Worldwide, the legal profession is grappling with how deeply to embrace the datafication of law. Drawing on interviews and the public record, this article offers a case study of how France’s 2016 Law for a Digital Republic—which promised public release of all judicial decisions—exposed divisions within the French legal profession over technology, big data, and identity. A heated debate over “predictive justice” (justice prédictive) mobilized competing coalitions, ultimately resulting in France becoming the first country to ban data analytics that reveal the identity of individual judges in 2019. For scholars of the legal profession, this episode highlights how legal professionals serve as gatekeepers of technological change and, in the process, reshape law-related cultural scripts central to national identity. For scholars interested in big data, the French case reminds us that the datafication of law is not an inexorable force, but rather a contested political process. And for those interested in court administration, France’s experience offers insight into how one early-moving jurisdiction re-negotiated the boundaries of privacy and judicial transparency for the twenty-first century.

This paper introduces the concept of symbolic rule of law promotion, which consists of repeated enactments of policy and initiatives equated with advancing the rule of law despite no evidence suggesting actual progress. To demonstrate its existence, US rule of law promotion in Afghanistan is examined as a “least likely” crucial case, from the end of President Obama’s Surge in 2014 to the Taliban’s return in 2021. During this time, Afghanistan— a major foreign policy priority—received the most US rule of law aid of any country globally. Unlike earlier attempts that sought to use the rule of law policy and practice to achieve substantive goals and adapted over time, US rule of law endeavors from 2015 to 2021 were symbolic. Decision makers consistently pursued rule of law strategies, and practitioners implemented initiatives that lacked any prospect of success. Previously unsuccessful strategies and programming were replicated alongside partnerships with disinterested, uncooperative stakeholders. More broadly, symbolic rule of law promotion has potentially significant implications for understanding the persistence of underperforming long-term rule of law efforts elsewhere. To increase the prospects of success, it shows the need to engage with non state justice authorities, support robust accountability mechanisms, and take concerns about state legitimacy seriously.

Nuancing the conventional wisdom that informal economic activities endure by marginalizing, circumventing, or colluding with the law, we use original court data from China to reveal a counterintuitive mechanism: informal finance can endure through formal litigation. Drawing on 66,843 judicial decisions, case studies of seven top-filers, and interviews, we examine how sophisticated moneylenders, inactive debtors, and embedded courts collectively helped sustain unlicensed moneylending in China before 2020. Moneylenders—whether operating through Fintech or offline channels—leverage superior legal resources to enforce semilegal debts. Debtors facing moneylenders suffer from serious hurdles in accessing justice, especially lacking professional legal help that could potentially change case outcomes. Courts, despite concerns over debtor protection, largely tolerate the semilegal lending in alignment with the pre 2020 regulatory environment that valued the expansion of private financing, particularly through Fintech. Beyond China and the financial market, this litigation-endured mechanism of informal economy reflects a pattern in high-volume civil dockets where litigation is strategically used to bypass regulation, which has contributed to access-to-justice crises in other jurisdictions, including the USA. Theorizing these dynamics raises pressing questions about the institutional role of courts in either sustaining or remedying welfare pathologies, and in shaping a just society.

COVID-19 lockdown restrictions forced several courts to conduct remote video or telephone hearings of cases. Many argue for the continued use of these hearing formats based on claims of increased transparency and access to justice. Recent research, however, has highlighted that virtual hearings may lead to unfair proceedings, especially in trial courts. Furthermore, this research suggests that technology gaps—for example, the lack of computer literacy among litigants—may impact case outcomes. In this article, we test whether the introduction of virtual hearings due to COVID-19 affected the way in which traffic courts adjudicated traffic tickets in Arkansas. Using an original dataset of all court cases that occurred in three Pulaski County courthouses in 2020, we find that courts were less likely to dismiss charges where hearings took place through videoconferencing. Further, using a difference-in-differences design, we find that this bias is mitigated when the technology used for the hearing is equalized among litigants. We suggest reasons for this effect and offer some recommendations to mitigate the biases inherent in virtual environments. Our results invite more research into the impact of remote communication technology on judicial behavior to ensure that the long-term use of virtual hearings guarantees equitable justice to all litigants.

This article examines the incentives, strategies, and constraints faced by judicial entrepreneurs in advancing bankruptcy enforcement—a legal area traditionally considered politically sensitive—in Wenzhou, China. While existing studies on Chinese courts emphasize external and institutional factors, this study argues that judicial entrepreneurs can play a pivotal role in driving reforms. In response to the 2011 private lending crisis, Wenzhou court leaders promoted bankruptcy as a means of resolving failing firms. They began with pilot cases and gradually institutionalized bankruptcy by mobilizing social, judicial, and political resources. These efforts were shaped by both personal attributes and self-serving interests. However, judicial entrepreneurship encountered limits, such as legal rules, the inconsistency of enforcement, and the government’s core interests. The study contributes to the debates on courts and social change by showing how court leaders can overcome institutional constraints through alliance building, public engagement, and local adaptation of national rules. It also enriches our understanding of judicial policymaking across regimes by highlighting a symbiotic, rather than a zero-sum, state-court relationship in the analysis of judicial politics.

This article examines Israeli juvenile courts as sites where poverty is present yet systematically denied as a cause of child neglect. Drawing on focused ethnographic observations, I show how factual reports routinely document material deprivation—housing shortages, lack of food, utilities cutoffs—yet court actors reject poverty as a legitimate explanation for neglect. Instead, they insist that “good parents” should be able to cope with scarcity, thereby displacing structural conditions onto individualized parental failure. I frame this configuration as part of “criministrative law”: an administrative forum that adopts criminal-style rituals of blame and correction while deferring to welfare agencies, leaving families without the protections of either criminal or administrative law. This criministrative denial of poverty produces epistemic marginalization of parents and legitimates punitive interventions. As a normative remedy, I propose adapting the poverty-aware paradigm from social work to law, reframing protection as solidarity rather than surveillance.

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.

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.

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.

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.