Situated Justice: A Contextual Analysis of Fairness and Inequality in Employment Discrimination Litigation

A substantial body of sociolegal scholarship suggests that the legitimacy of the law crucially depends on the public's perception that legal processes are fair. The bulk of this research relies on an underdeveloped account of the material and institutional contexts of litigants' perceptions of fairness. We introduce an analysis of situated justice to capture a contextualized conception of how litigants narrate fairness in their actual legal encounters. Our analysis draws on 100 in‐depth interviews with defendant's representatives, plaintiffs, and lawyers involved in employment discrimination lawsuits, selected as part of a multimethod study of 1,788 discrimination cases filed in U.S. district courts between 1988 and 2003. This article offers two key empirical findings, the first at the level of individual perceptions and the second at the level of legal institutions. First, we find that neither defendants' representatives nor plaintiffs believe discrimination law is fair. Rather than sharing a complaint, however, each side sees unfairness only in those aspects of the process that work to their disadvantage. Second, we demonstrate that the very notion of fairness can belie structural asymmetries that, overall, profoundly benefit employers in employment discrimination lawsuits. We conclude by discussing how a situated justice analysis calls for a rethinking of empirical research on fairness. Audio recordings of respondents quoted in this article are available online. ¹      

Welfare policymaking and intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender in U.S. state legislatures

Welfare policy in the American states has been shaped profoundly by race, ethnicity, and representation. Does gender matter as well? Focusing on state welfare reform in the mid‐1990s, we test hypotheses derived from two alternative approaches to incorporating gender into the study of representation and welfare policymaking. An additive approach, which assumes gender and race/ethnicity are distinct and independent, suggests that female state legislators—regardless of race/ethnicity—will mitigate the more restrictive and punitive aspects of welfare reform, much like their African American and Latino counterparts do. In contrast, an intersectional approach, which highlights the overlapping and interdependent nature of gender and race/ethnicity, suggests that legislative women of color will have the strongest countervailing effect on state welfare reform—stronger than that of other women or men of color. Our empirical analyses suggest an intersectional approach yields a more accurate understanding of gender, race/ethnicity, and welfare politics in the states.     

Interpersonal and self-critical dysphoria and behavioral problems in adolescents

Clinical evidence suggests that various problem behaviors in adolescence can be expressions of dysphoria that have not reached threshold for the diagnosis of depressive disorders. Formulations of two major types of dysphoria distinguish between disruptions of interpersonal relatedness (e.g., feelings of loss or abandonment) and diminished self-esteem (e.g., feelings of self-criticism, failure, or guilt). Adolescents in a suburban high school were given the Achenbach Youth Self-Report, the Adolescent Depressive Experiences Questionnaire, and the Community Epidemiological Survey of Depression for Children (CES-DC). Even after level of depressive symptoms (CES-DC) was partialled out in hierarchical multiple regressions, interpersonal dysphoria significantly accounted for additional variance in predicting internalizing disorders, while self-critical dysphoria added significantly to the explained variance of both internalizing and externalizing disorders, specifically delinquency and aggression in both males and females.Ph.D., 1957, University of Chicago. Research interests: The development of mental representations, their differential impairment in various forms of psychopathology (especially depression), and their change in the therapeutic process.Ph.D., 1981, Yeshiva University. Research interests: adolescent pregnancy, depression, and ego development.Ph.D., 1968, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Research interests: cognitive processes in schizophrenia, dependency and self-criticism in depression, and cognitive structural models of development and psychopathology.Ph.D., 1986, Columbia University, New York. Research interests: adolescent development.Ph.D., 1988, State University New York—Buffalo. Research interests: Language and self-representation and narcissism and borderline disorders.     

Taming The Shrew: Regulating Prisoners Through Women-Centered Mental Health Programming

The Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) has received international praise for its new policies with female prisoners serving federal sentences of two or more years. Regarded as progressive, even radical, other countries have looked toward Canada for inspiration in the design of their own policies [Carlen, (2002) Criminal Justice 2(2)]. CSC’s “women-centered” mental health agenda, however, while rhetorically progressive, remains consistent with disciplinary processes which prioritize self-regulation and aim to correct or normalize those considered failed citizens [Kemshall, (2002), The Howard Journal 41(1), 41–58]. Using Nicolas Rose’s concept of governance through self-regulation [Rose 1991, b Rose (1996). Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Rose (2000). British Journal of Criminology 40, 321–339] as a theoretical framework, we argue that correctional mental health practices privileges a psychological discourse which serves to regulate women prisoners as opposed to empowering or supporting them. We examine the over use of psychiatric labelling of women, such as that of Boderline Personality Disorder, and the resulting treatment regime, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, to illustrate that the CSC has constructed women prisoners as disorderly and disordered and thus in need of taming. This discussion is followed by recommendations for new directions in feminist mental health treatment for women in prison that more adequately confront the inherent tensions and contradictions of prison therapeutic services and that incorporate multi-faceted understandings of the mental health needs of women offenders. We conclude with some policy and research implications of adopting a feminist informed mental health correctional strategy. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Teaching the Violent Past: History Education and Reconciliation, Elizabeth A. Cole

Elizabeth A. Cole has edited a comprehensive collection of casestudies of educational reform efforts following some of the20th century's most searing episodes of violence and human rightsabuse. The collection begins with an essay on the role of educationalreform in reconciliation. Cole     

Labor Regulation,Corporate Governance,and Legal Origin: A Case of Institutional Complementarity?

We explore the influential claim that "legal origin"—the historical origin of a given national legal system in the common law or civil law—accounts for a significant degree of cross-national diversity in economic regulation and development. We show that the claim is undermined by problems in index construction and by a misreading of the implications of the common law/civil law divide for the respective roles of courts and legislatures in law making. We argue that a critical factor, instead, was the timing of industrialization in relation to the emergence of legal institutions associated with the modern business enterprise (the employment relationship and the joint stock company). We also show how distinctive "legal cultures" of the common law and civil law have played a part in setting national systems on separate pathways to economic development.     

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF BARGAINING FOR ADOPTION ASSISTANCE PAYMENTS

Families that adopt children who are in foster care may receive monthly adoption assistance payments to offset the cost of raising the adopted child. The amount of the adoption assistance payment is the subject of bargaining between the family and the child welfare authority. This article uses a bargaining model to highlight factors that, in addition to the expected costs of raising the child, might influence the outcome of bargaining over adoption assistance payments. Findings indicate that married parents who adopt children already in their care have an advantage in bargaining, and single women who adopt their kin or foster children have a disadvantage in bargaining.