This memoir describes the 40‐year unfolding, project by project, of my sociolegal field research on legal and regulatory processes. It provides brief accounts of my interactions and interviews with regulatory officials and with businesspeople responsible for regulatory compliance. It also describes my ventures into the cross‐national comparison of legal and regulatory institutions and the political

The Medical-Legal Partnership (MLP) model promotes direct services and public policy advocacy by lawyers incorporated into medical teams. Drawing on personal experiences, this Essay proposes that to accomplish policy change, MLP practitioners organize and be organized into community coalitions built and maintained around a robust vision of health justice.   

In recent years, a growing number of countries have courted controversy by regulating activities outside their borders. They have used extraterritorial lawmaking to cultivate competitive global markets, strengthen or weaken data privacy, combat foreign terrorism and military aggression, promote human rights abroad, and suppress political dissent at home. This Article explores whether extraterritorial

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian armed groups, chiefly Hamas's armed wing, breached the fence around the Gaza strip and launched attacks on Israeli territory. Over several hours, Palestinian fighters killed 1,269 people, mostly civilians, engaged in sexual violence and torture, and took 253 hostages. The same day, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Israel is at war,” and the Israel

On November 9, 2023, Prime Minister Albanese of Australia and then Prime Minister Natano of Tuvalu signed the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty in Rarotonga (Falepili Union Treaty or the Treaty). The preamble explains that “the concept of Falepili . . . connotes the traditional values of good neighbourliness, duty of care and mutual respect.” It sets a groundbreaking precedent for Small Island

Time is a Pandora's box that international lawyers have long been reluctant to fully open. Perhaps unwilling to tackle the complexities this elusive concept presents, or loath to confront past wrongs and future threats that might arise from the fabled box, international jurists have left core questions of time and international law largely underexplored. In so doing, however, they have overlooked time

This Essay explores how the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment doctrine perpetuates gender hierarchies and a male monopoly on lethal self-defense. It critiques the narrow “true man” framing that ignores women’s experiences and advocates for a justice-centered framework that incorporates power and privilege into the gun-rights discourse.  

Effective cyber incident response and crisis management increasingly relies on the coordination of relevant actors at supranational levels. A polycentric governance structure is one of the institutional arrangements that can promote active participation of involved actors, an aspect decisive for the rapid and effective response to cyber incidents and crises. This research aims to dissect whether, and

OBJECTIVE There is an increasing recognition of the necessity to establish the predictive validity of risk assessment scores within specific population subgroups, particularly those (including Indigenous peoples) who are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. I compared measures of discrimination and calibration of the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI) in Indigenous

In much of the American West, local special districts with undemocratic governance structures and archaic boundaries dominate water governance. In some places, they are expanding their reach into new policy realms. This Article explains how these governance systems evolved, why they are problematic, and how state governments can respond.

Had the critical legal studies movement never existed, it would have to be invented today. That movement framed law as a forceful instrument of domination but one compatible with both functional and interpretative underdeterminacy. Its discoveries are indispensable to any successor venture, including the current law-and-political-economy movement.

A century ago, auto clubs offered an astonishing array of legal services, representing members in civil and criminal cases, on both sides of the proverbial “v.” But in the 1930s, bar associations decimated these clubs, alongside other group-legal-service providers—and, we argue, sowed the seeds of the current access-to-justice crisis.  

The prevalent academic critique of arbitration, the access-to-justice critique, fails to account for arbitration’s influence on how firms organize themselves. This Note offers a new critique of arbitration from a political economy perspective, arguing that today’s highly restrictive arbitration law greatly benefits firms organized as gig platforms.   

OBJECTIVE There are documented gender disparities in the legal field. We examined whether gender representation on civil trial teams varied on the basis of (a) the degree of regional gender bias "in the air" and (b) time. HYPOTHESES We hypothesized that women were underrepresented both on trial teams and in leadership roles within those teams. We predicted that these gender disparities were exacerbated

One limitation of the literature on gun ownership is a lack of consensus regarding how to operationalize the dependent variable. Consequently, gun measures vary widely across studies, and findings ...

Large, listed companies are under increasing pressure to respond to critical issues such as climate change, modern slavery, and the protection of First Nations' heritage. Much of this pressure is exerted by civil society actors through corporate governance mechanisms, including leveraging shareholder rights to lobby firms. At the heart of this process sit largely understudied actors, proxy advisors

This Essay argues against the pursuit of students’ rights, which function mainly as a smokescreen behind which adults have advanced their own partisan agendas in our culture wars. Independent rights for students are both theoretically untenable and politically damaging to our liberal democracy.  

Democratic governance requires holding the powerful to account. This Essay therefore proposes a broad antisubordination theory of the criminal law which grapples directly with disparities in power, rather than obscuring them under the guise of formal equality. Neither formal equality nor its alternative, prison abolitionism, can adequately protect democracy.  

