This paper engages with the literature on the right against rights and autocratic legalism to examine the context and tactics of conservative legal mobilization against rights in North Africa. Drawing on legal case studies, interviews, and court observations in Egypt and Tunisia, I argue that in contexts of illiberal legality, law and rights discourses become the legitimizing tools of conservative mobilizations. The case studies presented reveal three primary tactics used by conservative legal actors in Egypt and Tunisia in their assault on gender and sexuality rights. The first, rights selectivism, is a tactic of referencing a set of rights to legitimize the oppression of other rights. Second, by deploying repressive legalism, conservative legal actors resort to tangential legal codes to punish minorities and those advocating for minority rights. Third, through appeals to majoritarianism, democracy, and anticolonial work are used to trump minority rights. This study contributes to emerging sociolegal scholarship on the right against rights and illiberal legality by illustrating how rights and legality are weaponized to advance antirights, antigender, and antiminority agendas.

What does it mean to be a citizen? To be equal in birth and stature as others born in the same land? How does law answer these questions and are the answers satisfying? Have the goalposts of citizenship shifted such that old, exlusionary notions of citizenship based on wealth, race, and sex now dangerously infect our society? These questions and this Essay are derived from the 2025 Presidential Address given at the Law and Society annual meeting.

Neoliberalism, once an economic doctrine responding to the failures of liberalism, has become a widely used concept in sociolegal scholarship. Law and society scholars often invoke it to explain sociolegal and punitive phenomena such as mass incarceration, inequality, and state transformation. But the concept’s analytic power is undermined when scholars conflate neoliberalism as a sociohistorical process with neoliberalism as a universal cause. Drawing on an intellectual history of neoliberalism’s evolving meanings, I identify two problems – ubiquity and a lack of counterfactual imagination – that limit its theoretical utility in sociolegal research. I argue that neoliberalism should be theorized as a contingent, sociohistorical process; only then can it function as a theory with meaningful consequents.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

Administrative burden describes the learning costs, psychological costs, and compliance costs people face when attempting to interface with the government, particularly in seeking a benefit. Algorithmic and automated processes offer the potential of reducing administrative burdens, but scant empirical research has determined to what, if any effect. This study uses the case of criminal record expungement in two policy contexts: traditional, court petition-based systems and newly enacted automated systems, to understand if and how administrative burden persists, and whether and how these burdens operate differently in the context of the criminal legal system. Drawing on interviews with 105 expungement-eligible people, we find that while automated expungement schemes shift the burden from petitioner to state to initiate the process, automation inadvertently creates new administrative burdens via failure to notify, partial clearances, and opaque data processes. Furthermore, respondents described how automation failed to provide a sense of confirmation from the state that their sentence was truly completed, rehabilitation had been acknowledged, or that collateral consequences should no longer wield the same power. Overall, we argue that leveraging automation to reduce burdens must include information availability by design; otherwise policy reforms may fail to fully achieve their goals.

We argue that the far-right is turning to law and legal institutions to institutionalize its extreme agendas but does so in the name of democratic values. Right-wing attempts to affirm and repress rights speak to the duality of democracy, often hinging on the perceived worthiness of rights along cultural and ethnic boundaries while still espousing equality for all. To understand and explain this phenomenon, we bring together socio-legal literature and far-right scholarship and focus on the understudied but significant Swedish case, often viewed as exceptional. We analyze critical events within the Swedish polity, such as the free speech crisis over the Quran burnings and recent reforms of the Tidö Agreement, the governing document of the right-wing coalition government, which is deeply influenced by the far-right Sweden Democrats. Empirical evidence shows how right-wing movements go beyond conventional right-against-rights expectations of authoritarian or strongman tactics to instead advocate for liberal values.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

While legal mobilization through litigation and legislative reform has been widely examined, less is known about how political and social actors engage constitution-making processes to advance or restrict rights. Latin America provides a particularly relevant context to study this phenomenon, given the region’s frequent constitutional replacements and the growing tendency of activists to use constitution-making itself when other institutional channels prove unresponsive. This article analyzes Chile’s 2021–2022 Constitutional Convention – the first phase of the 2020–2023 constitutional replacement process. Focusing on the constitutional mobilization of anti-abortion rights groups, we examine how, despite an unfavorable political opportunity structure and public opinion, they sought to roll back reproductive rights advances. Drawing on interviews, official records, protest event data, and public opinion surveys, we identify three main strategies employed by anti-abortion rights groups: reframing opposition to abortion within constitutional, natural law, and international human rights discourses; bundling conservative causes with broader appeals to protect life and property; and leveraging the referendum campaign to cast the draft constitution as a threat to national identity. Our findings demonstrate how constitutional replacement processes create distinct arenas for anti-rights mobilization, thereby contributing to the discussion on the “right against rights” in constitution-making contexts.

