Lawyers and Embedded Legal Activity in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

We introduce the concept of embedded legal activity to capture the ways in which lawyers and legal organizations can become intertwined in the ongoing activities of social movements. Embedded legal activity is characterized by diverse issues and venues and comprises legal activities that help support movement infrastructure, close coordination between movement lawyers and other activists, and responsiveness to constituent needs. Investigating a comprehensive data set on legal activity during the southern civil rights movement, we identify forms of legal activity beyond the typical focus of legal mobilization, including defense for movement participants charged with misdemeanors and other crimes, movement assistance on organization‐level legal matters, and general legal aid to movement constituents. These were by far the more common types of legal activity and emerged from the embeddedness of lawyers in a mass movement. We argue that embedded legal activity is likely where movements prioritize grassroots leadership and community organizing and face significant countermobilization, hostile legal and political opportunity structures, and substantial social and economic inequality.     

Guardians at the Gate: The Backgrounds, Career Paths, and Professional Development of Private US Immigration Lawyers

This article presents findings from a qualitative study of seventy-one New York immigration lawyers who are engaged in private practice. It focuses on the lawyers' backgrounds, career paths, and early professional training and describes, inter alia, the unusual diversity of this bar, the lawyers' reasons for practicing immigration law, the ways in which they learn to practice law, and the strong sense of community within the private immigration bar. It uses the idea of communities of practice to help understand how lawyers learn from their colleagues and are influenced by them. The article identifies several factors that may contribute to the supportiveness of the bar and the strong sense of community within that practice specialty, notwithstanding its great diversity. It concludes by making some preliminary comparisons between immigration lawyers and lawyers in other practice specialties and by identifying some questions for future study.     

中国律师执业中的法律与关系因素——社会资本理论视角的分析

从社会资本理论视角,对中国律师执业中的关系因素进行调查和分析,为探讨中国律师与中国司法的新视角。作为重要的社会资本,人际关系在中国律师执业中具有重要的意义;中国律师执业既要依靠法律也离不开关系。     

村社认同如何影响政治信任? ——公民参与和个人传统性的作用

【问题】政治信任是支撑政治系统运行的重要心理基础,对推进政民良性互动、提升公众的政府支持具有重要意义。村、社区是公众的社会生活共同体和国家治理的基本单元,人们对村社的认同如何转化为对政治系统的信任以及此过程受到何种条件的影响,这将是本研究尝试探究的问题。【方法】论文基于95个行政村和城镇社区的5040份有效数据,将村社认同作为高层级变量,运用多水平结构方程模型和贝叶斯可信区间估计,对所提出的跨层级的“有调节的中介模型”进行检验。【发现】村社认同对个体的政治信任水平具有显著的正向预测作用,且公民参与在二者关系中具有部分中介作用。同时,个人传统性不仅在村社认同和公民参与关系中具有显著的负向影响,也能进一步调节村社认同与政治信任的间接关系。具体来看,在不同水平的个人传统性下,村社认同差异通过公民参与对政治信任影响的间接效应表现出来。【贡献】论文从政治心理学的视角出发,揭示了“村社认同→公民参与→政治信任”这一中介作用路径,并进一步分析了个体传统性变量对上述影响机制作用发挥的边界效应,为理解和分析本土情境下公众的政治信任发生机制提供了可鉴路径,对激发公民参与、提升政治信任和推动基层治理转型的治理实践具有启示。     

“When They Come for You”: Legal Mobilization in New Authoritarian Russia

As of 2012, the Russian State Duma passed a string of repressive laws on nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), surveillance, and high treason. Under this “new authoritarian” regime, a growing number of Russians are investigated by the security services or put on trial for high treason. NGOs face selective prosecution and surprise inspections. While we know how lawyers use legal mobilization in democratic regimes where they can expect courts to be fair, legal mobilization remains understudied in regimes moving toward authoritarianism, where authorities pass repressive laws but enforce them erratically. Drawing on interviews with Russian lawyers, this article examines how lawyers represent two victim groups of state coercion: Russians under investigation for treason and prosecuted human rights NGOs. By examining how lawyers make strategic choices while coping with unfair courts, the random enforcement of laws, and shrinking resources, this article argues that state coercion does not deter lawyers from legal mobilization at domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights. Instead, repressive laws push lawyers to reinvent their everyday practices to counter repressive legislation and conviction bias in the criminal justice system.     

