The Ferguson Report became a watershed moment for understanding the costs and consequences of the monetary sanctions system for communities of color. Since that time, myriad reports, studies, and commissions have uncovered evidence that suggests that Ferguson, Missouri, was not an outlier but rather part of a broader set of systems throughout the c...
Cepeda Espinosa reflects on how the social sciences, especially the theories of Philip Selznick on responsive law, influenced his approach to constitution making and institutional design, when he worked as presidential advisor to two Colombian presidents, as well as to constitutional adjudication, when he was a justice of the Constitutional Court. ...
A growing body of empirical studies has provided important insights into our understanding of the causes and effects of codified human rights. Yet empirical research has treated human rights treaties and constitutional rights as separate domains, even though the two regimes offer many of the same rights protections and can interact and reinforce ea...
Money has remained closely connected to political sovereignty even as polities changed from empires and kingdoms to dictatorships and democracies, and as money shifted from coin to paper and now to digital currency. Money constitutes a claim on value in exchange and a store and measure of value, so we consider the role law plays in these three arti...
This review examines the workings of jurors deciding criminal cases. It seeks not to commend or condemn jury decision making but rather to offer an empathic exploration of the task that jurors face in exercising their fact-finding duty. Reconstructing criminal events in the courtroom amounts to a difficult feat under the best of circumstances. The ...
Populism is Janus-faced. There is not a single form of populism but rather a variety of different forms, each with profoundly different political consequences. Despite the current hegemony of authoritarian populism, a much different sort of populism is also possible: democratic and antiestablishment populism, which combines elements of liberal and ...
Studies about authoritarianism build the foundation of legal mobilization scholarship and continue to advance this area of sociolegal research. The contributions of these studies become apparent when we view authoritarianism as a phenomenon found in all societies. Authoritarian regimes exist as nation states and as enclaves, such as subnational ter...
Susan Silbey began her academic training in political science and in the course of her studies became a sociologist of law, the last two decades as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's anthropology department and management school. The disciplinary transformations ground, in part, her attention to the ways in which the everyday l...
Racial innocence is the practice of securing blamelessness for the death-dealing realities of racial capitalism. This article reviews the legal, social scientific, and reformist mechanisms that maintain the racial innocence of one particular site: the US carceral state. With its routine dehumanization, violence, and stunning levels of racial dispar...
Intersectionality as a framework and praxis has gathered significance in law and the social sciences over the past 20 years. This article begins by reviewing how intersectionality has been conceptualized, as well as the implications of varying definitions attributed to intersectionality. We then explore applications of intersectionality, first in r...
