Continuity and Caregiving: Comments on Someday All This Will Be Yours

Hartog, Hendrik. 2012 . Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 353. $29.95 cloth. These comments on Hendrik Hartog's Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age ( 2012 ) examine the delivery of elder care in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the resonance with care practices today. The book's stories of how older people arranged for their care transcend time and place, showing the age‐old difficulties of providing care for the elderly.     

When Someday Is Today: Carrying Forward the History of Old Age and Inheritance into the Age of Medicaid

Hartog, Hendrik. 2012 . Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 353. $29.95 cloth. This review essay of Hendrik Hartog's ( 2012 ) Someday All This Will Be Yours undertakes a brief overview of some of the massive changes in middle‐class planning for old age and inheritance in the United States over the course of the past century, focusing on the increased role of the state as a source of funding and regulation, the rise of the elder law bar, and the resulting new tools and motives for the transfer of property in exchange for care in the age of Medicaid.     

The Nasty Business of Aging

Hartog, Hendrik. 2012 . Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 353. $29.95 cloth. This essay explores the contribution of Hendrik Hartog's Someday All This Will Be Yours to an understanding of old age policy and the aging experience more broadly. It starts by discussing how Hartog's study contributes to a modern understanding of the legal structure surrounding old age. It then discusses how the narrative is colored, in part, by looking at the cases from a caregiver's perspective, and explores the implications of this perspective. Finally, it suggests avenues for building on Hartog's work by using modern legal cases to explore how courts today perceive the moral and legal obligations surrounding the duty to provide care.     

Somedays,I Have Second Thoughts

In this short response to the reviewers of Someday All This Will Be Yours, A History of Inheritance and Old Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), the author identifies some of the paradoxes and difficulties that researching and writing the book posed and, along the way, qualifies and complicates some of the conclusions that he then drew. In particular, he questions the extent to which a work of history speaks to the concerns of the emerging field of elder law.     

Conceptions of Agency in Social Movement Scholarship: Mack on African American Civil Rights Lawyers

This essay examines the theory of individual agency that propels the central thesis in Kenneth Mack's Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer (2012)—namely, that an important yet understudied means by which African American civil rights lawyers changed conceptions of race through their work was through their very performance of the professional role of lawyer. Mack shows that this performance was inevitably fraught with tension and contradiction because African American lawyers were called upon to act both as exemplary representatives of their race and as performers of a professional role that traditionally had been reserved for whites only. Mack focuses especially on the tensions of this role in courtrooms, where African American lawyers were necessarily called upon to act as the equals of white judges, opposing counsel, and witnesses. Mack's thesis, focused on the contradictions and tensions embodied in the performance of a racially loaded identity, reflects the influence of postmodern identity performance theory as articulated by Judith Butler and others. Mack and others belong to a new generation of civil rights history scholars who are asking new questions about contested identities related to race, gender, sexuality, and class. This essay offers an evaluation of this new direction for civil rights scholarship, focusing especially on its implicit normative orientation and what it contributes to the decade‐old debate over how to conceive of agency in social movement scholarship.     

Blinded by Sight: The Racial Body and the Origins of the Social Construction of Race

Osagie K. Obasogie's Blinded by Sight: Seeing Race through the Eyes of the Blind (2014) makes important contributions to both to the sociology of law and to critical race studies. The book challenges “colorblind” racial ideology by showing empirically that people who are blind from birth nevertheless “see” race, grasping it as a nearly omnipresent feature of social interaction and social organization. These insights, however, do not diminish the importance of the racial body. Beyond refuting colorblindness, Obasogie's book points to a neverending tension, embedded in what we call racial formation, between the social construction of race and the corporeality of race. This tension has been present since the dawn of empire and African slavery. Obasogie's achievement of falsifying colorblindness should not lead us to neglect the importance of the racial body.     

