The dynamics of household structure in the event of the father's death

This article looks at the survival strategies used in traditional societies by households that were greatly disrupted by the death of the father, usually their principal provider. Research is based on data from two parish censuses (1716 and 1744) of the city of Québec that describe the composition of urban households. Data from the Registre de la Population du Québec Ancien (RPQA), the register of the Québec population before 1800, were also used to complement the information required. Depending on the survival of a mother after the father's death, it appears that households could maintain their nuclear structure, except for those who were dispersed among other households.     

Parental-leave policy for male lawyers in Helsinki and Montreal: cultural and professional barriers to male lawyers’ use of paternity and parental leaves

Family policies in Finland and French Canada (Québec) include fathers’ rights to paternity and parental leaves, which have resulted in more fathers using parental leave. Yet this policy has a limited outreach to male-dominated professions, including the legal profession. In this article, we examine attitudes to paternity and parental leaves among male lawyers and the motives behind their decisions to use or not use them. We approach the issue from the perspective of the legal profession’s professional ethos, which impacts lawyers’ attitudes and practices regarding work-life balance. In our analysis, we draw on 20 Finnish and 18 Quebecois interviews with current and former male lawyers from private law practices in two urban civil-law contexts: Helsinki, Finland and Montreal, Canada. The findings indicate that, in traditionally male-dominated professions, it is not enough to provide men with a statutory right to paternity and parental leave. There is also a need for organisational solutions and peer encouragement in the work environment so that men feel comfortable taking leave.     

Networking in the Shadow of the Law: Informal Access to Legal Expertise through Personal Network Ties

Civil legal problems are common in everyday life, but the costs of obtaining legal representation create barriers to legal action and contribute to disparities in access to justice. Some individuals, however, may have informal access to legal assistance through personal network ties with lawyers, enhancing their responses to justiciable problems. In this study, we draw from theories of social capital and network formation to examine the distribution and mobilization of network‐based legal expertise. Using nationally representative survey data, we find that network‐based access to lawyers is widespread, and most people who have ties to lawyers expect to informally mobilize legal assistance when facing a problem. But people who are most likely to afford formal legal representation are also most likely to have informal access to lawyers. Thus, while informal access to lawyers may shape responses to legal problems, it may also exacerbate inequalities in experiences with civil justice events.     

A common law fly on the transsystemic wall: observing the integrated method at McGill Faculty of Law

Law schools attempting to prepare students for a more global practice are generally advised to tailor a law curriculum to their individual resources. When offering comparative perspectives, some law school programmes have pedagogical advantages arising out of a mixed legal heritage, such as McGill Faculty of Law’s transsystemic approach. What does the transsystemic approach entail, and can aspects of the transsystemic approach, which is grounded in Québec’s bijural and bilingual context, be practised at national-focus law schools? In order to consider this question, the author observed classroom dynamics in first year transsystemic courses. The McGill experience cannot be imported, but its pedagogy offers key lessons for common law national-focus law schools, including the need to make alternative visions of law necessary for understanding.     

Workers describe the effect of the workers' compensation process on their health: a Québec study

This article reports on a Canadian qualitative study designed to examine the workers' experience of the workers' compensation process and to look at the effects of the process on the physical and mental health of claimants. Eighty five in depth individual interviews of injured workers in Québec and six group interviews with workers and worker advocates from Québec, Ontario and British Columbia were analysed to determine the positive and negative impact on claimant health of various steps of the workers' compensation process and of behaviours of significant actors in that process. While superior access to health care and access to economic support both contributed to claimant well-being, various facets of the process undermined the mental health of workers, and in some cases, also had a negative impact on physical health. Primary characteristics of the process that influenced outcomes included stigmatization of injured workers and the significant power imbalance between the claimants and the other actors in the system; the effect of both these mechanisms was tempered by social support. The article describes how caseworkers, physicians, appeal tribunals, employers and compensation boards contribute to the positive or negative impacts on worker health and concludes with recommendations designed to promote the therapeutic aspects of workers' compensation and to curtail those facets that are harmful to worker health. It also has implications for researchers who wish to consider the role of lawyers or compensation in the development or prevention of disability.     

Legal Mobilization on the Terrain of the State: Creating a Field of Immigrant Rights Lawyering in France and the United States

Scholarship on law and social movements has focused attention primarily on the United States, and secondarily on countries that share the Anglo‐American legal tradition. The politics of law and social movements in other national legal contexts remains underexamined. The analysis in this article contrasts legal mobilizations for immigrant rights in France and the United States, and explores the relations between national fields of power and legal practices. I trace the institutionalization of immigrant rights legal organizations in each country and argue that the divergent organizational forms and litigation strategies adopted by professionalized movement organizations reflect the dynamics of the nationally distinct fields of power relations within which law reform has been conducted. My analysis links the material and symbolic resources available to law reformers to the relative authority of private and public juridical actors in each state.     