OBJECTIVE Some exonerees receive compensation and aid after being exonerated of their wrongful convictions, and some do not. Looking beyond differences in state statutes, we examined possible reasons for biases in receiving compensation (via statutes or civil claims) and other reintegration services. More specifically, we examined how two unique types of false admission of guilt (i.e., false confessions

OBJECTIVE Identification and implementation of effective methods for reducing racial/ethnic bias and disparities in legal settings are paramount in the United States and other countries. One procedure originally thought to reduce bias in legal decisions is the use of risk assessment instruments, which is now being heavily scrutinized. Measurement invariance, a latent trait technique, is a robust method

This Article reinterprets the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) to show how it might rationally strengthen protections for the environment against intentional damage by states, particularly during armed conflict. The Article applies the orthodox rules of treaty interpretation to analyze in depth the Convention text

About a decade ago, the neural network of the international financial system underwent an identity crisis. Since its establishment in 1973, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift) had become the world's dominant system for transmitting information about financial transactions, handling up to 20 million messages per day across 212 jurisdictions. The Belgium-based company

Public-sector corruption siphons trillions of dollars from the global economy and contributes to social instability. Institutional Anomie Theory, with its focus on the links between social institut...

Situational Action Theory (SAT) has emerged as a prominent theory of crime and delinquency. It includes a new conceptualization of self-control, which emphasizes its role in enabling individuals to...

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In recent years, many countries have adopted biodiversity offset policies to internalize the ecological impacts of land developments. Although national policies share the general principle of equalizing ecological harm with gain, there is substantial variation across programs regarding the institutional forms governing offsetting. In this paper, we compare biodiversity governance in the United States

Scholarship on the administration of international organizations (IOs) has extensively discussed how autonomy influences their performance. While some argue that autonomy increases performance through greater adaptability, others warn that it may increase the risk of agency slack. Authors typically distinguish between three types of performance: output, outcome, and impact performance. We focus on

Women’s engagement in policing in the United States and other countries has not reached its potential. We interviewed 47 women in law enforcement to learn about their pathways into policing. Two pr...

Self-control, perceived procedural justice, and moral foundations are prominent theoretical constructs in the criminological literature. However, existing measures of each are long. Long scales cro...

How can polycentric governance promote the development of ecosocial policies within existing policy systems? Through a study of green reforms of Danish vocational education, the paper argues that polycentric governance institutions are particularly useful at engaging constituent actors in innovation and constructive collaboration over reforming education programs to integrate ecological goals into

Trust is a key resource in financial transactions. Traditional financial institutions, and novel blockchain‐based decentralized financial (DeFi) services rely on fundamentally different sources of trust and confidence. The former relies on heavy regulation, trusted intermediaries, clear rules (and restrictions) on market competition, and long‐standing informal expectations on what banks and other financial

While low self-control is one of the strongest predictors of offending, scholars do not agree whether the theory is gendered or gender neutral. This study used hierarchal meta-analytic methods to t...

Building upon prior work, we propose an alternative way to look at the pattern of spatial crime concentration and temporal stability of it. We first identify a high-crime cluster using the sample b...

The governance turn in political research has led to increased attention to informal institutions. For scholars of international relations this has contributed to recent scholarship that reveals a notable growth in the number of informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs). Many aspects of IIGOs remain unknown, including whether they involve transnational actors (TNAs). Yet, whether IIGOs are open

OBJECTIVE One concern about the use of risk assessment instruments in legal decisions is the potential for disparate impact by race or ethnicity. This means that one racial or ethnic group will experience harsher legal outcomes than another because of higher or biased risk estimates. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to synthesize research examining the real-world impact of juvenile

In 2022, over 1.87 million Americans ceased employment before satisfying their employer’s 401(k) plan vesting schedule, causing them to forfeit nonvested employer contributions. This Essay uses data to demonstrate the effects of using vesting schedules and highlights companies who had the most affected workers or amassed significant forfeitures in 2022.  

OBJECTIVE Defense attorneys sometimes suggest that social-cognitive difficulties render autistic individuals vulnerable to involvement in crime, often arguing that theory of mind (ToM) difficulties that undermine inferences about others' intentions underpin this vulnerability. We examined autistic adults' ability to respond adaptively to criminal intent during interactions and whether difficulties

OBJECTIVE Existing literature has yet to conceptualize and consolidate research on psychological essentialism and its relation to the criminal legal system, particularly in terms of explaining how individuals with justice involvement have been and could be differentially impacted across contexts. This article explores essentialism in the criminal legal system, including its potential consequences for

OBJECTIVE Researcher-based degrees of freedom have been shown to contribute to low replication rates in science. That is, researchers' options within the process of designing and conducting empirical tests may increase the probability of false positive findings. The aim of this study was to transfer the concept of degrees of freedom to the practice of forensic-psychological assessment as it may likewise

How can decarbonization governance endure under increasing geoeconomic distress? Global tensions threaten to divert financial and political resources from the green transition toward national security issues. However, we lack the analytical tools to assess decarbonization governance in this age of global rivalries. To address this gap, we develop an analytical framework to study the effects of geoeconomic

OBJECTIVE Racial biases exist in almost every aspect of the criminal legal system, resulting in disparities across all stages of legal procedures-before, during, and after a legal procedure. Building on expected utility theory, we propose an expected utility framework to organize and quantify racial disparities in legal procedures. HYPOTHESES Corresponding to the parameteres involved in estimating

