Contemporary political science research suggests historically low public faith in judicial institutions. However, modern years have seen a proliferation of “court-watching” groups that harness volunteer observation to increase accountability in the courts. While these trends may seem in conflict, this article suggests that, in the absence of faith in traditional judiciary systems, court watching acts as a decentralized, grassroots method of legal participation, allowing engagement in the American socio-legal system. We address this relatively under-analyzed area of legal activism by establishing an original dataset (n = 59) that tracked court watch groups as of 2024. Our dataset includes the mission, jurisdictional focus, and major accomplishments of each court-watching group, providing a useful starting point for the analysis of court watching as a growing area of legal socialization. We also establish a four-part definition of “court watching,” which builds on existing scholarship. We proceed with descriptive analysis of our database and findings, providing brief vignettes of well-established or unique court-watching groups and preliminary observations. Based on these preliminary findings, we assert that these volunteer organizations are well positioned to increase civic engagement and democratic faith in US legal proceedings among broad populations and thus deserve further attention from socio-legal scholars.

There is conflicting evidence as to whether employers prefer immigrants over native-born workers when hiring. Some evidence suggests that employers might penalize immigrants over comparably educated co-ethnic native-born workers. Yet other evidence suggests just the opposite: employers prefer immigrants over native-born workers because of associations with compliance or exploitability. However, many of these studies generate data from workers, not employers, which makes it hard to understand employers’ underlying motivations when hiring. In addition, very few studies consider employers’ occupational roles and variations in organizational contexts. Drawing on original employer-level data—including an original survey experiment of 1,515 employers and interviews with 47 employers and immigration lawyers—I find that there’s tension in the legal awareness and professional interests of employers by their occupational role. Organizational and team leaders are motivated to hire whom they perceive as “exceptional” immigrants to make themselves and their companies look good, while HR staff are motivated to follow legal procedures and avoid regulatory fines. This article has contributions to studies on immigration, the law and society, and organizational sociology. For instance, it finds that in the case of immigration, employers’ occupational roles inside of firms help to mediate the influence of the law on immigrant inequality.

This article analyzes how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) handles evidence of pushback, where states violently force asylum seekers away from borders. An examination of how the experiences of pushback survivors get translated (or not) into judgments contributes to theoretical discussions about truth, epistemic practices, and law. The article asks why so little of what researchers, journalists, civil society actors, and international organizations have documented about European border violence is visible in the court’s judgments. Based on a mix of legal and anthropological research methods, the article traces how states and the ECtHR erase pushback evidence at borders and during litigation. Taking seriously on equal grounds the construction of facts outside and inside a court room, the article connects external perspectives on the production of evidence with an internal analysis of evidence in judgments. In doing so, the article highlights the political dimensions of seemingly merely technical and legal procedures. We argue for a clearer separation of courts’ and states’ versions of facts, contending that the presumption of the states’ good faith should no longer apply when there is evidence, including in case law, of misrecordings and false statements by respondent states.

How do “novel” spaces of transnational law emerge rather than being captured within existing legal regimes? This article argues that processes driving how the subject matter of a transnational legal space is defined and framed and by whom are notable in mediating such outcomes. The article presents the empirical case study of global neurotechnology governance and examines socio-legal processes whereby individual and organizational actors have constructed and defended neurotechnology as a distinct space of transnational law. Here, I argue that this can be understood as boundary work, which examines discursive and spatial processes of demarcating social entities from one another. The article shows how attention to external and internal boundaries around and within a transnational legal domain can sensitize socio-legal analysis to the more emergent features of these spaces, including more subtle modes of exclusion, cooperation, and coordination. The article concludes by reflecting on how attention to processes of boundary work can enrich inquiry into, and critique of, the earliest stages of transnational legal ordering.