Constructing Police Abuse after Rodney King: How Skid Row Residents and the Los Angeles Police Department Contest Video Evidence

This ethnographic article explores the manner in which the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LACAN), a grassroots organization made up of homeless and low‐income Skid Row residents, generates video evidence for use in lawsuits against the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). For marginalized communities fighting police abuse, the 1992 acquittal of four LAPD officers charged with the beating of Rodney King demonstrated that even the most “obvious” and condemning video evidence is subject to reinterpretation and reframing by skilled legal professionals. In response, LACAN has developed interactional filming strategies designed to constrain officers' ability to offer alternative explanations, while alleviating disparities in court‐recognized authority. In the tradition of legal consciousness scholarship, this article “de‐centers” the law by shifting emphasis from formal judicial decisions in the courtroom to citizen groups in their own communities, as they learn to use legal norms and conventions in social justice campaigns.     

Two Truths and a Lie: In re John Z. and Other Stories at the Juncture of Teen Sex and the Law

Laws governing adolescent sexuality are incoherent and chaotically enforced, and legal scholarship on the subject neither addresses nor remedies adolescents’ vulnerability in sexual encounters. To posit a meaningful relationship between the criminal law and adolescent sexual encounters, one must examine what we know about adolescent sexuality from both the academic literature and the adults who control the criminal justice response to such interactions. This article presents an in‐depth study of In re John Z., a 2003 rape prosecution involving two seventeen‐year‐olds. Using this case, I explore the implications of the prosecution by interviewing a variety of experts and analyzing the contemporary literature on sexual norms among youth. I also relate a series of interviews conducted with the major players in the prosecution. Examining this case from a variety of perspectives permits a deeper understanding of how the law regulates adolescent sexual encounters and why it fails.     

Partnership as a new strategy in mental health policy: the case of Québec

The notion of partnership is increasingly adopted as a sine qua non for the successful resolution of strategic problems in the field of human services. In this paper, I examine Québec's recent mental health policy and its operational definition of the concept. I then suggest some of the roots and reasons behind this province's adoption of le partenariat as the basis for policy. I suggest that it is a response to four key strategic problems: (1) the exhaustion of resources and allocation of losses; (2) the loss of faith in government and the consequent need to redefine the role of the state; (3) the loss of faith in professional knowledge and the increasingly forceful voice of alternative and "psychiatric survivor" groups; (4) the problem of overload in pluralist and competitive democracy and, related to this, the ubiquitous search for consensus and frictionless solutions. I conclude that in adopting the language of partnership, policymakers in Québec and elsewhere are being seduced by the possibilities of neocorporatist ideas applied to the management of human services.     

Legal Socialization of Children and Adolescents

Research on children and the law has recently renewed its focus on the development of children's ties to law and legal actors. We identify the developmental process through which these relations develop as legal socialization, a process that unfolds during childhood and adolescence as part of a vector of developmental capital that promotes compliance with the law and cooperation with legal actors. In this paper, we show that ties to the law and perceptions of law and legal actors among children and adolescents change over time and age. We show that neighborhood contexts and experiences with legal actors shape the outcomes of legal socialization. Children report lower ratings of legitimacy of the law and greater legal cynicism when they view interactions with legal actors as unfair and harsh. We show that perceived legitimacy of law and legal authorities shapes compliance with the law, and that these effects covary with social contexts including neighborhood. We identify neighborhood differences in this relationship that reflect differential experiences of children with criminal justice authorities and other social control agents. The results suggest that legal actors may play a role in socialization processes that lead to compliance with or rejection of legal and social norms. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Law School Climates: Job Satisfaction Among Tenured US Law Professors

In this article, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate why post‐tenure law professors of color and women professors within the US legal academy are differentially dissatisfied with their work lives. Previous social science research has indicated lingering difficulties for professionals from traditionally marginalized groups as they advance to higher levels. Post‐tenure law professors have been understudied relative to similar senior‐level professionals. Mixed methods allow us to isolate institutional structure and implicit cultural bias as key mediators of this dissatisfaction, converging on issues of respect, voice, and collegiality as crucial. We use the example of the legal academy to show how empirical research can shed important light on the realities of legal professionals—here, the faculty who are training the next generation of US attorneys. Following in the new legal realist tradition, we demonstrate the power of mixed empirical methodologies for grasping social realities pertinent to law.     

