Tens of millions of Americans are subject to drug and alcohol tests each year. How did this biochemical surveillance become so routine and normalized? This article examines the historical emergence, contestation, and gradual acceptance of the first biochemical surveillance technology, the drunkometer—the predecessor of the breathalyzer—which analyzed blood alcohol content in the breath. In the 1930s, public concerns over drunk driving grew alongside mistrust of rapidly expanding policing and security apparatuses. In this context, the drunkometer emerged as a seemingly commonsense solution to the problems of drunk driving and police mistrust, using a scientific technology to decenter law enforcement testimony and, in turn, streamline difficult cases. By examining contestations to the drunkometer in newspapers, court records, and other public documents, we detail how courts and the public gradually accepted the biochemical constitution of the body as the legitimate domain of authoritative institutions. We introduce the concept of “chemical citizenship” to analyze this authoritative institutional use of biochemical technologies to extract and deploy “the truth” about substance use as a mode of governing access to the rights and benefits of citizenship. We apply this concept to demonstrate how the drunkometer laid the foundation for contemporary drug testing.

The arbitration community has traditionally argued that arbitrators should be shielded from criminal liability for actions performed in their professional capacity. However, a global trend has emerged wherein criminal law is increasingly used to regulate arbitrators’ behavior. Central to the debate on the extent of arbitrators’ immunity from criminal prosecution are questions of whether such immunity is necessary to ensure the fairness of arbitral proceedings and the degree to which arbitrators can be trusted to fulfil their professional responsibilities. Although this topic has been extensively debated in legal scholarship, there has been a notable lack of empirical research on the implementation and effectiveness of these criminal provisions. This study addresses this gap by examining Mainland China’s use of criminal law to regulate arbitration. China is a particularly relevant case study due to its adoption of a controversial provision titled “Perversion of Law in Arbitration” in 2006. Critics have argued that the broadly defined language of this provision could be susceptible to abuse, potentially undermining the integrity of arbitral proceedings. By analyzing twenty-seven cases of criminal prosecution against arbitrators in China, this research evaluates whether the critics’ concerns have materialized in practice. The findings suggest that this provision has not been used in Mainland China to improperly influence arbitral decision‑making.

Based on four years of fieldwork, including 339 interviews across 21 cities, this paper provides the first-ever ethnographic account of the political economy behind the transition from traditional taxis to Didi-style ride-hailing in China. This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it investigates how the seemingly disadvantaged stakeholders of an old economy resisted the progress of the platform economy and why the different levels of the Chinese government, which are not subject to Western democratic accountability regimes, respond to the resistance. Second, it demonstrates the sophisticated and various approaches the Chinese government has taken in balancing the interests of the old taxi industry and the interests of the new economy. The Chinese government’s holistic approach in seeking a balance across different industries and achieving multiple goals at the same time differs from our conventional way of considering regulating online ride-hailing as an issue of compensation between the government and taxi license holders or an issue of legalization between the government and platforms such as Didi or Uber.

Judges in Vietnam have increasingly been called upon by the state and society to resolve new social and economic problems. However, the expansion of judicial authority presents a problem for Vietnam’s authoritarian government, which wants courts that can resolve social problems without challenging state interests. This study draws on empirical research to explore whether judges in Vietnam’s authoritarian polity can harness legal reasoning to extend their authority. It uses a novel theoretical framework based on systems theory to understand how judges determine who is entitled to benefit from the law, which norms are appropriate to particular cases, and how such norms might direct them to reach decisions. Data from case studies and interviews with judges reveal that courts in Vietnam are increasingly using legal reasoning to manage the interaction between legal and extralegal norms, which is a decision-making process with the potential to expand judicial authority over socially significant disputes.

This article examines the connections between existing democratic deficits in law and contemporary democratic backsliding processes. To undermine the democratic process, present-day autocrats employ various legal strategies, including enacting new legal institutions (such as constitutional amendments or key statutory reforms) or manipulating existing ones. Focusing on a legal legacy of military rule in Turkey, the Specially Authorized Courts, this study argues that in consolidating power, autocrats also capitalize on pre-existing authoritarian zones within legal systems. In Turkey’s case, the AKP government has leveraged the exceptional procedures of Specially Authorized Courts to silence adversaries while simultaneously framing its reforms to the structure of these courts and the trials held at these courts as efforts to democratize the country and eradicate authoritarian legacies. As a result, the AKP masked its repressive actions behind a narrative of democratization in the early stages of Turkey’s democratic regression. Overall, the article presents both the coercive and legitimating uses of pre-existing “zones of authoritarianism” in law in contemporary processes of democratic backsliding. In doing this, it highlights how aspiring autocrats exploit the histories embedded in legal institutions to obscure their repressive actions.

Responding to renewed interest in law school as a path to a career “to do well and do good,” this essay examines Nelson, Dinovitzer, Garth, Sterling, Wilkins, Dawe, and Michelson’s The Making of Lawyers’ Careers and its account of inequality and opportunity in the American legal profession. Based on a 20-year study of more than 2,000 lawyers, the book traces how credentials, race, gender, class, and law school selectivity profoundly shape career trajectories. The essay situates those findings within the divide in private practice between corporate practice and people law and interrogates the professional ideology—rooted in the lawyer’s traditional role in the American adversarial system and reinforced by the required three-year JD—that binds these different and unequal hemispheres into a single profession. The essay then considers what these findings mean for legal education, especially elite law schools’ long-standing economic reliance on sending graduates to Big Law, in light of corporate firms’ increasingly tarnished reputation and the possible impact of AI adoption on associate hiring.