Prestige,Networks, and Social Mobility Among Lawyers: A View from California of Woeste's book,Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech

Woeste, Victoria Saker. 2012 . Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech . Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Pp. 424. $48.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $24.95 e‐book. In Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012), Victoria Saker Woeste raises provocative questions for students of the legal profession. Aaron Sapiro, an Eastern European, Jewish immigrant to California, rose to international prominence through his corporate specialization in agricultural cooperatives. Our understanding of the social structure of the legal profession, based on studies of the East and Midwest, shows that for most of the twentieth century, the structure of the bar was highly stratified around markers of ethno‐religious status. The trajectory of Sapiro's career does not fit this story. A focus on the West generally or California in particular complicates our understanding of how factors such as ethno‐religious background, social networks, career mobility, and prestige interact.     

Support seeking,system avoidance,and citizenship: Social safety net usage after incarceration

Scholars have long described the American penal state and welfare state as joined by a common logic of social marginalization. But researchers have only recently begun to explore how the individuals who pass through the carceral system also interact with welfare state programs. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, in this article, I explore how formerly incarcerated individuals make claims on the welfare state and how participation varies across social programs and states, as well as by race, drawing on theories of social welfare rights-claiming and system avoidance. In so doing, I provide the first nationwide estimates of the extent to which previously incarcerated adults use social safety net resources. I find that participation in welfare programs varies with incarceration history, program structure, and race. Rather than finding patterns consistent with system avoidance, I find that previously incarcerated White Americans seem to engage in active rights claiming, participating in public assistance programs more than similarly eligible never-incarcerated counterparts. All formerly incarcerated individuals, however, have limited access to more generous social insurance programs, and the shift to an increasingly employment-based social safety net seems likely to further limit access to the welfare state for the growing population of Americans leaving prison.     

Do blind people see race? Social, legal, and theoretical considerations

Although the meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries, one thread of thought unifies almost all of the many diverging perspectives: a largely unquestioned belief that race is self-evident and visually obvious, defined largely by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. This suggests that “seeing race” is an experience largely unmediated by broader social forces; we simply know it when we see it. It also suggests that those who cannot see are likely to have a diminished understanding of race. But is this empirically accurate?I examine these questions by interviewing people who have been totally blind since birth about race and compare their responses to sighted individuals. I not only find that blind people have as significant an understanding of race as anyone else and that they understand race visually, but that this visual understanding of race stems from interpersonal and institutional socializations that profoundly shape their racial perceptions. These findings highlight how race and racial thinking are encoded into individuals through iterative social practices that train people to think a certain way about the world around them. In short, these practices are so strong that even blind people, in a conceptual sense, “see” race. Rather than being self-evident, these interviews draw attention to how race becomes visually salient through constitutive social practices that give rise to visual understandings of racial difference for blind and sighted people alike. This article concludes with a discussion of these findings' significance for understanding the role of race in law and society.     

DOING GENDER: SORTING OUT THE CASTE AND CRIME CONUNDRUM*

Theories that examine the relationship between inequality and crime typically privilege one system of stratification over others. In criminology, the system most often assumed to be primary is social class, but other approaches may emphasize gender or racial oppression to account for observed differences in offending patterns. Few, however, systematically link gender and race oppression as moderating etiological variables in the study of crime. From the theoretical and empirical literature on this subject, we discuss (1) how “hegemonic” masculinities and femininities are framed within social institutions such as work, the family, peer group, and schools; (2) how “doing gender” within these sites is modified by race; and (3) anticipated relationships among social structure, social action, and delinquency. Self-report data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth are used to test research hypotheses. Chow interaction tests and comparisons of slope coefficients reveal that gender and race modify independent-variable effects on property and violent delinquency.     

Correlates of Mortality in a U.S. Cohort of Youth, 1980–98: Implications for Social Justice

This paper reports results of a study based on a nationally representative sample of U.S. youth (N = 11,549) that asked two questions: (1) How does family structure affect the likelihood of adolescent death beyond that of race/ethnicity, sex, socioeconomic status, personal behavior, and other structural factors and (2) under what conditions might appeals for social justice be warranted for relative mortality statuses and for absolute gains in mortality? The study found that marital instability increases the likelihood of dying when controlling for a variety of other factors including class, race/ethnicity, sex, and unemployment rate in area of residence. The author argues that this finding lends support to social justice arguments to redistribute resources in such a way as to ensure the likelihood of absolute gains in mortality. The study also found, however, that race/ethnicity/sex also accounted for the likelihood of dying independently of family structure when controlling for socioeconomic and other factors. The author argues that this finding lends support to social justice arguments to redistribute resources on the basis of relative mortality statuses.     