Undoing the Legal Capacities of a Military Object: A Case Study on the (In)Visibility of Civilians

International law dictates that actors in armed conflicts must distinguish between combatants and civilians. But how do legal actors assess the legality of a military operation after the fact? I analyze a civil proceeding for compensation by victims of a German‐led airstrike in Afghanistan. The court treated military video as key evidence. I show how lawyers, judges, and expert witnesses categorized those involved by asking what a “military viewer” would make of the pictures. During the hearing, they avoided the categories of combatants/civilians; the military object resisted legal coding. I examine the decision in its procedural context, using ethnographic field notes and legal documents. I combine two ethnomethodological analytics: a trans‐sequential approach and membership categorization analysis. I show the value of this combination for the sociological analysis of legal practice. I also propose that legal practitioners should use this approach to assess military viewing as a concerted, situated activity.     

Relational Embeddedness and Socially Motivated Case Screening in the Practice of Law in Rural China

Based on an ethnographic study conducted in rural China, this article demonstrates that relational embeddedness—that is, concrete and durable relationships among law practitioners, clients, adversaries, and the surrounding communities—holds the key to our understandings of the legal profession's case screening. Over the past decade, legal services in rural China have been commodified significantly. Despite that, relationships with extended families, community members, and local political elites have continued to shape law practitioners’ professional decision‐making. By carefully scrutinizing multiplex relationships involved in legal services, law practitioners seek to meet the practical needs of their personal life, and more importantly, to uphold moral obligations derived from communal life. Seen in this light, the practice of law is an integral part of a moral economy in the countryside. Rather than giving rise to a more progressive form of services, the legal profession's participation in this moral economy often reinforces existing power structures in Chinese society. By introducing the concept of relational embeddedness into sociolegal research, this study unpacks the complex consequences of the recent legal reforms in China; it also enriches our theoretical understandings of related concepts, such as social capital, networking, and guanxi in the practice of law.     

Social justice jurisprudence of clinical education programme: A paradigm shift from legal education to justice education

The legal profession has remained relevant in bringing about positive transformation in society — with leaders, policymakers, and change makers around the world mostly possessing a background in the law. That said, the trust, and positive image, enjoyed by legal professionals continues on a declining path. Considered more glamorous, the legal profession has gone astray from the path of social justice. In this article, I argue that the negative perception of legal professionals is, in large part, because of the way legal professionals are taught and trained in law schools. I argue that legal teaching pedagogy in South Asia, and generally in developing countries, is a product of colonial structure. Even after the so-called decolonisation movement, law schools and universities, for example in South Asia, institutionalised a legal pedagogy unsuited to the epistemic actualities of their societies. A law student in South Asia was and continues to be taught the Western conception of what the law is and its relationship to justice. In a legal culture carrying the transplanted laws of the colonisers, the students of developing countries are meticulously trained in the technical skills of reasoning and interpretation by applying Eurocentric guidelines of positivist construction. In light of this, I propose a shift in legal education: to transform the existing legal education and pedagogy into ‘justice education’. I focus on the ancient principles — located in the Eastern legal philosophy — of empirical reasoning and the importance of the human nature of sociability in arriving at social justice. To combat the tendency of insulating law students from societal problems, I propose a social justice-driven legal pedagogy. I have also reflected on some practices that ‘are’ and highlighted other practices that ‘ought to be’. My thesis connotes that the legal profession has an innate role in building the capability of individuals who are deprived and excluded. In line with it, I present examples of scalable clinical legal education being practised specially by the Kathmandu School of Law that can create multidimensional legal professionalism.

     

Mobilizing the Law in China: "Informed Disenchantment" and the Development of Legal Consciousness

This article critically examines the development of legal consciousness among legal aid plaintiffs in Shanghai. It is based on 16 months of research at a large legal aid center and in‐depth interviews with 50 plaintiffs. Chinese legal aid plaintiffs come to the legal process with high expectations about the possibility of protecting their rights; however, they also have only a vague and imprecise knowledge of legal procedure and their actual codified rights. Through this process of legal mobilization, plaintiffs' legal consciousness changes in two separate dimensions: changes in one's feelings of efficacy and competency vis‐à‐vis the law, and changes in one's perception/evaluation of the legal system. Put another way, the first dimension is “How well can I work the law?” and the second is “How well does the law work?” In this study I observe positive changes in feelings of individual efficacy and competency that are combined with more negative evaluations/perceptions of the legal system in terms of its fairness and effectiveness. The positive feelings of efficacy and voice provided by the legal process encourage labor dispute plaintiffs in the post‐dispute period to plan new lawsuits and to help friends and relatives with their legal problems. Disenchantment with the promises of the legal system does not lead to despondency, but to more critical, informed action. This study provides new evidence on the nature of China's developing legal system with a focus on the social response to the state‐led “rule of law” project.     