CONTEXTUALIZING COMMUNITY CRIME CONTROL: RACE,GEOGRAPHY, AND CONFIGURATIONS OF CONTROL IN FOUR COMMUNITIES*

Criminology and urban sociology have long‐standing interests in how neighborhoods and communities respond to and control crime. We build on the literature on social disorganization, collective efficacy, and new parochialism to develop a framework that explains how and why communities respond differently to crime. We draw on more than 2 years of comparative ethnographic data and 56 resident and stakeholder interviews on responses to crime in four communities in two states. We find that the intersections of racial composition, geography, and crime narratives in each place contributed to distinct community responses to crime. By analyzing these dynamics across the four sites, we propose three types of public–parochial partnerships that communities use to respond to crime: public alliances that rely primarily on public forms of control, tentative public–parochial partnerships that rely on tenuous connections with public institutions, and grassroots engagement with public institutions. We explain the emergence of these three approaches as patterned responses rooted in characteristics of local contexts, including racial composition and geographic isolation.     

Lawyers and Politics in France, 1814–1950: The State, the Market, and the Public

Throughout the 19th century, lawyers in France were deeply involved in political action to pursue an overriding goal–to become recognized as spokesmen for the public. This strategy governed their history; it explains their brilliant social ascent and their subsequent slow decline. As long as the conflict between state and civil society raged, lawyers were able to we assets–political mobilization, the power of the word, the esteem enjoyed by law–which had allowed them faithfully to embody public opinion in its struggle to limit state powers. From this embodiment of public ideals they derived independence, prestige, and a dominant position in the state. But when the nature of the political regime ceased to be a bone of contention and when public life became organized around other cleavages, lawyers were gradually deprived of their representative function. This marked the beginning of a social decline that became visible between the two world wars and lasted until the 1950s.     

No fats,femmes, or Asians: the utility of critical race theory in examining the role of gay stock stories in the marginalization of gay Asian men

In the last few decades, proponents of critical race theory have uncovered everyday forms of injustice that continue to affect the lives of men and women of color by exposing the subtle forms of racism that exist in the stock stories told by the dominant group as well as the counterstories told by subaltern groups. However, rarely have we examined the stock stories articulated by subaltern groups to marginalize other subaltern groups. In this paper, I consider the stock stories told by gay White men and the counterstories expressed by gay Asian men to examine subtle forms of racism within the gay community. I argue that we need not only to reveal how the stories narrated by the dominant group continue to maintain social inequality, but that we also need to consider how subaltern groups help to maintain social inequality by adapting the language of the dominant group to use against other subaltern groups.     

Gated Communities in Law's Gaze: Material Forms and the Production of a Social Body in Legal Adjudication

This article focuses on the legal geography of gated communities. Sociolegal research has paid comparatively little attention to how specific material forms fare within legal contexts. Drawing on work in legal geography and in science and technology studies, this article isolates judicial decisions that deal with the borders of gated communities from other cases involving private homeowner associations. By focusing on these boundary disputes in which outsiders are excluded from the area, this article finds that courts are resisting the localism presented by gated communities and are instead articulating a social imaginary in which the landscape flows uninterrupted by the exclusionary presence of gates. In contrast to the privatopia literature, this article finds that courts are not complicit in promoting neoliberal visions of community. The social imaginary being developed by courts resists the spatial differentiation of gated communities, producing in its place a thoroughly modern polity in which legal, economic, and political relations flow easily between those inside and outside the gate.     

