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If our school closes, we lose our community. (Opunake & Coastal News, 2002, p. 1)

In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.

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.

In the dark days of the 1980s and 1990s, the abolition of capital punishment was virtually unthinkable. However, a new form of abolitionism – which I call Rule of Law abolitionism – has raised the hopes of death penalty opponents. In this chapter, I elucidate the logic of the Rule of Law abolitionist argument, distinguishing it from its more familiar doctrinal and moral variants. I then assess its strengths and weaknesses. On the basis of this critique, I indicate the route Rule of Law abolitionism must travel to bring about the demise of the death penalty.

It is commonly claimed that the entrapment defense has never succeeded in a terrorism case. Yet that is not precisely true. In several post-9/11 cases, entrapment claims have contributed to full or partial acquittals, hung juries, and unexpectedly lenient sentences. Prosecutors have also dropped charges, setting convicted defendants free, to prevent successful entrapment defenses upon retrial. This chapter concludes that, despite the fragility and ambiguity of the right not to be entrapped, entrapment claims can achieve partial victories even in terrorism cases, due to the multiple discretion points at which entrapment can inform strategic or normative judgments.

In this study we set out to explain police support for the use of force, police response to a vignette about force, and police self-reported use of force.

The computer-assisted survey was conducted among 419 officers of the Metropolitana police department in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The regression analyses show that a substantial part of how officers view force, and the reported frequency of their own use of force, can be explained through demographic characteristics, organizational features, attitudes toward citizens, and personal experience.

This study was conducted in a region where excessive police use of force is unfortunately a continuing concern. Based on the results we advise police organizations to tackle this issue by investing in improving police attitudes toward both internal and external relations. We also recommend prohibiting officers to carry the regulatory gun while off duty, in order to reduce deaths of both civilians and officers.

This chapter describes the results of an exploratory study that examined parents’ experiences with the law as they obtained funding for speech generating devices for their children with communication disabilities, either through public health insurance, private health insurance, or a public school. Exploring legal consciousness: Experiences of families seeking funding for assistive technologies for children with disabilities. Law, Policy, and Society Dissertations. Paper 17. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20000265). The study explored how parents engaged with the law and how their experiences and perceptions about the law compared to the formal law. This research was based on sociolegal theory, particularly the concept of legal consciousness, which examines how people think and act in relation to the law as a consequence of social interactions, and analyzes how law in action compares with the formal law. Sociolegal theory broadens the definition of law to include “the meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices” (Ewick & Silbey, 1998, p. 22) as well as the formal law.

Similar to other sociolegal research, this study collected personal narratives of law using grounded theory methods to identify themes within those narratives. The narratives revealed that while parents expressed varieties of legal consciousness, there was one overarching theme: the law provided a framework for parents to envision rights, discuss rights, and claim rights. While few parents invoked formal legal mechanisms to solve grievances, the law created a rights consciousness among parents which empowered them to acknowledge and validate the notion of rights and entitlements.

Handler's genealogy of postmodernism recounted in his address recognizes its origin in aesthetic disciplines and its somewhat viral transcription into social jurisprudence: “the postmodern concept of subversion developed first in language and literary theory, art, and architecture and then spread into politics and law” (1992a, p. 698). Although Handler's rejection of deconstruction stems from what he sees to be its political quiescence, its association with aesthetic critiques of modernism haunts his claims as one source of its essential conservatism. Aesthetic values, he implies, remain distant or distinct from pressing issues of political and social inequality.

Purpose – Using sexual harassment in Japan as a case, this research illustrates how local gender culture, particularly sexual harassment consciousness, has changed since initial local legal reform.

Design/methodology/approach – The historical analysis draws on national newspaper reporting of a fairly new concept of sexual harassment into a local society.

Findings – My findings suggest that Japanese actively engaged in, rather than rejected, the new social issue; their active response gave rise to social consciousness toward sekuhara especially and sex discrimination more generally. Broader and more inclusive definitions of sexual harassment appeared in Japan than the original international legal definitions. Local–international interactions effectively shaped such outcomes.

Originality/value – This is the first qualitative and quantitative analysis of the media's portrayals of sexual harassment in Japan.

Two paradoxes constitute the discourse of human rights. One concerns the relationship between “the human” and “the political”; the other invokes the opposition between the universalist moral character of human rights and the practical, particular context in which they become manifest. This chapter argues how and why these paradoxes will not go away – a good thing, too – over and against classical and contemporary writers who have argued for the priority of one or the other. After elucidating the powerful and enduring character of these paradoxes in history and political theory, I argue that human rights discourse only makes sense in terms of the arguably more primary discourses of democracy, political virtue, and justice if it is to avoid being a deceptive, rhetorical cover for dubious political practices.