Law and globalization studies have documented how Global South lawyers compete over the adaptation of international norms. Yet, little is known about how this adaptation legitimates worldviews beyond the law. To advance this literature, this paper proposes a discourse-centered field analysis of the legal globalization of anti-corruption ideas in Brazil. It examines Brazilian lawyers' disputes over a 2016 anti-corruption bill. The bill supporters mobilize global anti-corruption discourses that are exogenous to the legal field to defend harsher criminal law. Their critics counter the reform by mobilizing endogenous legal ideas against criminal law expansion. In so doing, they do not challenge reformers' ideas about corruption. I show how this discursive mismatch leads to a form of globalization by stealth, whereby local dynamics allow global ideas to remain unchallenged in local fields.

With a growing number of strict obligations and harsh sanctions for welfare recipients, the Netherlands has increasingly become a punitive welfare state. This article looks at what this means for welfare clients and their commonsense understandings of the law. To analyze how welfare officials shape clients' legal consciousness, I draw on an online survey among Dutch welfare clients (N = 1305) and a correlation analysis. The findings show that there is a clear relationship between welfare clients' own legal consciousness and their assessment of welfare officials' beliefs about the law. However, not all elements of their legal consciousness are relationally influenced by the same factors. Also, clients' self-reported compliance behavior is less relationally influenced than other elements of their legal consciousness. This study adds to our understanding of the mechanisms that constitute the production of relational and second-order legal consciousness and it contributes to the development of new research methods to study people's perceptions of law.

Courts have long struggled to bridge the access-to-justice gap associated with in-person hearings, which makes the recent adoption of online legal proceedings potentially beneficial. Online proceedings hold promise for better access: they occur remotely, can proceed asynchronously, and often rely solely on written communication. Yet these very qualities may also undermine some of the well-established elements of procedural-justice perceptions, a primary predictor of how people view the legal system's legitimacy. This paper examines the implications of shifting legal proceedings online for both procedural-justice and access-to-justice perceptions. It also investigates the relationship of both types of perceptions with system legitimacy, as well as the relative weight these predictors carry across litigant income levels. Drawing on online traffic court cases, we find that perceptions of procedural justice and access to justice are each separately associated with a litigant's appraisal of system legitimacy, but among lower-income parties, access to justice is a stronger predictor, while procedural justice dominates among higher-income parties. These findings highlight the need to incorporate access-to-justice perceptions into existing models of legal legitimacy.

When nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) encounter state resistance to human rights accountability, how do NGOs use international courts for their human rights advocacy strategies? Considering the overlapping phenomena of shrinking civic space within authoritarian, hybrid, and democratically backsliding regimes, and state backlash against international courts, NGOs navigate two potential levels of state backlash against human rights accountability. Building on the interdisciplinary scholarship on legal mobilization, we develop an integrated framework for explaining how states' two-level (domestic and international) backlash tactics can both promote and deter NGOs' strategic litigation at international human rights courts (IHRCs). States' backlash tactics can influence NGOs' opportunities, capacities, and goals for their human rights advocacy, and thus affect whether and how they pursue strategic litigation at IHRCs. We elucidate the value of this framework through case studies of NGOs' litigation against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, an understudied IHRC. Drawing on an original data set, interviews, and documentation, we process-trace how Tanzania's various backlash tactics influenced whether and how NGOs litigated at the Court. Our framework and analysis show how state backlash against human rights accountability affects NGOs' mobilization at IHRCs and, relatedly, IHRCs' opportunities for influence.

Based on ethnographic research, this article shows how legal orders are being established in spaces where the state law is absent. The case of refugee camps—often discussed as sites of legal limbo and state of exception—seems to be a space of legal pluralism. However, when observing local legal practices, this pluralism is dissolved into a powerful local camp law. This characteristic type of legal order is produced by social camp-specific mechanisms, camp materiality as well as the remaking of pre-camp structures. Therefore, refugee camps should be viewed as extraterritorial spaces with a high degree of legal autonomy that enables and forces residents to create a local camp law. The findings of this study add to the literature of law and order in camps and to the debates on plural configurations in extraterritorial spaces.

The premise of Russia's 2012 “Foreign Agents” Law, one of the first such laws restricting foreign funding for non-governmental organizations (NGOs), is that foreign monies equal foreign agendas. Since then, over 50 countries have adopted similar laws using a similar justification. This paper interrogates this claim of foreign donor influence through examining legal mobilization by human rights NGOs at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). We track donor support for litigation by providing an overview of all foundation grant flows relating to strategic litigation for 2013–2014, and then matching the granting activities of two major U.S. foundations over 14 years to human rights NGO participation in cases before the ECtHR. Further, through case studies of Russian NGOs, we assess the causal role that donor support has played in facilitating their increased involvement in ECtHR litigation. The combined analysis indicates broad patterns of private foundation support to litigating NGOs, but uncovers no evidence that foreign donors were “pushing” NGOs toward litigation as a strategy, but instead more evidence suggesting that NGOs convinced donors to support human rights litigation. Despite the inaccuracy of the justification underpinning Russia's foreign agent law, the law threatens the survival of human rights organizations.

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.

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.

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.

This article presents the results of survey-based research which explores if licensed aircraft maintenance engineers working in Norway, Sweden, and Portugal experience regulated “just culture” as procedural justice-infused processes when occurrence reporting in European Union (EU) civil aviation. Drawing on Tylerian procedural justice theory, the study finds that, perceived procedural justice is more strongly associated with legitimacy (perceived as support for rules and authority) than legal anxiety among the maintenance engineers. Country-based results reveal differences in engineers' legal experiences of occurrence reporting with perceived procedural justice strongest in Sweden and legal anxiety most influential in Portugal. The article contributes with a first exploration of “just culture” as a procedural justice-infused legal intervention to improve compliance to regulated occurrence reporting by negating legal anxiety in a European aviation context.

