Gendered Paths to Legal Citizenship: The Case of Latin‐American Immigrants in Phoenix,Arizona

In this paper we seek to contribute to a greater understanding of legal citizenship by exploring the gendered experiences of Latin‐American‐origin immigrants in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area as they go through the legalization process. To explore this gendered angle we rely on in‐depth interviews conducted from 1998 through 2008 with women and men from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico. The data reveal that although immigration policies and procedures are presumably gender neutral, they are in fact inflected with gendered meanings and enacted in gendered social structures. Gender ideologies permeate the processes to differentially affect the legalization, permanent legal residence, and citizenship processes of immigrant women and men. This article points to key gender inequalities in immigration law.     

Just Cognition: Scientific Research on Bias and Some Implications for Legal Procedure and Decision‐Making

Common law judges have traditionally been concerned about bias and the appearance of bias. Bias is believed to threaten the administration of justice and the legitimacy of legal decision‐making, particularly public confidence in the courts. This article contrasts legal approaches to bias with a range of biases, particularly cognitive biases, familiar to scientists who study human cognition and decision‐making. Research reveals that judges have narrowly conceived the biases that threaten legal decision‐making, insisting that some potential sources of bias are not open to review and that they are peculiarly resistant to bias through legal training and judicial experience. This article explains how, notwithstanding express concern with bias, there has been limited legal engagement with many risks known to actually bias decision‐making. Through examples, and drawing upon scientific research, it questions legal approaches and discusses the implications of more empirically‐based approaches to bias for decision making and institutional legitimacy.     

Identification of 2‐(ethylamino)‐1‐(4‐methylphenyl)‐1‐pentanone (4‐MEAP), a New “Legal High” Sold by an Internet Vendor as 4‐Methyl Pentedrone

Online vendors are offering a new legal high, 4‐methylpentedrone (4‐MPD). Information for potential users provided by internet vendors of 4‐MPD includes incorrect structures and nonexistent CAS numbers. A sample of 4‐MPD was obtained and analyzed using GC‐MS, NMR, and LC‐EIS. The fragmentation data from the GC‐MS and LC‐EIS produced an M‐1 ion that suggested the molecular mass was 219 amu, rather than 205 amu as calculated for 4‐methylpentedrone. The difference in molecular mass corresponded to the addition of a methyl group. Based on the mass and fragmentation pattern, two standards were synthesized, 2‐(ethylamino)‐1‐(4‐methylphenyl)‐1‐pentanone and 1‐(4‐methylphenyl)‐2‐(propylamino)‐1‐butanone. The synthesis involved bromination of the appropriate ketone followed by the reaction with ethylamine or propylamine. Based on the NMR data and unique fragmentation patterns produced by these molecules, the sample was identified as 2‐(ethylamino)‐1‐(4‐methylphenyl)‐1‐pentanone, not 4‐methylpentedrone.     

Of Tribunes and Tyrants: Machiavelli's Legal and Extra‐Legal Modes for Controlling Elites

This essay examines the two means by which Machiavelli thought republics could address the political problem of predatory socio‐economic elites: Healthy republics, he proposes explicitly, should consistently check the “insolence of the nobles” by establishing constitutional offices like the Roman tribunes of the plebeians; corrupt republics, he suggests more subtly, should completely eliminate overweening oligarchs via the violent actions of a tyrannical individual. Roman‐styled tribunes, wielding veto, legislative and accusatory authority, contain the oppressive behavior of socio‐economic elites during normal republican circumstances. By contrast, having overthrown a republic grown corrupt through oligarchic encroachment on the commonweal, Machiavelli suggests that Greek‐styled tyrants lay the foundation for a more robust—that is, more egalitarian and martial—republic down the road by eliminating elites entirely and by instituting economic redistribution and military reforms.     

Asking the Sovereignty Question in Global Legal Pluralism: From “Weak” Jurisprudence to “Strong” Socio‐Legal Theories of Constitutional Power Operations

The article examines recent theories of legal and constitutional pluralism, especially their adoption of sociological perspectives and criticisms of the concept of sovereignty. The author argues that John Griffiths's original dichotomy of “weak” and “strong” pluralism has to be reassessed because “weak” jurisprudential theories contain useful sociological analyses of the internal differentiation and operations of specific legal orders, their overlapping, parallel validity and collisions in global society. Using the sociological methodology of legal pluralism theories and critically elaborating on Teubner's societal constitutionalism, the author subsequently reformulates the question of sovereignty as a sociological problem of complex power operations communicated through the constitutional state's organization and reconfigured within the global legal and political framework.     

