Negotiating Status: Pro Bono Partners and Counsels in Large Law Firms

Law firm pro bono work provides access to justice to low-income people and other vulnerable populations. The professionals that manage pro bono programs are at the forefront of that process. The limited available research on these professionals do not often distinguish lawyers from other managers or theorize about their status vis-à-vis other law firm lawyers. Yet the status of lawyers who are also managers of pro bono programs influences both their identities and the management and provision of legal services and advocacy. Drawing on original demographic and interview data, this article shows how law firm pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles and negotiate their status as lawyers and managers. I find that pro bono partners and counsels navigate their ambiguous roles by striving to be perceived as “real” lawyers, reframe their roles as business generators, conform to the billing culture, and establish a common identity. They also negotiate their titles and office spaces to raise their profiles. Gender inequality influences the negotiation of office spaces and the approval of pro bono matters. These findings have implications for lawyers who manage pro bono programs and the legitimacy of pro bono work.

The Judge as a Negotiator: Claims Negotiating and Inequalities in China’s Judicial Mediation

I propose a three-way model of negotiation on judicial mediation: the judge as a negotiator. Primarily drawing on ethnographic observations of a civil judge in a basic-level court in hinterland China, I document Chinese judges’ tactics at the micro level. I find that the Chinese judge not only “expands” and “narrows” claims. In addition, included in her repertoire are “repression,” “conversion,” and “facilitation.” Following this, I explore the inequitable consequences of the judge’s apparent success in disposing cases. In negotiating the claims, the judge convinces or cajoles litigants who are economically vulnerable, inexperienced in the courtroom, legally bewildered, or timid in confronting the judges’ authority, into the settlement. But she often facilitates the claims of litigants who can mount credible political resistance. The interests of those who are vulnerable in one way or another, but not in a position to initiate political threats, are often dispensed. Inequalities are thus generated, reproduced, and reinforced. This three-way negotiation model provides a new perspective to study judicial mediation comparatively.

Bad Queers: LGBTQ People and the Carceral State in Modern America

The war on sex offenders was an American campaign against sex crime that began in the 1930s and is still ongoing. In this review essay, I argue that the architects and opponents of that war engaged in political struggles that—especially during the pivotal era of the long 1970s—produced, criminalized, and hierarchized multiple new categories of “good” and “bad” LGBTQ legal subjects. In making this argument, my aim is to bring the field of LGBTQ political and legal history—especially the work of George Chauncey ([1994] 2019) and Margot Canaday (2009)—into closer conversation with scholarship by queer theorists who are not historians—especially Gayle Rubin ([1984] 2011a) and Michael Warner (1999)—about the stigmatization of non-normative gender and sexual practices. While historians have examined the policing of multiple queer behaviors in the early twentieth century, their examinations of the post-1945 period have been concerned primarily with the consolidation of a starker social and legal binary between homo- and heterosexuality. As their narratives get closer to the present, the most stigmatized “bad” queers become more and more tangential. At least in part, this has been because historians have been under the same pressure as LGBTQ activists to distance LGBTQ identity from the stigma of sexual “deviance”—especially sex that violated age-of-consent statutes—in order to promote the political project of LGBTQ rights. Placing bad queers at the center of LGBTQ political and legal history diversifies who counts as a subject of this history and reveals an even bigger carceral state that governed them.

Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

This article examines the role of law in shaping visual commercial culture by telling the story of the hoarding—the outdoor advertising surface for posters—in the formative decades of mass advertising in Britain, from roughly 1840 to 1914. The hoarding emerged in this period as a distinct property and a focal point of contestation over ways of seeing. Its meaning as a visual environment hinged on questions, which are still resonant today, about the interaction between economic and aesthetic categories: advertising and art, capital and beauty, commerce and culture. Historical actors—among them the organized billposting trade, the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, a civil society organization that took up the cause of protecting public spaces from advertising, governmental and local lawmakers, and citizens—enlisted private and public legal means to respond to these questions. This analysis draws on an expansive interdisciplinary archive to trace them. As it shows, legal means were engaged in cultural demarcation or what Thomas Gieryn has aptly termed boundary work. In establishing cultural boundaries, law defined the terms on which advertising became an integral element of daily visual experience, at once omnipresent and derided. The legal history of advertising thus offers deep insights for visual legal studies.

Liquidity: Water and Investment in Mandate Palestine

In this article, I illustrate two ways in which Zionist settlers appropriated water in Mandate Palestine. The first way was through the imposition of a new kind of property regime, one that measured and defined water rights in terms of volume. This differed from customary Palestinian practice, which distributed water in time-based shares. I argue that volume-based measures made water more easily bought and sold and, by extension, more like a commodity. The second method of appropriation I detail is the granting of concessions to generate hydroelectricity to the Palestine Electric Corporation. These concessions gave the company control over three of Palestine’s major rivers, which it then turned into an object of investment for foreign shareholders. As a result, water use cannot be understood separately from electricity during the Mandate. While these two processes might appear unrelated, I argue that they were both legalized methods of exclusion that, when taken together, reveal a larger process of gradual, albeit incomplete, dispossession of water resources. While Zionist settler colonialism legitimated itself by claiming to efficiently use natural resources, such as water, in actuality, it sustained itself by imposing exclusive property rights.

The Family Friendliness That Wasn’t: Access, but Not Progress, for Women in the Czech Judiciary

Despite the fact that three-fifths of Czech judges are women, it would be a mistake to consider the Czech judiciary “feminized”: it is characterized by vertical gender segregation and a slow “defeminization” in positions of power and influence. The key to understanding both women’s presence overall and absence at the top is the gendered division of labor, especially in the home. The same reason why many women enter the judiciary—better reconciliation of private and professional lives than in other legal professions—is the reason why women do not progress—their “second shift” at home prevents them from ascending the career ladder.

Modeling Repressive Policing: Computational Analysis of Protocols from the Israeli State Commission of Inquiry into the October 2000 Events

This article addresses the gap between normative expectations of the right to protest in liberal democracies and the continued practice of repressive protest policing. The empirical literature has identified three types of factors explaining repressive policing: macro- or societal-level factors, meso-level factors relating to the police organization, and micro-level factors pertaining to specific events. Yet these factors provide only a fragmented understanding of the phenomenon. In this article, we put forward a novel three-tiered methodology of scaled reading, which is able to examine all these explanations together. We use scaled reading to analyze the protocols of the Or Commission of Inquiry, which investigated lethal clashes between the Israeli police and Israel’s Arab minority in October 2000. Through large-scale algorithmic topic modeling, we found that all types of empirical explanations of repressive policing co-exist within the October events. The mid-scale analysis revealed that no type of explanation exclusively belongs to a specific group of actors. The small-scale reading of the most representative documents for each topic demonstrated that this coexistence of mechanisms is also present within single testimonies. Together, our findings challenge existing empirical categories and illuminate repressive policing as a nonlinear, nonbinary, noncausal, and nonunitary phenomenon. These insights help make sense of the phenomenon’s persistence in deeply divided societies.