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Climate change is a wicked problem, a framework not often used in sociolegal studies. The problem is complex, not readily named, and not limited to one jurisdiction. Therefore, the places of law are multiple: human rights instruments, supranational tribunals, regional courts, and local governments and NGOS. Litigation concerning responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions has largely not resulted in favorable judgments, and the papers in this collection turn to other ways of conceptualizing law and courts in responding to climate change. Relevant legal strategies include environmental legal enforcement, but also changes in investment, and response to the many disasters that are related to climate change. The papers in this collection travel across jurisdictions, actors and problems to assess legal strategies concerning climate change. El cambio climatico es un problema perverso, un marco poco usado en los estudios sociojuridicos. El problema es complejo, de dificil denominacion, y no esta limitado a una sola jurisdiccion. Por lo tanto, el derecho tiene muchos espacios: instrumentos de derechos humanos, tribunales supranacionales, juzgados regionales y gobiernos y ONG locales. Los litigios sobre responsabilidades por emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero no han solido acabar con veredictos favorables, y los articulos de esta coleccion miran hacia otras formas de conceptualizar el derecho y los tribunales como respuesta al cambio climatico. Estrategias legales importantes incluyen la aplicacion del derecho, pero tambien cambios en inversiones y respuestas a los multiples desastres relacionados con el cambio climatico. Los articulos de este numero navegan por varias jurisdicciones, agentes y problemas para valorar las estrategias juridicas sobre cambio climatico. Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1059

This paper contrasts knowledge frames for climate change and displacement. First the paper explains the abstract human rights arguments about displacement in climate change and disaster. In contrast, management and claims under lawsuits about climate change and displacement are place-based. The paper then draws on data about knowledge and management strategies in a particular place in the United States, and on a close reading of legal reasoning in a post-disaster domestic housing case in the United States. The paper relies on interpretive methods. Although legal reasoning is often represented as distinctive in how it transforms stories into decisions, it shares characteristics with other forms of policy reasoning. Institutional reasoning transforms the “existential threat” of climate change into managed parts. The paper argues that intervening concerning climate change and displacement requires shifting from broad claims in the drama of climate change and rights to following tactics logical within particular institutions. Este articulo realiza un contraste entre marcos de conocimiento para el cambio climatico y el desplazamiento de la poblacion. Primero, explica los argumentos abstractos sobre derechos humanos; por contra, la gestion y las reclamaciones judiciales sobre cambio climatico y desplazamiento se basan en el lugar. A continuacion, se parte de datos sobre estrategias de conocimiento y gestion en un lugar concreto, y de una cuidadosa lectura del razonamiento juridico en un caso sobre vivienda post-desastre. Nos basamos en metodos interpretativos. A pesar de que a menudo se presenta como rasgo distintivo del razonamiento juridico el transformar historias en decisiones, comparte caracteristicas con otros tipos de razonamiento de politicas. El razonamiento institucional transforma la “amenaza existencial” del cambio climatico en partes gestionadas. Se argumenta que, para intervenir sobre el cambio climatico y el desplazamiento, es necesario pasar de reclamaciones generales a tacticas logicas dentro de instituciones concretas. Available from: https://doi.org/10.35295/osls.iisl/0000-0000-0000-1064

This article considers calls for data transparency as research regulation and accountability. Rather than arguing for or against the value of sharing data, the article argues that understanding the call for data sharing requires questioning assumptions embedded in the debate about the context of scholarship and rethinking the purposes of data access. The article first argues that the spread of information available digitally means that researchers in the academy and outside it work with digital information, quite apart from mandates for data access. Second, replication as an accountability measure is often offered as one reason for making data available. However, scholars of replication have argued that replication has multiple components, many difficult to enact. Demands in universities for grant funding, impact by standard metrics, and newsworthy research encourage rapidly produced scholarship and research that makes big innovative claims. However, replication imposed sporadically cannot regularly counter these systematic incentives. If one purpose of data access is to regulate the research enterprise, scholarship on regulatory strategies and the difficulty of accomplishing goals via mandates illuminates the call for data access. Replication operates as a threat, one seen to generate incentives for good science, but is erratically enforced. Borrowing from the scholarship of audit and regulation, the article uses regulation, including audit, as accountability to argue that the sciences might need to address fundamental concerns about trust.

I wrote most of this article before October 2016. The news has brought to the fore points made in scholarship on sexual harassment, including that people do not complain, that sexual harassment is widespread and ordinary in some work settings, that legal settlement contributes to allowing problems to go unaddressed, and that sexual harassment is experienced well beyond the high-profile settings that made the news in the fall of 2016 or winter of 2017. Political science most recently finds itself in the professional press in contests over individual stories of sexual harassment as unwanted sexual attention and the use of professional power (Gluckman, 2018). The New York Times's 2017 reporting of sexual assault by Harvey Weinstein (Kantor and Twohey, 2017) sparked the spread of #MeToo, a term that an African-American woman had first deployed years earlier (Vagianos, 2017). The term relies on framing a wrong but often without the law. Before the fall of 2016 and the spread of #MeToo, law and decisions by administrators in higher education had generated reporting about the academy. Generated in part by law and decisions by administrators in higher education, sexual harassment reporting about the academy predated the fall of 2016. This article concerns that earlier reporting and the way that sexual harassment as unwanted sexual attention can crowd out other ways of seeing law in employment problems and other ways of interpreting employment problems without relying on law.