New Institutionalism and Naturalism in Socio‐Legal Analysis: Institutionalist Approaches to Regulatory Decision Making

Through drawing on the work particularly of sociological and organizational theorists socio-legal work has added considerably to an understanding of the uses of law and discretion, and shown the contingency of the operation of law on the economic, political and organizational context. Some important questions still remain unanswered, however. In particular, if in decision making law is not determinative, but rather decisions are shaped by other bureaucratic or organizational norms, political and economic pressures and an individual's own world views and interests, what role does law play? Further, what impact does the decision process, in which different norms or considerations all bear, have on law? In starting to answer these questions the article examines the models of decision processes and decision behavior which underly the different new institutionalist analyses, and suggests that whilst they provide some insights, they have their own limits.     

The Legal Case File as Border Object: On Self‐reference and Other‐reference in Criminal Law

What do case files do? With help of an ethnographic study on the care, maintenance, and use of legal case files in a Dutch, inquisitorial context, we work through Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law. We understand these case files as enacting and performing both self‐reference and other‐reference. We coin the term border object to denote the way the legal case file becomes the nexus between two worlds it itself performatively produces: the world of ‘law itself’ on the one hand, and the ‘world out there’ on the other. As such, our discussion offers clues for a partial reconciliation of Latour's and Luhmann's conceptualizations of law: while Luhmann's insistence on other‐referential operations assist in showing how law forges an ‘epistemic relationship’ with the realities it seeks to judge, Latour's concentration on the materialities of epistemic practices assists in situating these other‐referential and self‐referential operations.     

Of Mandarins,Legal Consciousness,and the Cultural Turn in US Legal History: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

This article traces the impact of Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” on scholars writing at the intersection of law and history. While Gordon's central claim about the constitutive character of the law has come to serve as a working assumption in the field, the case he made for the intellectual history of doctrine as articulated by legal mandarins has proven less influential in the twenty‐five years since the article was published. Instead, legal historians have focused their attention on the interaction between official and lay forms of law‐making with a decided emphasis on popular legal consciousness. For precisely this reason, the time may be ripe for reconsideration of mandarin materials, not only for what they have to tell us about the dynamics of cultural change, but also as sources of insight into basic puzzles of the human condition that have tended across time to be expressed in and through legal forms.     

Novel O‐propyl,S‐propyl,and N‐propyl substituted 1,4‐naphthoquinones and 1,4‐anthraquinones as potential fingermark development reagents for porous surfaces

Lawsone is a 2‐substituted‐1,4‐naphthoquinone derivative, which has been proposed as an alternative to the reagents currently used for fingermark detection on porous surfaces. 2‐substituted‐anthraquinones, which contain an additional conjugated benzene ring, have a similar chemical structure to that of lawsone. In this study, a new series of 2‐substituted‐1,4‐naphthoquinones and 2‐substituted‐1,4‐anthraquinones were synthesized and completely characterized by¹H NMR,¹³C NMR, IR, and HPLC‐TOF/MS analyses. All newly synthesized 2‐substituted‐1,4‐quinones were investigated for their ability to develop latent fingermarks on porous surfaces, and this ability was compared with that of lawsone. Each fingermark developed was graded using an established method; thus, quantitative data were attributed to each fingermark. It has been demonstrated that the 1,4 ‐ quinones react with amino acids present in latent fingermarks on selected paper surfaces to produce faint yellow‐orange impressions, which exhibit strong photoluminescence when illuminated with a forensic light source at 440 nm and observed through a red filter. None of the compounds caused background darkening. The results obtained were generally similar to those of lawsone, however, 8‐dibromo‐2‐(propylamino)naphthalene‐1,4‐dione and 5,8‐dibromo‐2‐(propylthio)naphthalene‐1,4‐dione yielded better results for copier paper and colored (blue) copier paper used in this analysis. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the role of 1,4‐anthraquinone derivatives as potential fingermark development reagents. The results indicate that 1,4‐quinones have a potential to be used as reagents for enhancement of latent fingermarks.     