Restoring (dis)order: Sanctions,resolutions, and "social control" in anarchist communities

This essay explores the restorative implications of anarchist communities through an analysis of processes such as norm formation, sanctioning, conflict resolution, and economic exchange. The study explores ways in which anarchist communities employ various restorative measures to maintain group cohesion and achieve a modicum of social control through the application of natural phenomena such as diffuse power, fluid authority, community consensus and mutual aid. Drawing upon studies of communities manifesting anarchist tendencies--Aincluding utopian experiments, indigenous cultures, and the unique case of the Rainbow Family of Living Light--a picture begins to emerge wherein conceptions of property and the social dynamics that inhere within a community are inextricably linked, suggesting the propensity of anarchist communities to promote an organic synthesis of self, society, and nature. In the end, by exploring tenets associated with the nascent restorative justice paradigm, it is observed that anarchist communities manifest principles that challenge the dominant conceptions of criminality and legality, providing a framework for envisioning models of justice-in-practice that appear on the horizon of possibility and potentiality.     

Legal Aid,Social Workers,and the Redefinition of the Legal Profession in Chile, 1925–1960

This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial) from the 1920s until the 1960s. It argues that with the emergence of the “social question”—the concern for improving the lower classes' working and living conditions to promote the nation's modernization and prevent political radicalization—the Chilean legal profession committed to legal aid reform to escape a professional identity crisis. Legal aid allowed lawyers to claim they had a new “social function” advocating on behalf of the poor. However, within legal aid offices, lawyers interacted with female social workers who acted as gatekeepers, mediators, and translators between the lawyers and the poor. This gendered professional complementarity in legal aid offices helped lawyers to put limits on their new “social function”: it allowed them to maintain legal aid as a part‐time activity that did not challenge the structure of the legal system as a whole.     

Working for Corporate Actors: Social Change and Elite Attorneys in Chicago

Elite attorneys have been the objects of social scientific study and speculation for many years. This article contributes to that body of thought by reporting some of the results of a research project that studied 59 members of Chicago's corporate actor legal elite-the lawyers who serve the city's major business, social, civic, political, and cultural organizations.
The article briefly defines the elite studied and the design of the overall re-search project. It then focuses on the working situations of these lawyers and the professional roles they play for their respective corporate actors. A division of legal labor that is discovered to separate house counsel from law firm partners among the elite is analyzed in some depth.
Since the professional roles of these elite attorneys differ from those de-scribed by other social scientists earlier, the article concludes by offering a theory to explain this apparent social change. By tapping recent discussions of the coming of postliberal society, it suggests that corporate actors engineer this new division of legal labor for their attorneys in response to the complex new legal problems posed by institutional changes in the larger society.     

Lawyer Satisfaction in the Process of Structuring Legal Careers

This article proposes a new approach to the study of job satisfaction in the legal profession. Drawing on a Bourdieusian understanding of the relationship between social class and dispositions, we argue that job satisfaction depends in part on social origins and the credentials related to these origins, with social hierarchies helping to define the expectations and possibilities that produce professional careers. Through this lens, job satisfaction is understood as a mechanism through which social and professional hierarchies are produced and reproduced. Relying on the first national data set on lawyer careers (including both survey data and in-depth interviews), we find that lawyers' social background, as reflected in the ranking of their law school, decreases career satisfaction and increases the odds of a job search for the most successful new lawyers. When combined with the interview data, we find that social class is an important component of a stratification system that tends to lead individuals into hierarchically arranged positions.     

What is the Use of a Human Right to Development? Legal Pluralism, ‘Participation’, and a Tentative Rehabilitation

The human right to development divides academic thought. On the one hand, it is mistrusted as an apology for human rights (and other) abuses. On the other, it remains a central pillar of the UN‐led campaign against poverty. Building on the concept of the right to participate in development framed in the UN General Assembly Declaration of 1986, this article seeks to show that there is some scope for the rehabilitation of that right. It demonstrates how the development discourse has tended to exclude minority and subaltern groups. Drawing on the insights of legal pluralism, it then outlines ways in which, for example, indigenous communities have reasserted some control over the development process, before suggesting how this could lay the basis for the wider rehabilitation of the idea of a human right to development.     