The public service mission of public administration programs invites rethinking the exclusive focus on federal court decisions in administrative law courses. In spring 2015, we worked together in a course on the legal environment for public administration. The course included elements of the standard administrative law syllabus as well as a service component. The class worked with a city on a project that required the class to gather information about civil liability, policing, and racial inequality. A service project allows deeper learning while upending expectations of education as absorbing material presented to students. We argue service projects can be part of administrative law courses.

Casework in the United States in social welfare programs has been limited in what caseworkers can do, as what they do has been tightly structured by rules. Recently, scholars have argued that episodic assistance in disaster brings sympathy in public policy more than restriction. The sympathy after disaster brings new money, and individual assistance is in turn the subject of casework. This article relies upon interviews, observations, and government documents to assess how casework served displaced people after Hurricane Katrina. The article finds that caseworkers after Katrina were caught in a program that would end at some uncertain time, and with new and unclear rules that changed frequently, making the sympathy difficult to enact for many of the poorest people. Casework after disaster is episodic and convened by nonprofits and, after Katrina, paid for by a large grant and then written into statute. Assistance for displaced people is likely to continue, given the expectation of more disasters and rising sea levels. The question of how it is like or unlike other forms of assistance and what sympathy in policy means in helping displaced people is therefore likely to continue to matter.

For students of political development, work in legal history on identity invites considering how institutions construct, reinforce, stigmatize, and transform identity and how identity illuminates h...

Reports of employment problems in universities enacts an information asymmetry that has recently highlighted sexual harassment as a legal wrong while dampening other potential descriptions of reasons for disparities. Sexual harassment as unwanted sexual attention both understates and overstates problems at work, not least because it is not an issue for all women. If it crowds out other reasons for disparities, reports misstate problems in employment. This focus contrasts with books that popularized other barriers at work for women just a few years previously. The stories about sexual harassment contrast with systematic evidence concerning reasons for disadvantage at work. Systematic evidence is often less easy to tell as a story with characters, events and a time line. In this instance, law along with university leaders' willingness to publicly act on claims has produced complaints that women have usually been reluctant to make, The Office of Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague Letter in 2011 addressing sexual assault in higher education, which contributes to mobilizing complaints. This paper draws upon the Chronicle of Higher Education's reports of discrimination. This paper concludes by arguing for proliferating stories, motivated by lessons from systematic research, even if law is not a remedy.

This paper analyzes the delivery of assistance for displaced people after Hurricane Katrina. Assistance can be understood as part of social welfare assistance in the United States. It is part of the social welfare apparatus in structure, and in how recipients experienced it. The “top tier” of social welfare assistance is available on the basis of claims that a person has worked and contributed to the American economy. However, displacement rather than the work of citizens was the point of access to assistance after Hurricane Katrina. Although humanitarian assistance for internally displaced persons has an international grounding, citizenship was central to evacuees’ understanding of why they merited decent treatment. The term “internally displaced person” was not in widespread use, and to receive assistance as a refugee implied being treated disrespectfully. Although for recipients citizenship was key to assistance, analyses of migration are illuminating in (1) the delivery of casework services, w...

Analyses of American constitutionalism tend to address it as something very distinct from simple common law interpretation of rights and powers; that is, the ability to overturn statutes as unconstitutional is different in kind, not in degree, from the elaboration of principles in Common Law. Reconsiderations of constitutionalism and the Common Law have begun to note how much in courts on both sides of the Atlantic supervised hierarchical relations-in labour, in family law, between courts-through interpretation of statutes and common law principles during the nineteenth century. In the United States, courts interpreted constitutional principles through common law categories.2 Supervision included what we would now consider administrative law: the supervision of governing officials by the ordinary courts. While in Britain textbooks as well as Benthamite political theory have treated administrative law as part of constitutional law, in American constitutionalism they tend to be analysed as different phenomena, the latter dependent on the emergence of administrative agencies within the executive branch of government in the latter part of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth. Through the early nineteenth century in Britain, the High Court had supervised administrative tasks such as administration of the poor laws because the local courts, the Quarter Sessions, had administered the laws and the task of the High Court was to ensure that the local courts were enforcing the Sovereign's law.3 After about 1840, courts supervised the boards then taking over administrative tasks through supervision of jurisdiction, a key to administrative law in Britain.

California's recently enacted Proposition 187, restricting access to benefits for undocumented people, highlights once again the hostility to immigrants from Mexico in the western United States. While supporters of that proposition have sometimes argued the importance of the difference between legal and illegal immigration, the demand for labor has often meant that legal and illegal immigration are closely related. Now is an opportune time to examine more closely U.S. policy that has facilitated the use of migrant labor from Mexico in the American Southwest.