What's Law Got to Do with It? Judicial Behavioralists Test the “Legal Model” of Judicial Decision Making

[Behavioral research has] the potential to engender serious confusion over judicial decision making. Even worse, [it] may mislead the unsuspecting … into thinking that judges are lawless in their decision making, influenced more by personal ideology than legal principles…. I have no doubt that careful statistical analysis, cautiously interpreted, may conceivably shed some light on judicial decision making. But serious scholars seeking to analyze the work of the courts cannot simply ignore the internal experiences of judges as irrelevant or disingenuously expressed. (Edwards 1998, 1337-38)
[E]ven if Chief Judge Edwards is accurately reporting his perceptions, one must worry about whether those perceptions are in fact an accurate portrayal of the work of his court…. [W]hen leaders tell the public that their institutions function well and that the views of potential critics should be disregarded, skepticism and empirical testing are appropriate. (Revesz 1999, 845)     

A Vision of Social‐Legal Change: Rescuing Ehrlich from “Living Law”

The hundredth anniversary of the original publication of Eugen Ehrlich's Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law is nearly upon us. The book earned high praise from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound, and Karl Llewellyn as one of the outstanding works of its time. Ehrlich has been identified as an early legal realist, a pioneering figure in legal sociology, and a leading theorist of legal pluralism. In this retrospective review, I explain the strengths and weaknesses of this classic book. Ehrlich articulated an unsurpassed account of dynamic social‐legal change, an account that remains fresh and timely today.     

The Loss of Property Rights and the Construction of Legal Consciousness in Early Socialist Romania (1950–1965)

What happens to legal and rights consciousness when rights previously protected are taken away? In this article, I investigate the process of contesting urban housing nationalization in Romania in the early 1950s in order to understand how the loss of property rights led to new hybrid types of legal consciousness. I find that the construction of socialist legal consciousness was grounded in the interaction between the legally constituted selves of former owners and state bureaucrats who drew from distinct legal and property rights ideologies. This process underscores continuities in legal consciousness even under drastic regime changes, which in turn has implications for the construction of new hegemonic legalities and power regimes. The article is based on extensive document and archival research.     

Creating a State‐Academic Partnership to Advance a Forensic Teaching Service: Benefits and Barriers

In Washington State, like many states, there is a shortage of forensically trained mental health clinicians to work with criminal justice‐involved individuals. At the direction of the state legislature, a collaborative project was undertaken by the University of Washington, the state Department of Social and Health Services, and a state psychiatric hospital to develop a proposal for a jointly sponsored forensic teaching service. The authors reviewed the literature, surveyed and interviewed forensic psychiatry and psychology training directors, and conducted site visits of selected training programs that offer multidisciplinary training or have affiliations with state hospitals. The authors conducted focus groups of additional stakeholders, including clinicians and patients in forensic settings, to better understand the needs in Washington. The authors report on several common benefits and barriers to establishing forensic teaching services. Other states and forensic programs may find this article useful in identifying common considerations for forensic mental health teaching services.     

The Time of Constitution‐Making: On the Differentiation of the Legal,Political and Moral Systems and Temporality of Constitutional Symbolism

Abstract. The article focuses on the problem of constitutional symbolism in functionally differentiated societies and its relevance to legal, political, and moral systems. The first part analyses differences between the three systems and their constitutional context. The second part concentrates on the moral symbolic function of modern constitutions and its temporal dimension. It shows that the “good/bad” moral code of constitutions draws on expressive symbolism and transforms it into evaluative symbolism and dogma of morality. The final part analyses the prospective character of modern constitution‐making and its symbolic selectivity regarding the past. The paper concludes by emphasising the systemic pluralisation effect of constitution‐making and the impossibility of constituting systems of “pure” law, morality, and politics.     

Children Exposed to Domestic Violence: Making Trauma‐Informed Custody and Visitation Decisions

This article explores the risks for young children and the challenges for courts that emerge when parents who are victims or perpetrators of intimate partner violence seek court decisions on child visitation or custody matters. We focus particularly on children age five and younger, a group that is disproportionately represented in families affected by intimate partner violence, and especially vulnerable to its traumatic impact. We examine the literature on children's response to violence between their parents and the literature on parental alienation, a counter‐charge that may arise when one parent alleges violence as a reason to limit the other parent's access to the children. We look at challenges faced by both mental health professionals and courts involved in custody determinations and make policy recommendations to help courts make trauma‐informed decisions that best serve children.