Judicial rulings on expert evidence determine which specialized knowledge enters the courtroom and, in doing so, shape the credibility of litigants and the legitimacy of their claims. This article examines how disparities in litigant status shape the judicial gatekeeping of expert evidence and how this process relates to the ideological context of the legal forum. Using data from a probability sample of 811 Daubert rulings from United States District Courts, our multinomial logistic regression models show that, overall, higher status litigants are more successful in excluding opposing evidence and in overcoming exclusionary motions. However, this aggregate relationship masks a pronounced ideological divide. Specifically, higher status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to conservative judges while lower status litigants tend to be more successful in cases assigned to liberal judges. These findings illustrate how trial court decisions reflect broader institutional and ideological forces and suggest that ideological contexts can either amplify or temper structural inequalities in the courtroom.

What do we mean by backlash against rights? How does backlash vary? What explains its variation? Although backlash is recognized as a crucial problem in the legal mobilization literature, it is treated as a residual category. This paper proposes a conceptual apparatus and research agenda for its identification and analysis. We propose a definition of backlash that distinguishes it from ordinary legal mobilization, and identify key dimensions along which backlash varies – actors, realms, tactics, goals, and outcomes. We propose typologies to explore how backlash differs across these dimensions. For each dimension, we offer criteria to distinguish between the different forms of backlash, use examples to illustrate their particularities, and propose hypotheses regarding the factors that may explain variation. The main innovation of our approach is the concept of veiled backlash, which occurs in the backdoor of state agencies when regressive networks have dominant influence thereon. We claim that veiled backlash often employs pseudolegal tactics, which are difficult to detect and challenge, thus increasing the likelihood of backlash’s success. We further argue that veiled backlash tends to be cumulative; it has the ambitious goal of curtailing pro-rights policies or state agencies, yet it can go unnoticed because it relies on tactics that appear like ordinary legal mobilization.

Providing pro bono legal services is an important professional obligation that ensures that people who cannot afford representation still realize their rights. Unlike impact litigation, which seeks to overturn unjust laws or create new rights, pro bono direct legal services are not typically seen as oriented toward creating social change. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with thirty-six lawyers and non-lawyer legal volunteers, this article explores how bearing witness became a mechanism that blended pro bono services with social movement-like collective action to transform direct legal services within two liminal legal environments, the U.S.–Mexico border and immigration detention. These activities included (1) asserting and publicizing truth in the face of misconceptions and misinformation so the American public understood what was occurring and demanded policy change, (2) recruiting more volunteers to assist asylum seekers and in turn speak out, and (3) documenting the human impact of immigration laws and policies to ensure future harms would not occur. Because interviewees took part in up to three waves of interviews between 2019 and 2023, I also address the perceived outcomes of these efforts, including that interviewees felt that they increased knowledge and shifted some individuals’ perspectives.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

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.

Many legal disputes are resolved through settlement. The dominant theory explaining settlements – known as “bargaining in the shadow of the law” – assumes that litigants are informed, rational actors inclined to bargain toward a settlement prior to court proceedings. Yet many settlements are negotiated after litigants have appeared in court expecting to go to trial. This article argues that court organizational mechanisms play an undertheorized role in facilitating settlement agreements. To build theory on organizational mechanisms, we examine the case of eviction settlements. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in a California eviction court, we find that organizational rules and workgroup norms funnel mostly unrepresented tenants – sometimes, in coercive ways – into unregulated hallway conversations with landlord attorneys and/or participation in the court’s mediation program. Through relational interactions with legal professionals in these organizational spaces, tenants are taught the risks of trial and the benefits of settlement. As a result, most tenants in our sample come to recognize their legal culpability and view settlement agreements as legitimate, even as their negotiated settlements reproduce their housing insecurity. We discuss implications for bargaining theory and research on housing insecurity.

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

Sociolegal research has long found that most people “lump” their problems rather than pursue legal remedies. This study examines how social media transforms legal consciousness and mobilization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 100 families who experienced the same birth injury, and 37 legal and medical professionals, we analyze how online communities shape perceptions of medical injury, blame attribution, and legal action. We find that parents often experience profound guilt, believing they are responsible for their child’s injury. However, participation in online support groups reframes their understanding of the injury, shifting their guilt toward medical providers and fostering legal claims. Our findings show that social media serves as a new “structuring structure,” shaping legal consciousness across geographic and social class boundaries. Social media serves as a powerful force in shaping parents’ perceptions of their child’s injuries as legally actionable, challenging existing assumptions about why people do or do not pursue legal action. By examining how online communities facilitate the transformation from guilt to blame and encourage legal mobilization, this study contributes to broader sociolegal debates about the role of digital technologies in shaping contemporary legal consciousness.

Scholars trained in disciplines like anthropology, history, law, political science, and sociology helped to give rise to the field of law and society over the past two generations. What theories does law and society offer those disciplines in return, and are scholars in those fields looking back to law and society? To answer these questions, this article, which introduces a symposium celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Law & Society Review, brings together scholarship across disciplines to share the possible future influence of law and society on the disciplines. This theoretical and forward-looking inquiry invites us all to reflect upon law and society’s contributions over the past two generations and to consider what law and society will contribute to the next generation of interdisciplinary – and disciplinary – scholarship.