Current LSR Issue

This study examines the transformation of environmental public interest lawyering in China within an ever-tightening legal order, where activists confront both state suppression and co-optation. Utilizing qualitative methods, including in-depth interviews with 49 environmental lawyers and activists, participant observations, and online ethnography, the research delineates two divergent models of legal mobilization. The conventional model prioritizes compliance with state regulations, employing impact litigation and consensus-building with state institutions to drive incremental environmental reforms, often at the cost of aligning with state priorities. In contrast, guerrilla lawyering emerges as an innovative strategy, leveraging decentralized networks, experimentalist litigation, flexible funding, and diffused media tactics to sustain activism while preserving autonomy. By transforming courts into platforms for generating critical information and exposing systemic vulnerabilities, guerrilla lawyering resists assimilation into state-controlled schemes. This approach not only ensures movement survival amidst repression but also enriches theoretical understandings of legal mobilization under authoritarianism by addressing the understudied risk of co-optation. These findings illuminate the resilience and ingenuity of activists in China’s constrained environmental advocacy landscape and offer a transferable framework for resistance for social movements in other authoritarian contexts, amid the global rise of authoritarian legality.

Changing legal environments create new opportunities for legal mobilization by civil society groups. At stake is mobilization in Germany and Europe for the prosecution of agents of the Syrian Assad regime accused of committing core international crimes. Changes in the legal environment include the (a) spread of universal jurisdiction; (b) increasing use of “crimes against humanity”; (c) new prosecutorial and policing units specialized in core international crimes; and (d) new prosecutorial practices, such as structural investigations. Coinciding with an influx of Syrian refugees, these opportunities give rise to a collaborative network of (I)NGOs that feed witnesses and evidence into prosecutorial agencies. Interaction between agencies and (I)NGOs contributes to the transnational ordering of criminal law and constitutes a Prosecutorial-NGO (P-NGO) Complex. (I)NGOs finally diffuse court narratives to a broad audience and shape public knowledge of grave violations of human rights. We focus on the P-NGO Complex for the al-Khatib universal jurisdiction trial before the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany. Empirical tools include an analysis of (I)NGO network structures and websites, interviews with court observers, activists, and prosecutorial staff, and an analysis of media reporting.

Front-line workers mediate law on the books and law in action, translating higher-level laws into local policy. One important mediating institution is the police. Whereas most research analyzes how the law empowers police to label certain denizens “criminals” – both within and outside criminal legal contexts – this article demonstrates how policing also affects who is recognized as an innocent crime victim. Synthesizing existing scholarship, I theorize three paths through which police can affect legal recognition of crime victims: criminalization, minimization, and legal estrangement. I then test the extent to which these processes affect victims’ access to public benefits provided under victim compensation law. Drawing on never-before-analyzed administrative data from 18 U.S. states (N = 768,382), I find police account for more than half of all victim benefits denials. These denials are racialized and gendered: Police are significantly more likely to criminalize and be estranged from Black male victims and significantly more likely to minimize the injuries of Black female victims. Additional qualitative data suggest police systematically perceive Black men as not truly innocent and Black survivors of gender-based violence as not truly victims. These findings advance our understanding of the expansive role of police in society as well as the porous boundary between social provision and social control.

Scholars have extensively studied the diffusion of criminal laws across the American states, and this paper examines an overlooked story of penal diffusion: the mid-twentieth-century spread of habitual offender laws. These laws, which escalated sentences for repeat offenders, proliferated across the states decades before the enactment of the three-strikes laws to which they bore remarkable resemblance. But whereas prior research has traced the legislative diffusion of habitual offender laws, this article alternatively explores how state courts’ interpretations of habitual offender laws diffused across jurisdictions. Using an innovative theoretical framework blending judicial diffusion research with literatures in neo-institutional theory, this article reveals how state courts borrowed legal decisions from other states to interpret, legitimize, and alter laws within their own jurisdictions. This reveals how state courts can shape the trajectory of legislative diffusion in enduring and profound ways. This study’s unique theoretical framework uses the history of habitual offender laws as a case study to explore underappreciated features and dynamics of the diffusion process that have shaped the development of American criminal law.