This case study of immigration law in Spain examines the contradiction between the rhetoric of immigration politics stressing immigrant integration and the reality of immigrant exclusion and marginalization. Drawing from a variety of secondary sources, government documents, and interviews, I show how Spanish policies regularly “irregularize” Third World immigrants. Further, I argue that this legal construction of illegality consigns these immigrants to the margins of the economy where they provide what policymakers appreciatively call “flexibility” to the post-Fordist Spanish economy. Finally, I discuss the ways in which racial “otherness,” exclusion, and economic function are mutually constituted, and the role of law in that process.

If we want to explore the social dimensions of property, we need to think of it not only historically but also geographically, entailing both practices in and representations of social space. The concept of landscape is a useful bridging device here, given its double meaning as both a material space and as a particular way of seeing space. Landscapes, in both senses, can serve to reify and naturalize dominant property relations but can also serve as spaces of contestation. Such landscapes, however, cannot be disentangled from the places in which they are positioned. I use this framework to make sense of resistance to gentrification in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, a poor neighborhood with a rich history of activism. A collective property claim by the poor has been staked out through the material use, production, and representation of an urban landscape. Such local meanings and practices, however, are threatened by “outsiders,” who are seen to map and use this landscape in very different ways.

Scholars from across disciplinary lines are interested in understanding legal development. One impediment to the quest for a systematic explanation has been measures of legal change. Indicators like whether a court overturns an earlier ruling capture one facet of legal change but fail to capture the full range of courts' actions to develop legal doctrine. I introduce an alternative measure of legal change here—one based on Levi's (1949) focus on whether factual circumstances are or are not encompassed by the law. I use the U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions on the federal common law of public nuisance to illustrate this measure. Utilizing a multinomial logit model to explore the appellate judiciary's decisions to develop this legal doctrine, I find that the judges' decisions to develop the federal common law are explained by the judges' policy preferences; the litigation environment consisting of party resources, attorney experience, and amicus support; as well as the broader political context of public opinion and Supreme Court rulings.

Everyday legal discourse refers to the spoken language with which ordinary people constitute the law-in-action. In this article, we experimentally investigate the social distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse found by ethnographers in small-claims court settings. We examine the influences of sex differences and social ties between disputants on these types of discourse in a mock small-claims setting using a quantitative content coding scheme. We do not find empirical support for sex differences in the production of simulated everyday legal discourse. The relational context of a dispute (operationalized as the strength of social ties between disputants) has significant effects on the distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse, so that disputants in relationally-close contexts produce more relationally-oriented discourse and those in relationally-distant contexts produce more rule-oriented discourses than those in relationally-close contexts. With these findings as a backdrop, we discuss (1) the contextual nature of sex differences in everyday legal discourse; (2) discourse “switching” and emotional investment in personal relationships, and (3) applications for our coding scheme to studies of disputing frames.

Research on juvenile and adult sentencing has been characterized by theoretical, methodological, and empirical limitations that preclude adequate description, prediction, or assessment of decisionmaking processes and outcomes. Five limitations are prominent: emphasis on atheoretical, empirical attempts, generally unsuccessful, to increase predictive accuracy; limited conceptualizations of dependent variables (e.g., incarceration versus nonincarceration); overreliance on individual, offender-level data with minimal reference to victims, practitioners, or contextual factors; failure to incorporate analytically multiple research methods; and inattention to intended and unintended uses and effects of sentencing. These limitations can be highlighted by focusing on a context—-juvenile justice—in which the goals of sentencing are varied, conflicting, and, due to recent reforms, changing. Using interview and survey data, the present research examines juvenile sentencing reform in Texas to highlight these limitations and to oudine an analytical framework for improved description, modeling, and assessment of sentencing.