Toward a New Legal History of Capitalism and Unfree Labor: Law,Slavery, and Emancipation in the American Marketplace

New work on the “history of capitalism” reveals how the personal freedom enjoyed by people living within the liberal capitalist mainstream is often purchased by coerced labor at the social margins. Walter Johnson's book River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom makes this argument with force, utilizing the concept of “slave racial capitalism” to suggest how race‐based slavery constituted a necessary component of early American economic expansion. Using Johnson's framework as a starting point, this essay argues that the legal institutions of property and contract, institutions underwriting a genuinely “slave racial capitalist” regime, also contained certain subversive possibilities within themselves, eventually challenging unfree labor as a modality of rule within the modernizing United States.     

Structural Determinants of Homicide: The Big Three

Building upon and expanding the previous research into structural determinants of homicide, particularly the work of Land, McCall, and Cohen (1990), the current paper introduces a multilevel theoretical framework that outlines the influences of three major structural forces on homicidal violence. The Big Three are poverty/low education, racial composition, and the disruption of family structure. These three factors exert their effects on violence at the following levels: neighborhood/community level, family/social interpersonal level, and individual level. It is shown algebraically how individual-level and aggregate-level effects contribute to the size of regression coefficients in aggregate-level analyses. In the empirical part of the study, the presented theoretical model is tested using county-level data to estimate separate effects of each of the Big Three factors on homicide at two time periods: 1950–1960 and 1995–2005 (chosen to be as far removed from one another as the availability of data allows). All major variables typically used in homicide research are included as statistical controls. The results of analyses show that the effects of the three major structural forces—poverty/low education, race, and divorce rates—on homicide rates in US counties are remarkably strong. Moreover, the effect sizes of each of the Big Three are found to be identical for both time periods despite profound changes in the economic and social situation in the United States over the past half-century. This remarkable stability in the effect sizes implies the stability of homicidal violence in response to certain structural conditions.     

Connecting Critical Race Theory with Second Generation Legal Consciousness Work in Obasogie's Blinded by Sight

Sociologist and legal scholar Osagie Obasogie's study of how blind people “see” race reveals the usually invisible, taken‐for‐granted mechanisms that reproduce racism. In Blinded by Sight, he distinguishes racial consciousness from legal consciousness, though he notes their common emphases on studying how cumulative social practices and interactions produce commonsense understandings. I argue that there is much to be gained from connecting these two fields, one emanating primarily out of critical race theory and the other out of law and society scholarship. Legal consciousness offers an important avenue for bridging macro studies of race making with micro studies such as Obasogie's, which focus on individuals’ experiences and practices of constructing race and learning racism.     

Legal Constraints on the Use of Race in Biomedical Research: Toward a Social Justice Framework

This article addresses three questions concerning the legal regulation of the use of race as a category in biomedical research: how does the law currently encourage the use of race in biomedical research?; how might the existing legal framework constrain its use?; and what should be the law's approach to race-based biomedical research? It proposes a social justice approach that aims to promote racial equality by discouraging the use of "race" as a biological category while encouraging its use as a socio-political category to understand and investigate ways to eliminate disparities in health status, access to health care, and medical treatment.     

“It's Just Black,White, or Hispanic”: An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California's Segregated Prison Reception Centers

This article takes as its launching point a 2005 U. S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California (543 U.S. 499), which ruled that the California Department of Corrections' unwritten practice of racially segregating inmates in prison reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest level of constitutional review, strict scrutiny. Relying on observational data from two California prison reception centers, this research is grounded in an interactionist perspective and influenced by Smith's work on “institutional ethnography.” I examine how racialization occurs in carceral settings, arguing that officers and inmates collaborate to arrive at a “negotiated settlement” regarding housing decisions. They do so working together (but not always in agreement) to shape how an inmate is categorized in terms of ‘race’/ethnicity and gang/group affiliation, within a framework established by official Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paperwork and related institutional understandings of housing needs. The findings demonstrate that administrators, officers, and inmates alike have influence over the process by which people are categorized and ‘race’ is produced, even as they derive their power from different sources and are both enabled and constrained by the relationship between them. I conclude that California prisons are, as Wacquant has put it, “the main machine for ‘race making’” (2005:128), and that the fuel for that machine—a series of patterned, negotiated settlements—happens in real time, “on the ground,” and with important consequences for inmates, officers, and administrators.     

