empirically examines whether and how the introduction of disability rights impacted the portrayal of disability in personal injury court decisions in Israel and offers a method for doing such research in other legal realms and contexts. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of Israeli district court judicial rulings over twenty years to measure whether a discursive shift occurred from a medical-individual view of disability to a social constructionist and a rights-based understanding of disability. Our coding system included descriptive and conceptual indicators, forming two indexes: a conventional index and a progressive index. Our findings reveal a steady dominance of the conventional discourse and a gradual yet limited rise in progressive discourse. Moreover, individual court decisions often manifest both types of discourse but are still dominated by a conventional view of disability and rarely apply direct disability rights terminology. These findings provide pioneering empirical evidence that substantiates the disability critique of tort law, demonstrating that judicial decision making is slow to adopt a disability rights perspective. More broadly, our findings show that the infusion of a disability rights orientation does not necessarily replace the older medical-individual view of disability but adds to it, resulting in a mixed discourse that includes both conventional and progressive elements.

Procedural justice research has shown how people’s experiences with courtroom actors, such as judges, defense attorneys, and prosecutors, shape their views of the justice system and its legitimacy. However, less is known about how people’s experiences outside the courtroom that relate to their cases shape their views of this system. Based on forty-one interviews with twenty-one youths and twenty parents in Dane County, Wisconsin about their legal financial obligations (also known as monetary sanctions), this study broadens the focus of procedural justice to include another key aspect to people’s experiences with the law beyond the courtroom: their experiences navigating bureaucratic aspects to their youths’ cases and their interactions with non-court staff (e.g., clerks, Human Services, and community agencies), otherwise known as “auxiliary personnel” (Feeley 1979) or “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 2010/1980). We focus on legal financial obligations as a case study to show this multi-agency view of procedural justice as it reveals the families’ often disjointed experiences with justice staff both inside and outside of the courtroom.

Parole officers are central actors in the penal system as their decisions can affect the timing of a person’s release from prison and also restrict or enable their freedoms in the community upon release. Existing research on parole examines how parole officers think about and govern ex-prisoners via techniques of surveillance, regulation, and support. Few studies, however, provide qualitative insight into how parole officers experience their occupational authorities and associated power over (ex)prisoners’ future, or the emotions generated by frontline supervision work. Using data from interviews with 150 parole officers in Canada, we explore the emotions associated with parole officers’ occupational responsibilities and authorities vis-à-vis the parolee, the public, and the parole officer’s employer. Participants experienced their duty to make decisions that impact their clients’ legal and social futures, and potentially public safety, as a source of emotional stress and concern, as they worried about how their decisions could negatively affect their client, the community, and their own professional status. In illuminating parole officers’ feelings and experiences, we show how parole—the “transition” between incarceration and freedom—produces an emotionally charged experience not just for (ex)prisoners, but also for those engaged in frontline supervision work.

During the twentieth century, privacy evolved from an ambiguous legal idea into a defined state-centric right, while privacy claims against non-state entities became more marginalized. Whereas prior studies treat this as the direct outcome of cultural shifts or landmark interventions by legal elites, I document legal institutionalization as a three-stage process of domain formation and meaning making. Using a combination of citation network analysis and qualitative research, I show that the concept of privacy first entered the legal field when journalists raised concerns about the unauthorized use and commodification of personal data; that US jurisprudence produced two competing schools of legal thought as judges and legal scholars struggled to give substance to an abstract concept and structure to an evolving domain of judicial practice; and that privacy was consecrated as a constitutional right when state courts and the US Supreme Court selectively mobilized the language of privacy to confront the expanding reach of the American state. These findings demonstrate the processual nature of legal institutionalization, draw attention to intra-legal contestation and the implicit pluralism of American jurisprudence, and highlight an emerging distinction between the legal regimes governing bureaucratic rule and market exchanges in the early twentieth century.

