Current LSR Issue

Universities face a dilemma in determining how to create fair, consistent, and reliable processes that respect the rights of both alleged perpetrators and victims and encourage people to bring complaints forward. Using the literature on non-law forms of ordering and neo-institutional theory, this article examines university Ombuds and Title IX Coordinators and their handling of sexual misconduct disputes. Primary data collection included a review of 1200 documents and interviews with 14 Ombuds and 13 Title IX Coordinators from 22 large institutions of higher education between 2011 and 2014. This study concludes that Ombuds and Title IX Coordinators, despite being designed in sharply contrasting ways, converge (but not fully) toward a hybrid of formality and informality. This paper examines Title IX to understand what drives convergence behavior and to analyze how the recent changes in the law may alter the process of convergence. As Title IX law continues to develop, the theory of procedural convergence has important implications for the creation of non-law dispute mechanisms and the balance between individual rights and the organizational development of legal norms.

We examined the economic status of women who experienced intimate partner violence (IPV) and sought civil legal aid services over 1 year. Women’s average overall income increased, after accounting for both private income increases and public income decreases, by approximately $5500, and the odds of being in poverty 1 year after civil legal services decreased. The social return on investment estimate for total income impact relative to legal aid costs was 141%, meaning that women’s overall income increased $2.41 for every $1 expended on legal aid services. Legal aid services can improve income and reduce poverty among women experiencing IPV.

Prior research illustrates how race-class subjugated communities are over-policed and under-protected, producing high rates of victimization by other community members and the police. Yet few studies explore how gender and race structure dual frustration, despite a long line of Black feminist scholarship on the interpersonal, gender-based, and state violence Black and other women of color face. Drawing on interviews with 53 women in Minneapolis from 2017 to 2019, we examine how gendered racial vulnerability to both crime and criminalization shape dual frustration toward the law. Findings illustrate that police fail to protect women of color from neighborhood and gender-based violence, while simultaneously targeting them and their families. Despite their spatial proximity to women of color, white women remained largely shielded from the dual frustration of crime and criminalization. Attention to the gendered racial dimensions of dual frustration offers an intersectional framework for understanding women’s vulnerability to violence and cultural orientations toward the law.

Because stereotyping affects individual assessments of ability and because of socializing experiences in the law, we argue that women and judges of color, while well-credentialed, feel pressure to work harder than their white male peers to demonstrate their competence. Using an original dataset of published appellate court opinions from 2008–2016, we find that majority opinions authored by female and non-white judges go farther to explain and justify their rulings, when compared to opinions written by white male peers. In comparison to other judges, opinions by white men are about 6% shorter, with 11% fewer citations, and 17% fewer extensively discussed citations. Our findings suggest that norms about crafting judicial opinions are gendered and racialized in ways that create higher workloads for women and judges of color.

In the present study, we compared two European regions with deeply contrasting policing traditions—post-communist countries and established democracies—to explore whether political history may have long-term consequences for police–public interactions. Using data from 26 countries that participated in the 2010 European Social Survey, we first measured and compared the prevalence of police-initiated contact and satisfaction with contact once it took place. We found that both tended to be higher in established democracies. Next, we contrasted the magnitude of the association between police contact and attitudes about police fairness and legitimacy between the two regions, finding consistently stronger associations in post-communist countries. Taken together, our results help expand procedural justice theory by demonstrating that incorporating history and context can enhance its ability to explain how interactions with police shape public opinion about law enforcement.

As undocumented youths transition from arrival to adolescence to adulthood, regimes of migrant il/legality shape their lives in varying ways. Over the life course, undocumented youths’ legal status may also shift, creating different “careers of il/legality,” sequences characterized by changes to legal status over time that re-shape self, mobility, and social roles. Longitudinal, comparative ethnographic data with undocumented male youths in Paris and New York and schools, municipal and civil society organizations show how shifts in legal status reshape youths’ social identities based on access to institutional roles and evaluation of current and future conditions. Showing how undocumented youths simultaneously navigate deportation and regularization possibilities over time reveals the possibilities of, and constraints to, life after regularization.