Legal Intermediaries: How Insurance Companies Construct the Meaning of Compliance with Antidiscrimination Laws

Existing empirical research suggests that human resource officials, managers, and in‐house counsel influence the meaning of antidiscrimination law by communicating an altered ideology of what civil rights laws mean that is colored with managerial values. This article explores how insurance companies play a critical and, as yet, unrecognized role in mediating the meaning of antidiscrimination law through Employment Practice Liability Insurance (EPLI). My analysis draws from, links, and contributes to two literatures that examine organizational behavior in different ways: new institutional organizational sociology studies of how organizations respond to legal regulation and sociolegal insurance scholars' research on how institutions govern through risk. Through participant observation at EPLI conferences, interviews, and content analysis of insurance loss prevention manuals, my study bridges these two literatures and highlights how the insurance field uses a risk‐based logic to construct the threat of employment law and influence the form of compliance from employers. Faced with uncertain legal risk concerning potential discrimination violations, insurance institutions elevate the risk and threat in the legal environment and offer EPLI and a series of risk‐management services that build discretion into legal rules and mediate the nature of civil rights compliance. My data suggest that insurance risk‐management services may sometimes be compatible with civil rights goals of improving equality, due process, and fair governance in workplace settings, but at other times may simply make discrimination claims against employers more defensible.     

Between Law and Transnational Social Movement Organizations: Stabilizing Expectations of Global Public Goods

This article draws on Niklas Luhmann's theory and method to present transnational social movement organizations as a solution to the problem of increased expectations of global public goods which fail to find adequate accommodation in law. As a concrete example of the limits of law in this respect, it examines the non liquet of the World Court on the question of the illegality of nuclear weapons. The trajectory of anti‐nuclear norms is traced beyond the limits of law to the alternative structure of transnational social movement organizations, and the article presents such organizations as stabilizing increased expectations of global public goods through their recursive decision making and their capacity to continuously project those expectations at the legal and political systems. This generates observations on the concept of ‘global governance ‘, the structural relations between global civil society and international law, and the role of this form of organization in the evolution of the global political system.     

The Evolutionary Game‐Theoretic Foundations of Law

Interdisciplinary work in the law often starts and stops with the social sciences. To produce a complete understanding of how law, evolutionary game‐theoretic insights must, however, supplement these more standard social scientific methods. To illustrate, this article critically examines The Force of Law by Frederick Schauer and The Expressive Powers of Law by Richard McAdams. Combining the methods of analytic jurisprudence and social psychology, Schauer clarifies the need for a philosophically respectable and empirically well‐grounded account of the ubiquity of legal sanctions. Drawing primarily on economic and social psychological paradigms, McAdams highlights law's potential to alter human behavior through expressions that coordinate. Still, these contributions generate further puzzles about how law works, which can be addressed using evolutionary game‐theoretic resources. Drawing on these resources, this article argues that legal sanctions are ubiquitous to law not only because they can motivate legal compliance, as Schauer suggests, but also because they provide the general evolutionary stability conditions for intrinsic legal motivation. In reaction to McAdams, this article argues that law's expressive powers can function to coordinate human behavior only because humans are naturally and culturally evolved to share a prior background agreement in forms of life. Evolutionary game‐theoretic resources can thus be used to develop a unified framework from within which to understand some of the complex interrelationships between legal sanctions, intrinsic legal motivation, and law's coordinating power. Going forward, interdisciplinary studies of how law works should include greater syntheses of contemporary insights from evolutionary game theory.     

The History of Genres: Reaching for Reality in Law and Literature

Genres are historical formations; their ability to generate knowledge depends on their interrelationships within a culture. Since law, too, can be viewed as a genre, studies of specific historical relationalities between law and other genres are necessary for law's own history and theory. This essay discusses differentiations between Victorian law and literature, starting out from the recent publication of Ayelet Ben‐Yishai's Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction (2013), which reveals some of that history. I examine two points: differentiations in legal and literary approaches to probabilistic knowledge, and differentiations in the author functions in law and literature. These differentiations bear multiple implications. I discuss implications for evidence‐law debates about probabilistic evidence, for contract‐law debates about the centrality of autonomy and self‐authorship, and for understandings of legal reasoning itself—the elusive notion of “thinking like a lawyer.”     

The Practice of Law With LGBT‐Parent Families

In this article, I examine how a history of legal conflict has produced a constantly evolving professional identity for lawyers representing lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) clients on family matters. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 21 lawyers, I describe variation across areas of specialization, advertising, clientele, and access to professional networks. In addition, I focus on how sociopolitical and legal context shapes professional identity and practice for these lawyers, demonstrating the importance of practice location for this group of lawyers. Although interviews were conducted prior to national marriage recognition, these findings provide insight into the future development of the LGBT family law profession post‐Obergefell.