For most of legal anthropology’s existence as a distinct subfield, ethnographers have studied the function of law rather than its form. With the proliferation of neoliberal technologies of governance, however, anthropologists are increasingly turning to law’s form. This article surveys the anthropology of legal form and its contribution to the study of transnational law and governance. In taking legal form as the object of ethnographic inquiry, legal anthropologists examine the material, sensory, and symbolic dimensions through which law is recognized. Such an approach analyzes how power operates not through law’s substantive meanings but, rather, through its aesthetic dimensions. Current anthropological scholarship has illuminated the diverse ways in which the technical and formal aesthetics of law operate to foreclose political contestation. I argue, however, that the aesthetics of legal form may also be mobilized to render power relations visible and open to challenge amidst proliferating forms of neoliberal governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within one arena of global governance—the UN Committee on World Food Security—I illustrate how activists draw on the aesthetics of rights to illuminate inequalities and politicize governance processes. In doing so, I suggest that greater engagement with Jacques Rancière’s political theory of aesthetics can deepen anthropological insights into the power of legal form in the context of transnational law and governance.

Among law and society fields, legal anthropology has experienced markedly high highs and low lows. Its parent disciplines, law and anthropology, have fluctuated from intense and productive engagement with one another to mutual disregard for each other’s ways of knowing. Most commentary on the trajectory of this interdisciplinary relationship has bemoaned anthropology’s (ir)relevance to legal scholarship, but this introduction and the symposium essays that follow invert the usual narrative by asking how—and why—formal law might matter to anthropology. The symposium is part of a dual special issue that grows out of a multi-year conversation between legal anthropologists representing varied institutional and intellectual backgrounds. Drawing on that conversation and on the essays it has produced, this introduction argues that anthropologists would do well to abandon their prepositional attitude to formal law and, instead, to build on the strengths of anthropological analysis by “cultivating attentiveness” to things legal.

For a legal anthropologist interested in how different agents and forms of governance shape projects of sexual humanitarianism, the strategies that US-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use in their attempts to reframe an Indian anti-prostitution law as an anti-trafficking instrument generate broader conceptual questions. How do Indian NGOs articulate donor-driven concerns with the postcolonial socio-legal framework within which they work? What impact do they seek to have on the law, legal system, and legal actors? What, in turn, happens to formal law, which is already shaped by a complex history of legal concerns, moral panics, and NGO intervention (itself authorized by law) in this context? How do law and NGOs shape each other across anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking projects in the overlapping contexts of postcoloniality, globalization, neoliberalism, and sexual humanitarianism in India? How might one explore these intersections and relationships methodologically? I show how ethnography at the intersection of anti-prostitution law and anti-trafficking NGOs illuminates: (1) law’s imbrication in a broader, long-standing, and ever-expanding field of governmental action on prostitution; (2) how NGOs and legal actors act, in tension and in collaboration, upon the perceived “problem” of prostitution; and (3) how anti-trafficking NGOs and anti-prostitution law co-constitute each other as they shape contested meanings around prostitution.

Every other day, books and articles are published that examine the withering of democracy across multiple national contexts, perhaps best summarized by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zibblat’s How Democracies Die. The law has not been ignored in this burgeoning literature. Telling examples are the studies on autocratic legalism by Javier Corrales and Kim Lane Scheppele; Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq’s book How to Save a Constitutional Democracy; a recent review essay by Michael McCann and Filiz Kahraman on the “interdependence of liberal and illiberal legal orders … in the United States”; and two forthcoming works from the Project on Autocratic Legalism: a special issue in the Verfassung und Recht in Übersee/World Comparative Law journal and a book on Brazil edited by Oscar Vilhena Vieira and colleagues. In this review essay, I focus on three critical issues arising from these and other sources. First, they show that a backlash against liberal democracies is happening in both the global South and the global North. Second, they show that law is no longer thought of as an intrinsic bulwark against assaults on liberal democracy—on the contrary, rising autocrats, many of whom are trained lawyers, often use the law as a tool to consolidate power, sideline minorities and political adversaries, and rule unconstrained. Finally, while earlier analyses of this phenomenon have tended to emphasize legislative change that reconfigured governance at its highest levels (the Presidency or Prime Minister’s Office, Congress, and High Courts), new studies are revealing––and are helping constitute––an empirically broader field of inquiry.