Trickster, Hero, Helper: A Report on the Lawyer Image

This study presents evidence that there are three distinct images of lawyers that are held by both lawyers and the public. The lawyers' professional subculture and values are explored through examination of the three images and their interrelationships as seen from differing perspectives. Implications are drawn concerning issues of lawyer identity, social responsibility, lawyer-client relations, and the unity of the bar. The images are related to other symbolic structures, including the adversary system, the family, and Western myth.     

传统与转型：坚守正义、守护良知和维护荣誉

律师是法律职业共同体中的一员,既要代表和维护委托人的利益,又要看重正义和司法公正。律师应当成为社会的一个阶层,构成一个重要的社会群体,构成公民社会一个最成熟的层面,成为反对专制和建设民主的重要社会力量。新世纪初,中国律师随社会政治转型再次面临新的转型,律师将从传统职业角色中走出来．部分地转向社会公共事务和政治生活。律师职业转型应当适度保持传统本色,以实现社会正义为根本使命,以守护社会良知为职业本分,以维护共同体的荣誉为最高利益。     

Lawyers on the move: the consequences of mobility for legal careers

While the legal profession was traditionally conceived of as geographically bounded, recent decades have witnessed a surge in the movement of lawyers across geographic boundaries. This mobility has transformed the paths through which legal careers are built and sustained. Relying on Bourdieu's concept of capital, this paper focuses on the effects of geographic mobility within the legal profession in order to explore how moving can alter the forms and value of capital—human, social, or symbolic—necessary for professional advancement. Drawing on two unique datasets, we find that geographic mobility can be a source for the emergence of new inequalities within the profession, so that lawyers moving from one jurisdiction to another do not receive full value for their credentials. We also find that geographic mobility can exacerbate existing inequalities in the profession, and finally, our analyses suggest that understanding the effects of capital assets equally requires attention to the functional form of capital within professional fields.     

Cause Lawyers,Political Violence,and Professionalism in Conflict

This article examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian societies balance their professional responsibilities as lawyers with their commitment to a political cause. It is drawn from extensive interviews with both lawyers and political activists in a range of societies. It focuses on the challenges for lawyers in managing relations with violent politically‐motivated clients and their movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work', it seeks to examine the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that is developed in such contexts, offering three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers in order to better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites: (a) struggle lawyers (b) human rights activists and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community'. The article concludes by re‐examining how law is imagined in the legitimation work of cause lawyers in such settings and how that work is remembered in the transition from violence.     

Social Media’s Role in Peacebuilding and Post-Conflict Recovery

Armed conflict can have detrimental and profound effects on the social capital of people and communities affected by violence. Besides the destruction of economic and physical infrastructures, intrastate conflict fractures societies, destroys social capital, and exposes vulnerable populations to mental health disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder. The restoration of social capital represents a major challenge in achieving sustainable peace in the vast majority of pluralistic societies that have suffered from past conflicts. The emphasis on the reconstruction of the physical infrastructure needed for the survival of agonized communities after a conflict can delay the restoration of social capital, which slows down the recovery process. As a result, the damaged social capital in post-conflict societies remains an obstacle in building sustainable peace. This essay highlights the influence of social media on the restoration of social and psychological capitals in post-conflict recovery.     

The Social Movement Turn in Law

The rise of social movements in US legal scholarship is a current response to an age‐old problem in progressive legal thought: harnessing law for social change while maintaining a distinction between law and politics. This problem erupted in controversy around the civil rights–era concept of legal liberalism defined by activist courts and lawyers pursuing political reform through law. Contemporary legal scholars have responded by building on social science to develop a new concept—movement liberalism—that assigns leadership of transformative change to social movements to preserve conventional roles for courts and lawyers. Movement liberalism aims to achieve the lost promise of progressive reform, while avoiding critiques of legal activism that have divided scholars for a half‐century. Yet rather than resolving the law‐politics problem, movement liberalism reproduces long‐standing debates, carrying forward critical visions of law that it seeks to transcend.