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.     

Theorizing Race and Imprisonment: Towards a New Penality

This article compares historical and contemporary notions of race in France, England and Wales, and the United States, in order to explain each nation's prison population. It seeks to demonstrate how the distinct interpretations and ways of documenting race in each place correspond with an over-representation of specific populations in that nation's prison system. After describing the prison population in each country, the paper analyzes the historical and cultural construction of ideas of race in France. Of particular importance is the Enlightenment and the 19th century love of taxonomy that articulated, mapped and reified Otherness and which is also considered to be the birth of prison and criminology. Thus, the genealogical approach may provide a new understanding of the conceptual and practical interdependence of race and imprisonment, which is then applied to the U.S. and England. This paper aims to help criminologists move beyond merely documenting the over-representation of minorities to critiquing the structures of race and punishment, grounded in colonialism and slavery, that serve to legitimate strategies of social control. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Affect Regulation and the Cycle of Violence Against Women: New Directions for Understanding the Process

The process of the intergenerational transmission of violence is not well understood. A risk and resilience model of criminal violence against women was investigated using secondary data. The sample was composed of adolescent male juvenile delinquents who had been physically abused by their parents, and who were followed up at ages 25 and 31. A series of structural equation models were fit to investigate whether dysregulated affect mediated the effects of attachment and family chaos on the adult perpetration of violence against women. These models support the hypothesis that affect dysregulation may act as a mediator. Results raise new ideas about the mechanisms by which violence may be transmitted across generations.     

Binding Prometheus: How the 19th Century Expansion of Trade Impeded Britain's Ability to Raise an Army

This article explores how the dramatic expansion of British trade in the decades prior to World War I affected Britain's ability to raise an army. We first develop a simple institutionally based model of British army recruiting which we then perturb by expanding trade while holding all other variables constant. Our theoretical analysis suggests that the expansion of trade would impede Britain's ability to raise an army, a prediction that finds substantial support in the historical record using both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that trade enhances a state's military power, we find that the expansion of trade did not ease Britain's resource constraints by making labor more freely available for military purposes. Rather, by raising the civilian demand for labor, the expansion of trade made labor more expensive and difficult to mobilize, even as a more effective army became more important to British strategy.