OBJECTIVE Across two experiments, we examined three cognitive biases (order effects, context effects, confirmatory bias) in licensed psychologists' diagnostic reasoning. HYPOTHESES Our main prediction was that psychologist-participants would seek confirming versus disconfirming information after forming an initial diagnostic hypothesis, even given multiple opportunities to seek new information in the

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) adopted in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic marks an important departure in European Union (EU) governance, as it introduces an innovative “demand‐driven, performance‐based” model aimed at overcoming the limitations of past policies seeking to promote national reforms. In this study, we set out the theoretical assumptions underlying the RRF governance model

OBJECTIVE Algorithmic decision making (ADM) takes on increasingly complex tasks in the criminal justice system. Whereas new developments in machine learning could help to improve the quality of judicial decisions, there are legal and ethical concerns that thwart the widespread use of algorithms. Against the backdrop of current efforts to promote the digitization of the German judicial system, this

In large and complex human groups, social rules reduce individuals' uncertainty about their own choice set, including through these rules' simultaneous influence on the choice set of other individuals. But uncertainty varies as to the extent to which it is knowable and quantifiable ex ante. Therefore, different classes of social rules deal with the future uncertainty of individuals' conduct in structurally

As scholars race to address the climate crisis, they have often treated the problem as sui generis and have only rarely sought to learn from prior efforts to make industrial operations greener. In this paper, we consider what can be learned from other shifts away from polluting substances. Drawing on literatures on corporate regulatory strategies and evolving regulatory interactions, we argue for a

Despite significant public concern, previous research on hate crimes has been limited and inconclusive regarding whether police discriminate against racial minority victims when clearing hate crime...

Scholars of the US regulatory process routinely assert that rulemaking is “ossified”—that it has become so encumbered with procedural constraints that it is difficult for agencies to issue socially desirable regulations. Yet, this claim has rarely been subject to empirical testing, and this is particularly true at the sub‐federal (i.e., US state) level. But the same factors that allegedly cause ossification

How do citizens perceive labor market risks related to digitalization and the green transition, and how do these risk perceptions translate into preferences for social policies? We address these questions in this paper by studying the policy preferences of individual workers on how governments should deal with the two labor market challenges of digitalization and the green transition. Employing novel

There is ongoing debate over the latitude of discretion police officers have when conducting stops and searches. While necessary due to resource limitations and need for individualized justice, dis...

A regulatory sandbox is an emerging tool for addressing the challenges posed by the FinTech industry, but countries have embraced it to varying degrees. There is a need to systematically examine the question: Which factors explain the diverging trajectories in countries' decision to use (or not use) this instrument? This paper examines the adoption of regulatory sandboxes for FinTech in the Baltic

In the United States, hate crimes that are motivated by religious bias disproportionately impact minoritized religious groups. This study investigates religious ecological predictors of hate crimes...

OBJECTIVE When an officer places a suspect in an identification procedure and the witness identifies the suspect, it falls on attorneys to make decisions that reflect the strength of that identification. The factor that most affects the strength of identification evidence is the likelihood that the suspect is guilty before being subjected to the procedure, which scholars refer to as the prior probability

OBJECTIVE People who have been wrongly incarcerated report exceptionally poor mental health, and despite having been exonerated, they face discrimination similar to other formerly incarcerated people when seeking housing and employment opportunities. The current audit study was designed to test whether exonerees likewise face discrimination when seeking mental health treatment. HYPOTHESES Therapists

Since the 1990s, the EU has attempted to create a common electricity market. However, EU legislators are unsatisfied by the results. We argue that differentiated implementation of directives over time creates path dependencies that entrench national differences. The actor constellation of parties and incumbent operators at the beginning of the liberalization path determines how well countries implement

This article reviews recent insights from the blooming Comparative Political Economy (CPE) literature on climate change with the aim to demonstrate the importance of integrating climate change into the field of CPE and to highlight the contributions of CPE to our understanding of the social and political obstacles to effective climate policies. In addition, we advance two key points to bring the CPE

Legal cynicism refers to a general contempt of people toward the law and legal authorities. Gifford and Reisig proposed a scale to measure the construct and provided evidence for its multidimension...

Citizen trust in regulatory agencies is essential for the functioning of society and markets. Trust in regulatory agencies promotes compliance and strengthens trust in regulated sectors. Despite its importance, there is no systematic study on how trust is in this context can be measured best. In response, this article presents findings of a systematic review of measures of trust in regulatory contexts

Political decisions over economic growth policies influence the degree of bureaucratic autonomy and regulatory governance dynamics. Yet, our understanding of these processes in the Global South is somewhat limited. The article studies the post‐Global Financial Crisis period and relies on elite interviews and secondary sources from Turkey. It problematizes how an economic growth model dependent on foreign

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to estimate the behavioral impacts of training police officers in implicit bias awareness and management. HYPOTHESES Training police in implicit bias reduces racial and ethnic disparities in stops, arrests, summonses, frisks, searches, and/or use of force. METHOD A cluster randomized controlled trial using the stepped wedge design was applied to 14,471 officers