The social category of “youth” occupies liminal space with blurred boundaries between “childhood” and “adulthood.” Dominant modes of socio-legal inquiry into youth typically yield adult-centered, criminological accounts that place adult interests and perspectives at the core of their analyses, focusing ultimately on remedies to quell troubled adolescents and suppress disruptive delinquents. Youth-centered accounts, by contrast, locate young people as agents negotiating the contradictory expectations of adults and their institutions while forging socio-legal orders of their own making. This review essay draws from six key works on youth published over the past century—Kathryn Abrams’s Open Hand, Close Fist: Practices of Undocumented Organizing in a Hostile State, James Coleman’s The Adolescent Society: The Social Life of the Teenager and Its Impact on Education, Nikki Jones’s Beyond Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner-City Violence, C. J. Pascoe’s, Nice Is Not Enough: Inequality and the Limits of Kindness at American High, Forrest Stuart’s The Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy, and Frederick Thrasher’s 1927 text The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago—to explore how young people constitute their own socio-legal orders. This exploration suggests a new front in research on legal pluralism while identifying mechanisms through which youth-centered socio-legal orders influence adult-centered orders via mobilization, cooperation, imitation, and imbrication.

In times of political crisis and attacks against the foundations of political liberalism, can we put our trust in lawyers and other legal occupations to fight for our freedoms when they are under attack? The role of the legal profession in the rise, development, and resilience of political liberalism has been at the core of a body of work commonly framed as “the legal complex”: Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik’s Lawyers and the Rise of Western Political Liberalism, Halliday, Malcolm Feeley, and Karpik’s Fighting for Political Freedom, Halliday, Karpik, and Feeley’s Fates of Political Liberalism in the British Post-Colony, and Feeley and Malcolm Langford’s The Limits of the Legal Complex. In view of the precariousness of political liberalism in contemporary global politics, this review essay reflects on the core ideas of the legal complex literature. By identifying connections with other strands of scholarship on legal agents, legal mobilization, and the move to law in transitional politics, I suggest rescaling the study of the legal complex to enable consideration of its relevance for the study of political liberalism at the international level of analysis and, specifically, of its importance to the resilience of the liberal international order currently in rapid decline.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has come under challenge in recent years as some countries have decided, or considered, to withdraw from it. Against this backdrop, an emerging literature has begun to examine attitudes toward the court among the general public as a key court constituency. However, little is known about how domestic elites perceive the court. This research gap is particularly surprising given that domestic elites have a considerable impact on both public and state support of the court. This article explains why political and societal elites across world regions have confidence or lack confidence in the ICC. We present the results from a unique survey of 722 elite respondents conducted from 2017 to 2019 across six countries: Brazil, Germany, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, and the United States. We furthermore enrich our analysis by using public opinion data to draw comparisons between elites and the general public. The analyses reveal that the views of elites are most consistently related to their perceptions of other, more well-known international organizations and their country’s relationship with the ICC. Our findings indicate both similarities and differences between how elite and public opinion about the ICC are formed, demonstrating the value of further research on elite opinion on international courts.

The animal protection movement has developed an increasingly close working relationship with the criminal punishment system through lobbying and campaigning for harsher punishments for animal abuse, while at the same time showing an interest in restorative justice (RJ) as a response to harm against animals. In this article, we take a critical position aligned with anti-carceral feminists and prison abolitionists against the carceral systems that fail humans and animals in circumstances of violence. We consider the potential of RJ as an alternative approach to address and prevent harm against animals in abuse cases on an individual level while highlighting the limitations of RJ in achieving the necessary changes on a societal level to end structurally produced violence against animals, such as industrial animal exploitation. We propose that transformative justice (TJ), which involves some RJ processes, is the most promising approach that could achieve justice for both humans and nonhumans in the long term without reproducing traumas and violence for the individuals and communities involved in harm reduction and prevention. Drawing on examples of RJ and TJ as developed and practised in marginalized human communities, we apply their lessons to thinking through similar practices in the context of animal abuse and neglect.

Legal institutions rely on monitoring and prediction technologies to enforce the law. Drawing on three recent books—Predict and Surveil by Sarah Brayne (2021), Data Driven by Karen Levy (2023), and Policing Patients by Elizabeth Chiarello (2024)—this review essay examines how the incorporation of these technologies brings about three shifts in the work of frontline enforcement. First, it broadens the categories of actors with the capacity to facilitate the formal enforcement of law. Second, it reorients enforcement to increasingly center on generating information for future use by institutional actors beyond the original information gatherer. Third, it increases the variety and frequency of agents’ decisions about how much to engage with new tools. These shifts are likely to exacerbate a persistent challenge faced by frontline agents: navigating conflicting goals and flawed laws with inadequate resources and guidance.