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Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights provided a path-breaking theoretical analysis of what he called the “myth of rights.” Scheingold's key insight was that even though rights were a myth, rights ideologies nevertheless left a significant imprint on American politics. The book charted a research agenda that has now been followed by a wide range of sociolegal scholars. Looking across that diverse body scholarship, I find convergence on two points. First, scholars claim that law and legal ideology contribute to processes of legitimation and to political acquiescence. Second, and seemingly in tension with the first, most people do not appear to believe in idealized legal myths and express only qualified commitments to legal ideals. Most scholars have responded to this tension by downplaying evidence that people have doubts about legal ideals, often treating expressions of doubts as evidence of confusion. As a result, scholars still conclude that residual commitments to legal myths help to explain legitimation and acquiescence. Such moves produce accounts of legal myths that are insufficiently attentive to politics and power. Scholars would do better to return to Scheingold's more ambivalent perspective on the politics of rights in order to understand the political consequences of commitments to rights’ ideologies.

The sociological and socio-legal literatures on social movements have identified three main types of “legal framing” in contemporary social movement discourse: collective rights framing, individual rights framing, and nationalistic legal framing. However, it is unclear from the current research how movement actors decide which of these framing strategies to use, under what circumstances, and to what effect. In this article, I offer a model for future empirical research on legal framing, which (1) distinguishes legal framing by its argumentative structure, ideological content, and remedy; and (2) analyzes how a social movement’s internal culture and institutional environment constrain the symbolic utility of particular legal frames and shape the movement’s legal framing strategy. I argue that the alternative approach offered here will help theorize how social movements strike a balance between the institutional pressure to reproduce dominant ideologies and the internal pressure to reform those ideologies. This perspective thus helps build socio-legal theory on the relationship between legal framing and social subordination, and on the conditions under which movements will be able to inflect legal language with insurgent social movement values.

While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.

This chapter examines the survival of private property during the early transition to communism in Romania at the intersection of state policies, ideologies, and legal practices. It focuses on petitions contesting urban housing nationalization in the city of Timişoara between 1950 and 1965. I argue that petitions are partially successful acts of microresistance through law that contested the communist regime's concept of private property, played a role in halting further urban housing nationalization, undermined the regime's attempts at building legitimacy through legality, and challenged ideas about legal instrumentalism in a communist system.

As social movements engage in transnational legal processes, they have articulated innovative rights claims outside the nation-state frame. This chapter analyzes emerging practices of legal mobilization in response to global governance through a case study of the “right to food sovereignty.” The claim of food sovereignty has been mobilized transnationally by small-scale food producers, food-chain workers, and the food insecure to oppose the liberalization of food and agriculture. The author analyzes the formation of this claim in relation to the rise of a “network imaginary” of global governance. By drawing on ethnographic research, the author shows how activists have internalized this imaginary within their claims and practices of legal mobilization. In doing so, the author argues, transnational food sovereignty activists co-constitute global food governance from below. Ultimately, the development of these practices in response to shifting forms of transnational legality reflects the enduring, mutually constitutive relationship between law and social movements on a global scale.

This paper provides a political analysis of legal pluralism from a “new institutionalist” perspective. In response to question of why states recognize and incorporate non-state normative orderings into their legal systems, it is hypothesized that the decision of incorporation is made to enhance the capacities of postcolonial states with “rational” calculations. In this respect, two new categories of legal pluralism are introduced: capacity-enhancing recognition and capacity-diminishing recognition. The paper lastly assesses the implications of legal pluralism upon the state-society relations and individual rights and liberties of citizens in the case of Israel.

In The Americans, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings are undercover operatives for the Soviet Union. In that capacity, they are responsible for crimes including murder and espionage. Yet they also pose as a law-abiding family, running a small business, raising children, and making friends with their neighbours. By ‘practicing’ American life, Philip becomes more American, forging an identity more receptive to American values and attitudes. This chapter draws on concepts from the literature on legal consciousness to examine the relationship between identity and hegemony. Studies of legal consciousness emphasise that consciousness is not simply legal attitudes or even ideology; rather legal consciousness is reflected in the way that people enact their legal beliefs and values. Those enactments help individuals form identities, but those identities are constrained by the hegemonic ideologies that are prevalent in the culture. Law and legal consciousness are important to both processes.

Access to justice is both a topic of engaged social-legal research and a key component of legal professional ideology. There is a relationship between the two. The more committed the organized legal profession to the issue of access to justice, the higher the profile of scholarly research on topics that relate in one form or another to access to justice. The organized bar's commitment peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, waned in the 1980s, and has not regained the position it once had on the domestic U.S. agenda. In contrast, however, access to justice has recently emerged strongly on the reform agenda that U.S. and multilateral foreign aid organizations – along with the U.S. legal profession – are promoting abroad as part of the renewed post Cold War effort to build the rule of law.

This paper examines several common features that animate Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights and The Political Novel. In exploring the affinities between these contrasting works, the paper takes up Scheingold's engagement with the cultural imagination – the legal imagination in The Politics of Rights and the literary imagination in The Political Novel – and shows how this engagement informs Scheingold's analysis of illusion, dualism, contingency, and agency.

Giorgio Agamben has used the notion of the state of exception to describe the United States’ detention camps in Cuba. Agamben argues that the use of the state of exception in the U.S. can be traced back to President Lincoln's suspension of the right of habeas corpus during the Civil War. This paper suggests that this argument obscures more relevant legal and political precedents that can be found in U.S. territorial legal history. Moreover, while Agamben's argument obscures conceptual distinctions between a state of emergency and a state of exception, his argument also provides resources that can expose the limits of liberal interpretations of the relationship between the State, the citizen, and the law.