Britain does not have a written constitution, which provides for a common assessment that it has no constitutional law. However, it actually instead provides a limiting case for considering the influence of courts and law in governance. For the courts have been involved in modifying both central and local government programs through statutory interpretation. The modifications that the courts have brought about have meant that the government has to take legal rules and courts into account in designing programs. The current limits on what the courts do have been part of the provocation for a movement in favor of a bill of rights in Britain.

Efforts to structure administrative processes through legality are well known in the United States. However, they are seldom analyzed in a comparative context, with an effort to explain how legal procedures are structured into administrative process. Political disputes criticizing bureaucracy and arguing for more legal accountability have occurred in Britain as well as the United States, culminating in statutes. But the extensive postwar debate in Britain led to a statute that did not accomplish as much as the American Administrative Procedure Act. This article explains the efforts and the somewhat different outcomes in Britain and the United States with an analysis of the coherence of and divisions within legal ideology and how the legal profession interacted with the different configuration of state institutions in Britain and the United States.

Rather than studying only what appellate courts do, scholars of law and society have been pointing out that the interpretation of law is an enterprise many engage in—e.g., lawyers, administrative officials, and the lay public, as well as courts. Recent scholarship has broadened the analysis of constitutional law in a way that is not Supreme Court centered. Scholars have focused on constitutionalism as the idea that words written down limit and shape political practice. For example, Michael Kammen's work shows the continuing and repetitive celebrations of the Constitution in American life, celebrations that have taken the federal constitution as “a machine that would go of itself” and as a sacred text, often forgetting how much it has been remade through reinterpretation. This focus on constitutionalism rather than on appellate court decisions leads to a broader understanding of constitutions in a polity, so that scholars analyze rights claims in addition to examining the rights that courts have said people have. This effort emphasizes the meaningful elements of law, since the definition of constitutionalism focuses on what people think they should do, or on what they have a right to do. It leads to scholarship that points out the penetration of legal language, particularly claims of rights, into American culture. With this approach, one reason to analyze elite statements of law is that they state rights in ways that become part of general political consciousness.

The political effectiveness of legal expertise in the United States has rested on the ability of a peak association to present itself as representing the opinion of the profession as a whole. It has also relied on a broad epistemology in which lawyers claim to know the right thing to do. However, the effectiveness and placement of such expertise is a comparative issue. This article argues that organizations other than peak associations can muster the support required for legitimacy in the modem state. The legal profession's epistemology could lead it to narrow rather than broaden its claims in order to effectively claim expertise in something. The ability of the central state to shape a profession's mandate and to reject its advice will also influence the deployment of legal expertise. The article explores these issues in the context of the reform of administrative law in England and Wales. In England and Wales, an expertise-based commission mimicked the processes expected of a peak association. In anticipation of rejection by the central administration, it constrained rather than broadened its policy recommendations.

The comparative essays in Richard Abel and Philip Lewis's Lawyers in Society: The Common Law World and Richard Abel's The Legal Profession in England and Wales provide an excellent opportunity to reconsider the usefulness of the monopoly-control approach to the legal profession, an approach that has dominated the study of professions for the last decade. Abel, one of the major proponents of the monopoly-control thesis, uses it in the England and Wales volume and in his contribution to the edited work on the common law world. However, his discussions of the English and American professions serve more to illustrate the theory than to assess it. The wealth of information Abel and the other authors provide-most of whom take a more skeptical approach to the theory-furnish a rich data base from which to evaluate the monopoly-control framework.' The au

One thing seems clear in British politics today: many of the old truths no longer hold. Voters no longer vote according to class. The current government has made some effort to shake up the civil service and bring in outsiders. And a third political party is struggling along. Faced with all this, scholars have had to rethink their approach to British politics and governance. Appellate courts have long been considered Britain’s least interesting governing institution, but they have also benefited from the shake-up. Studies published in recent years mean to examine the politics of the British courts, primarily the Law Lords, the members of the House of Lords who comprise the final court of appeal in Britain. And, congruent with other changes in politics, studies find that courts have become interesting enough that they ought at least be considered in discussing British politics.

In the 19th century, courts supervised states’ social spending by limiting taxation to public purposes. The focus of this article is the courts’ approach to pensions. Under a 19th-century doctrine, states could pay money to those who had served the state or, under the rubric of charity, to those who were the indigent helpless. States first paid pensions to people for military service and for serving as firemen; later in the century, the doctrine from these cases provided a framework for expanding civil service pensions as states expanded their civil service. Courts characterized the earlier pensions as earned because the service had been dangerous, requiring bravery from men and possibly leaving helpless women and children without protection. This characterization later shaped evaluations of civil service pensions. The doctrine persisted as states enacted pensions for widowed mothers; when these pensions were challenged in state courts, the courts approved of them as payments to helpless people, not as rewards to those who had served. This characterization counters recent scholarship that argues that mothers’ pensions rewarded service as military pensions did.