Racism has become more covert in post-civil rights America. Yet, measures to combat it are hindered by inadequate general knowledge on what “colorblind” race talk says and does and what makes it effective. We deepen understanding of covert racism by investigating one type of discourse – racial code words, which are (1) indirect signifiers of racial or ethnic groups that contain (2) at least one positive or negative value judgment and (3) contextually implied or salient meanings. Through a thematic analysis of 734 racial code words from 97 scholarly texts, we develop an interpretive framework that explains their tropes, linguistic mechanisms and unique roles in perpetuating racism, drawing from race, linguistic and cultural studies. Racial code words promote tropes of White people’s respectability and privilege and Racial/Ethnic Minorities’ pathology and inferiority in efficient, adaptable, plausibly deniable and almost always racially stratifying ways, often through euphemism, metonymy and othering. They construct a “colorblind” discursivity and propel both “epistemic racism” (racism in knowledge) and systemic racism (racism in action). We further strengthen applications of Critical Race Theory in sociolegal studies of race by presenting a “racial meaning decoding tool” to assist legal and societal measures to detect coded racism.

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.

Through the lens of legal consciousness, this paper analyzes institutional dissatisfaction within the backdrop of profound skepticism directed at formal institutions, particularly within the context of post-October 2019 Chilean society. It aims at inquiring into the relationship between the expression of deep state antipathy and the stance that individuals manifest regarding legality. The paper reports on the findings derived from 12 focus groups, categorized by age, gender and location. We find that despite prevalent negative sentiments harbored by individuals toward these establishments, interviewees continue to use the language of law, expressing their dissatisfaction as frustrated formal entitlements or a lack of enforcement of the law regarding corrupt elites. We conclude that the existence of a gap between normative expectations and the acute rejection of the fulfillment of those expectations by institutional actors points to a structure of opportunities conducive to the emergence of more authoritative forms of state power.

The emergence and dissemination of new legal ideas can play an important role in sparking change in the way activists in marginalized communities understand their rights and pursue their objectives. How and why do the legal beliefs of such communities evolve? We argue that the vigorous advocacy of new legal ideas by entrepreneurs and the harnessing of specialized media to help disseminate those ideas are important mechanisms in this evolution. We use the rise of marriage equality as a central legal priority in the mainstream American LGBTQ+ rights movement as a case study to illustrate this phenomenon. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Evan Wolfson’s legal advocacy and an examination of The Advocate, we investigate how Wolfson developed and disseminated legal ideas about same-sex marriage. We show how this advocacy eventually dominated discussion of the issue among elite LGBTQ+ legal actors and the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ publication. However, Wolfson’s advocacy tended to emphasize LGBTQ+ integration into “mainstream” American culture and prioritized the interests and values of relatively privileged subgroups within the LGBTQ+ community. Our research informs our understanding of the interplay between legal advocacy and media reporting in the development of LGBTQ+ rights claims and the strategies adopted to achieve them.

While sociologists have focused on the national adoption of public-sphere women’s rights such as the right to vote in elections or participate fully in economic matters, less work has examined the diffusion of private-sphere women’s rights, rights of women in the home. We address this gap by examining the cross-national adoption of laws that criminalize marital rape. Building on prior research that finds that women’s rights organizations and women’s rights focused treaties, we explore the cross-national determinants of the criminalization of marital rape. Using an event history analysis covering 131 countries from 1979 to 2013, we find support for the global institutionalist framework that contends that socialization into the global system and direct advocacy efforts of global organizations contribute to faster rates of criminalization of marital rape. Further, we suggest that these global institutionalist processes become amplified when they are focused by events that set the agenda for international organizations. Implications for world-society scholarship on the global adoption of women’s rights are further discussed.