The concept of adversarial legalism has been widely used by scholars of law, public administration, public policy, political science, sociology, and Law and Society, but the varying ways in which the concept has been employed raise concerns that it has become stretched to the point of incoherence. We argue that adversarial legalism entails both a s...
This article examines the origins of US mass incarceration. Although it is clear that changes in policy and practice are the proximate drivers of the prison boom, researchers continue to explore—and disagree about—why crime control policy and practice changed in ways that fueled the growth of incarceration in all 50 states. One well-known account e...
In the last few decades, the study of law and religion has undergone considerable reconstruction. Less and less constrained by modern statist construals of rights talk or tied to confessional contexts, the comparative study of the intersection of law and religion by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and religious studies scholars is underg...
We call for a further appreciation of the versatility of concepts and methods that increase the breadth and diversity of work on law and social science. We make our point with a review of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism's value, like other important concepts, lies in its versatility as well as its capacity for replication. Several classic works intr...
The last two decades have seen an unprecedented proliferation of ethnographies of policing in many parts of the world. Implicit in the body of this new work is the continuation of an old and perhaps irresolvable debate on what policing is: the extralegal subjugation of subordinate populations or an agency whose authority is highly restricted by the...
This article uses oral histories of surviving founders to explore the emergence of law and society as a scholarly movement and its transformation to a scholarly field. The oral histories we draw on come from a unique public archive of interviews with founders of law and society titled Conversations in Law and Society, which is maintained by the Cen...
This review collects initiatives and legal decisions designed to mitigate discrimination in pretrial decision making, jury selection, jury unanimity, and jury deliberations. It also reviews initiatives to interrupt implicit racial biases. Among these, Washington's new rule for jury selection stands alone in treating racism as the product of both in...
This review is about scholarly contributions to a hotly debated issue—gun policy. Teasing apart the politics of evidence within gun politics, it examines both how research agendas shape gun policy and politics as well as how gun policy and politics shape research agendas. To do so, the article maps out two waves of gun research, Gun Studies 1.0 and...
Swencionis & Goff identified five situations that tend to increase the likelihood that an individual police officer may behave in a racially disparate way: discretion, inexperience, salience of crime, cognitive demand, and identity threat. This article applies their framework to the realities of police work, identifying situations and assignments i...
The rise of big data and machine learning is a polarizing force among those studying inequality and the law. Big data and tools like predictive modeling may amplify inequalities in the law, subjecting vulnerable individuals to enhanced surveillance. But these data and tools may also serve an opposite function, shining a spotlight on inequality and ...