The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession, by Robert L. Nelson, Ronit Dinovitzer, Bryant G. Garth, Joyce S. Sterling, David B. Wilkins, Meghan Dawe, and Ethan Michelson, is an exhaustive, rigorous, and defining study of the US legal profession in the early twenty-first century. Like the profession itself during this period, its primary focus is on corporate practice and the ripple and sequencing effects of beginning a career in a corporate law firm. This review essay examines the takeaways from the questions that animate the book and considers how populism and rising autocracy will shape future research on lawyers’ careers.

This article theorizes China’s Charity Law as a staged legal architecture that institutionalizes symbolic governance through sequenced design: from normative logic, to operational mechanism, to statutory codification. Based on comparative ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai and Chongqing (2021–2023), this article develops a three-part model of interface legality. First, it conceptualizes legality as a symbolic infrastructure of legitimacy budgeting—the institutional logic through which symbolic control is organized without procedural closure. Second, it analyzes triadic discretion as the operational logic of this system, where codified law, bureaucratic modulation, and organizational alignment interact as a choreography of relational governance. Third, it traces how this discretionary system, developed in practice after the 2016 enactment, was codified into law as structured unfulfillability—embedding impossibility into legal form to sustain reputational suspense. These mechanisms are not pathologies of implementation but institutional features of symbolic governance. By connecting the Charity Law’s expressive design to its affective operations and strategic incompletion, this article contributes to sociolegal scholarship on staged legality by revealing how institutional logic, operational rhythm, and statutory design interlock to codify symbolic governance in contemporary lawmaking.

The extent to which legal professions around the world facilitate and promote the careers of a diverse range of qualified candidates has been a focus for research and debate throughout the 21st century. This essay discusses a significant contribution to this field, Robert Nelson, et. al.’s The Making of Lawyers’ Careers: Inequality and Opportunity in the American Legal Profession, a comprehensive study of lawyers’ careers in the United States that draws on extensive quantitative and qualitative data. The essay considers the book’s findings in the context of the exponential rate of change in legal professions worldwide change which, however, has been constrained by the endurance of traditional features of professionalism, including its classed, gendered, and raced character. In line with the Bourdieusian stance taken by the book’s authors, the essay reflects on the continuing influence of social categories and their interaction both with each other and with institutional and wider socio-economic factors in a complex and many-layered process.

Richard Abel’s five-volume book series, Defending American Democracy (2025), offers key insights into the transformation of a liberal democracy under modern, legalistic autocratic rule. As an in-depth study of President Donald Trump’s first term in office, it outlines how the Trump administration challenged and subverted laws and legal principles, exploiting the gaps in our democracy exposed by his predecessors. With an executive branch actively working beyond constitutional boundaries, Abel highlights one of the most pressing questions of our day—what do we do now? This review essay aims to respond to part of this question by contributing to emerging scholarship on resistance to autocracy and authoritarianism. It proceeds in two parts. The first part draws from and develops Abel’s accounting of resistance to autocracy in the United States. In doing so, it extracts a generally applicable typology of resistance methods and how they manifest under state repression or persecution. The second part of this essay adapts these categories and raises examples within electoral democracies that are facing similar conditions. In contemplating resistance “success stories” in similarly situated nations, the review essay aims to direct further attention to shared strategies for democratic resilience during a global decline in the rule of law.

While a postwar consensus largely upheld the legitimacy of the administrative state, the past two decades have witnessed a surge of critiques not seen since the 1930s. This review essay traces the evolution of these attacks from libertarian legal scholars decrying the administrative government’s alleged constitutional violations to lesser-known populist conservative figures like John Marini and Ned Ryun who frame the same developments as a subversive plot against the executive branch. Contrasted with them are defenders of the regulatory state like William Novak, who argue both for the historical precedent of state intervention as well as for its democratic legitimacy. The essay closes with a review of liberal concerns about the administrative state—exemplified by Alan Brinkley’s critique of the New Deal—and considers how defenders and critics might be speaking past one another. The debate reveals deeper fractures in American political thought and potentially new avenues for research into the politics of the administrative state in the latter half of the twentieth century.

This essay argues for a shift in sociolegal scholarship on lawyers’ careers from a framework centered on stratification to one attentive to reconfiguration under changing institutional conditions. Building on the findings of the After the JD project and related scholarship, we suggest that enduring hierarchies of race, gender, class, and professional prestige are increasingly reorganized through fragmentation of the professional field, technological change, shifting forms of capital, transformations in the social organization of legal work, and in politics and the economy. Rather than displacing earlier insights about inequality, we argue for extending them through a more dynamic account of careers, institutions, and professional change across time.

This review essay articulates methodological insights gleaned from Whitney Taylor’s The Social Constitution: Embedding Social Rights Through Legal Mobilization (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Through an analysis of how Taylor used interview and comparative methods, the essay addresses the opportunities and challenges of drawing on interview data to make sense of past events. It also explores the use of comparative methods, both comparing one country to another and comparing different regions in one country.