Deviant identity,negative self-feelings,and decreases in deviant behavior: The moderating influence of conventional social bonding

Abstract

Informed by Kaplan's general theory of deviant behavior it was hypothesized that adolescents characterized by deviant identities who developed negative self-feelings would decrease deviant behavior over time if the youths were bonded to the conventional social order but not if the youths were not bonded to the conventional social order. For adolescents not characterized by deviant identities, the development of negative self-feelings would increase deviant behavior over time regardless of the level of conventional social bonding.

The hypotheses were explored using data from youth (n=1019) tested during early adolescence and re-tested 3 years later. Ordinary least square regression models estimated the effects of negative self-feelings on later deviant behaviors controlling for earlier deviant behavior, gender, race/ethnicity, and father's education. The model was estimated separately for each of four subgroups: deviant identity/high social bonding; deviant identity/low social bonding; non-deviant identity/high social bonding; and non-deviant identity/low social bonding.

As hypothesized, negative self-feelings anticipated significant decreases in deviant behavior for the deviant identity/high social bonding group, but were unrelated to deviant behavior in the deviant identity/low social bonding group; and negative self-feelings anticipated increased deviant behavior in the two non-deviant identity groups regardless of the level of social bonding.     

Understanding Law as a Democratic Institution Through US Constitutional Development

Gillman, Howard, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington. 2012 . American Constitutionalism: Volume I: Structures of Government . New York: Oxford University Press. Gillman, Howard, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington. 2012 . American Constitutionalism: Volume II: Rights and Liberties . New York: Oxford University Press. This essay reviews Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume I: Structures of Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Howard Gillman, Mark Graber, and Keith Whittington, American Constitutionalism: Volume II: Rights and Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). It defends developmental approaches in the study of US constitutional law. It explains how law has been studied in political science, illustrating how political development became part of the story. It outlines how American political development approaches work when applied to law, noting how studying law transforms these approaches. It notes the insights produced through the blending of American political development and constitutional law, explaining how these insights provide more leverage for understanding the role of courts as democratic institutions. The essay closes by discussing the promising directions these approaches suggest, defending their value beyond political science.     

Unveiling White logic in criminological research: an intertextual analysis

Critical race scholars have called into question the objective neutrality upon which much positivist social science rests, arguing that it discursively masks how whiteness underpins the normative purview of research design and findings. As the scholarly securing of whiteness takes shape through explicit and discursive mechanisms, this article examines how it is manifest in criminological research through an intertextual analysis of contemporary peer-reviewed scholarship. Examining 558 articles in five recognized journals, this paper documents how blind spots towards race and racial stratification surface in criminological research, arguing that most of the articles analyzed do not simply ignore White privilege; they actively uphold it. Findings suggest that they do so through two means: first by whitewashing race, that is, disregarding how race and racism can differentially affect acts and trends of crime and deviance, and secondly, by narrowly representing race as merely explanatory variable without querying the broader power relations it marks. After discussing how these patterns reveal and uphold whiteness as a normative value, we conclude with a discussion of preliminary steps aimed at exposing and unpacking how White logic informs the field.     

Judging the Other: The Intersection of Race,Gender, and Class in Family Court

This critical ethnographic study of family court child maltreatment proceedings describes and illuminates the ways in which racial, gender, and class disadvantages can manifest on the ground as judges, attorneys, social service workers, and parents—joined often by gender but split by race and class—adjudicate cases. The findings suggest that intersectionality worked in ways that exponentially marginalized poor mothers of color in the courtroom. They were marginalized both through the rules of the adversarial process (which silenced their voices) and through the construction of narratives (which emphasized individual weakness) over structural obstacles as well as personal irresponsibility over expressions of maternal care and concern. Standard due process courtroom practices also communicated bias or social exclusion, especially in a courtroom split by race and class.