Current LSR Issue

Organizations are often drawn into the contested work of criminal law enforcement. Through compulsory process and mandatory reporting laws, governments routinely conscript organizations such as hospitals, banks, and schools into assisting in surveillance activities whose legitimacy is socially contested. In recent years, conscription has been particularly pronounced with online platform companies, whose extensive collections of user data make them frequent sources of information and evidence for law enforcement agencies. How do actors in platform companies navigate compliance with such contested laws? While neoinstitutional theories of law emphasize how perceived compliance can protect organizational legitimacy, this article shows how perceived compliance with contested laws can also undermine it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with legal and operations staff for platform companies and law enforcement agents, this article explains how perceived compliance with contested laws can give rise to a legitimacy dilemma that organizational actors manage through symbolic ambivalence: compliance practices that signal both an organization’s responsiveness to a law, as well as its independence from the aims, consequences, and institutions associated with the law. The article also suggests organizational and legal conditions that shape how platform actors engage in symbolic ambivalence. These findings extend neoinstitutional theory by showing that the relationship between perceived compliance and legitimacy is not straightforward, but contingent, and by explaining how organizational actors manage the legitimacy dilemma brought about by that contingency.

Although democracy is at the core of the U.S.’s self-image, the laws granting civic rights have long been designed to exclude some Americans, highlighting a fundamental tension between the democratic ideal and group interest. Echoing past racial exclusions, contemporary felony disenfranchisement policies and a racially unjust criminal legal system combine to continue to disenfranchise Black Americans disproportionately. Public opinion on these policies presents opportunities for or barriers to reform, so we seek to understand public opposition to ending felony disenfranchisement. Using two recent national surveys from the American National Election Studies, we explore two explanations rooted in the social contexts from which relational civic rights consciousness emerges: one reflecting varied commitments to democratic norms and one rooted in racial threat. Even after controlling for politics, a commitment to democracy is associated with support for allowing those convicted of a felony to vote, while concerns about threats to White privilege are associated with opposition. Critically, the relationship appears conditional: commitments to democracy fail to produce support for voting rights among those who are preoccupied with maintaining White privilege. Implications for people’s support for the legal rights of others, for democracy and for legal change are discussed.

What do clients value in legal representation? Based on 65 in-depth interviews with Anishinaabek litigants and their relatives, this study explores how clients construct attorney–client relationships, value representation and experience justice. Drawing from the sociolegal literature on access to justice, attorney–client relationships, and legal services delivery, this article extends understandings of how relationship dynamics inform client evaluations of legal representation and their justice experiences. Caretaking, or a reciprocal relationship with a lawyer based on human connection, respect and a mutual sense of being in a difficult situation together, emerges as a crucial way Anishinaabek value lawyers that help them navigate confusing legal processes during difficult times in their lives. These findings question the promises of procedural justice by illuminating how clients decouple their experiences with lawyers from their views of the justice system. They also contribute to timely debates about the importance of legal representation and access to justice in marginalized communities.

This essay assesses Susan Sturm’s What Might Be: Confronting Racism to Transform Our Institutions as a major contribution to Critical Race Theory, socio-legal theory, and the practice of institutional anti-racism. It argues that Sturm’s central achievement is to reframe anti-racism not as a discrete legal remedy or diversity initiative, but as a sustained institutional practice of navigating paradox. Drawing on Sturm’s earlier work on complex discrimination, the essay shows how her critique of formal adjudication and liability-centered antidiscrimination law develops into a broader theory of organizational transformation. Institutions, Sturm argues, are not race-neutral arenas; they reproduce racial hierarchy through norms, routines, role structures, and patterns of interaction that often appear ordinary or neutral. The essay emphasizes three linked dimensions of Sturm’s intervention. First, anti-racism requires working through contradictions rather than resolving them: race must be acknowledged because it is materially consequential, yet racial categories must also be destabilized because they help reproduce hierarchy. Second, institutions often become trapped in cycles of reform and retrenchment, producing what Sturm calls “Groundhog Day” dynamics in which diversity initiatives generate temporary movement but fail to alter underlying structures. Third, meaningful transformation depends on trust, linked fate, stretch collaboration, and organizational catalysts that can create durable forms of shared inquiry and collective action.