The ways in which grievance procedures are used and perceived by incarcerated people raise important questions about the operation of procedural justice and legal consciousness and mobilization scholarship in settings where rights are especially vulnerable. This paper analyzes perceptions and usage of the grievance procedure for incarcerated people using survey data from people (N = 508) in three prisons in Ireland. We find that incarcerated people's views of the grievance procedures are generally negative, though some use it, especially those serving long sentences and those in segregation, with education level not significant in terms of usage. Additionally, having confidence in staff is associated with satisfaction with the procedure, as is the perception that one's rights are respected, showing important connections between perceptions of complaints and aspects of legal consciousness. We suggest a need for further situated analyses of procedural justice and legal consciousness, as well as practical requirements for complaints systems to elicit confidence among incarcerated people.

International criminal law has developed significantly over the past 20 years since the establishment of the ad hoc Tribunals and International Criminal Court. Much scholarly attention has focused on the politics and jurisprudence of these courts, with particular focus on the prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence. This article adds to the literature with comparative, qualitative research with survivors of conflict-related forced marriage in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, revealing context-specific understandings of marriage, consent and harm. We argue women exercise “tactic agency” in captivity in ways that are, taken together, “law-making” in their contestations over the socio-legal categories of marriage. Their contestations of marriage impact the norms within rebel groups as well as the development of new crimes against humanity in international criminal law. Building on the empirical findings, we argue that prosecution of crimes against humanity and reparation programs ought to be flexible and responsive enough to capture the varied experiences of women and girls abducted in war for purposes of sexual exploitation.

Health care rights for transgender and/or nonbinary people have dramatically expanded in recent years, including in insurance coverage for the treatments and procedures they need. Yet, trans people themselves still identify health insurance problems as a top priority for research and policy change because of significant difficulties gaining and using coverage. Wrangling over coverage determinations happens through multiple types of interactions, bureaucratic, interpersonal, and medical. When these interactions become difficult, it is because key terms such as medical necessity are both powerful and indeterminate. This study examines how trans people and health care intermediaries navigate the health insurance process and contest the meaning of medical necessity in coverage determinations. These disputes constitute the ground-level reality for instantiating health care rights to gender affirming care. Relying on analysis of contract language and 32 interviews with people who sought gender-affirming care and allied professionals, we find that health insurance policy language, interpretation, and implementation often create disadvantages and barriers for trans people who attempt to access care. Our study highlights how the contested life of insurance policy terminology produces a reality for rights but also details the mechanisms through which insurance-mediated care is a socially contested and negotiated process

Social classifications are increasingly interrelated, far-reaching, and consequential for socioeconomic outcomes. We use the concept of marginalized legal categories to describe how the law disadvantages individuals or groups by transforming inherently ordered social classifications into consequential legal categories, employing intestacy laws as an illustration. Using the Survey of Consumer Finances, we find that more than 21% of American families have forms that are marginalized by intestacy classifications, and that such forms are more common among individuals of color and those with less wealth. Yet, many individuals with these family structures hold assets and lack access to intestacy-avoidance mechanisms, giving consequence to the application of these laws. We conclude by discussing implications of legal classification for inequality.

The major aim of this article is to examine how migrations affect private governance, taking as a case study the Prud'homie de pêche, a private order that has governed the fishery of Marseille for the past six centuries. Scholarship generally argues that social norms guarantee the efficiency of private orders and their ability to resist the arrival of newcomers. My data suggest that the Prud'homie has failed to accommodate social changes prompted by migratory flows, not despite but because of its social norms. This paper suggests that social norms are not only powerful tools of governance for private orders, but also forces of inertia that can prevent these orders from accommodating social changes.

Interdisciplinarity is a delicate achievement. We learned this some years ago when the Program in Law and Society at New York University collapsed. News of the administration's reluctance to continue its support of the Program trickled down to us as graduate students in fall 2009. At the time, the Program's Director (and our advisor) was Sally Merry.

Qualitative interviews with one hundred defendants in Dutch criminal cases examine whether perceived procedural justice is a relevant concern for defendants, and, if so, which procedural justice components they refer to. The study provides a point of epistemological departure from the quantitative studies dominating the field, as it assessed which components of procedural justice (if any) respondents put forward themselves rather than asking about predetermined procedural justice components. The large majority of respondents mentioned procedural justice issues themselves, and six components were at the core of their procedural justice perceptions: (1) information on which decisions are based, (2) interpersonal treatment, (3) due consideration, (4) neutrality, (5) voice, and (6) accuracy. Although these procedural justice components largely correspond with the literature, respondents thus mentioned some components more often, and others less often, than the literature would suggest. In particular, neutrality plays an important role in the Dutch legal context examined here.

This article identifies the factors that contribute to the successful implementation of intersectionality in European multilevel legal praxis through the analysis of the case B.S. v. Spain. Combining critical legal analysis of the main judicial documents with qualitative methodology from political science based on in-depth interviews with key actors involved in the case, we uncover the obstacles and opportunities existing at the national and supra-national levels for the implementation of intersectionality. We decipher the factors contributing to the exceptional success of this case through the conjoint analysis of macro, meso, and micro levels. Our analysis shows that a combination of the legal provisions, paradigms and structures, the roles of the different actors involved, and the applicant's subjective position made it possible to put intersectionality in practice. This study provides novel empirical evidence that contributes to advancing the theoretical debate about intersectionality implementation in the multilevel European context.