Welcome to the Law and Society Review Blog

The current editors of Law and Society Review have started this blog with the goal of facilitating broader dissemination of socio-legal research. We hope that this blog allows us to discuss scholarship and teach issues that may not make it to academic journals quickly. We invite everyone to contribute; we ask all authors to summarize their recent articles.

The new blog will also allow us to discuss the changing research environment. We’d like to hear more people contribute to pressing conversations around research and publishing. Many of us already have these conversations among smaller groups of scholars. A blog will allow a larger conversation with more participants and, we hope, a greater diversity of views.

The questions to weigh in on are many. Professional associations and funding agencies occasion talk about the press for data access in both Europe and North America. What do you think about this issue, in every dimension from ethical to epistemological to administrative? What do we think about the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk as a research tool? How do ethical practices translate to obligations cross-nationally? What are ethical dilemmas in research resulting from the increasing availability of records on the internet? What do we do with what we know about the production of records by state agencies, including police, when big data analytics often do not rely on that knowledge?

We live in the midst of information overload, and the wish to cut through the noise allows elites to make simple false statements, repeating them over and over and possibly promoting significant policy changes. We do not know whether a blog making information more accessible will help counter ‘alternative facts.’ We do know we want to make the forum available.

Please send all proposed contributions to lsr@umbc.edu. Guidelines are on the ‘Guidelines’ tab.

We would like to thank Wiley and the Law and Society Association for their encouragement, Danielle McClellan for her help, and Rebecca Postowski for her excellent work managing the blog.

Europeanization or National Specificity? Legal Approaches to Sexual Harassment in France, 2002–2012

By Abigail Saguy, UCLA

Sexual harassment represents a massive problem for working women worldwide. A recent social media campaign has brought increased awareness to this fact. In late 2017—after three-dozen women accused Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault, or rape—millions of women posted “Me Too” on Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Taking inspiration from African American activist Tarana Burke—who, in 2007, started an offline “Me Too” campaign to let sex abuse survivors know that they were not alone—actress Alyssa Milano launched this online Me Too campaign to shift the focus from Weinstein to victims. She hoped this would “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”[1] While some posted simply, “Me Too,” others provided wrenching detail about abuse they had sometimes never before shared publicly. In France, a similar social media campaign flourished, under the hashtag “balance ton porc,” loosely translated as “sq…

Comment: Making valid claims in social science research: A comment on Jenness and Calavita

By Tom Tyler, Yale Law School

I am writing to comment on several methodological issues raised by the article by Valerie Jenness and Kitty Calavita, entitled “It depends on the outcome”: Prisoners, grievances, and perceptions of justice”. I am pleased that the methodology blog for Law and Society Review has been created and provides a forum to discuss research design issues. I will address three aspects of the study: operationalization of the variables; statistical analysis; and inclusiveness of the literature review.

The Jenness/Calavita paper studies California prisons using data collected through interviews with prisoners. The paper says that it tests the perceptual procedural justice model, in particular there are frequent references to the Tyler model, in a prison setting. The study concludes that “prisoners privilege the actual outcome of disputes as their barometer of justice” showing “the dominance of substantive outcomes” (from the abstract)”.

I agree with Jenness and Cala…

The Roots of Life Without Parole Sentencing

By Christopher Seeds, New York University

Since the early 1970s, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP)—an extreme prison sentence offering no reasonable possibility of release—has emerged as a routine legal sanction and penal practice in the United States. A century, even several decades ago, this would have been unexpected. Yet today, with more than 50,000 prisoners so sentenced and hundreds of laws authorizing it, LWOP is firmly entrenched in American penal policy, in judicial and prosecutorial decisionmaking, and in public discourse. Two general theses—one depicting LWOP as a replacement penalty for capital crimes; another linking LWOP with tough-on-crime sentencing policy of the mass incarceration era—have served as working explanations for this phenomenon. In the absence of in-depth studies, however, there has been little evidence with which to carefully evaluate these narratives.

My article, “Disaggregating LWOP: Life Without Parole, Capital Punishment, and …

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