Welcome to the Law and Society Review Blog

The 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 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 lsa5.lsrblog@blogger.com. Guidelines are on the ‘Guidelines’ tab.

We would like to thank Wiley and the Law and Society Association for their encouragement and Danielle McClellan for her help.

In the most recent Law & Society Review

Reconfiguring the Deserving Refugee: Cultural Categories of Worth and the Making of US Asylum Policy Talia Shiff Lecturer on Sociology Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Scholars Program Harvard University @Talia_Shiff Contemporary US asylum policy is characterized by two seemingly contradictory developments: on the one hand, increasing restrictions placed on the admission of immigrants and asylum seekers, and on the other hand a growing acceptance of a new set of asylum claims involving previously unrecognized forms of gender-related harms. In Reconfiguring the Deserving Refugee: Cultural Categories of Worth and the Making of US Asylum Policy, Talia Shiff sets to explain this puzzle: how is it that during a period of growing hostility towards asylum seekers at large, there is an increasingly inclusive approach towards non-conventional gender-based claims such as rape, female genital cutting and domestic violence that do not involve standard forms of government-s

In the most recent Law & Society Review

On the Radar: Why Immigrant ‘Legality’ Can Feel as Scary as Immigrant ‘Illegality’ Photo by Harrison Truong Asad L. Asad Assistant Professor of Sociology Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity Stanford University @asasad Under contemporary U.S. immigration policy, both “legal” and “illegal” immigrants are vulnerable to deportation. Sociologist Asad L. Asad’s article in Law & Society Review , “On the Radar: System Embeddedness and Latin American Immigrants’ Perceived Risk of Deportation,” asks what this shared vulnerability means for whether and how undocumented and documented immigrants fear deportation. He describes the perceptions and experiences of Latin American families recruited from their residential neighborhoods in Dallas, Texas. Asad’s analysis reveals the perverse incentives the U.S. immigration system creates for immigrants seeking to balance their long-term commitment to this country with a

In the most recent Law & Society Review

Jailing Immigrant Detainees: A National Study of County Participation in Immigration Detention, 1983-2013 Emily Ryo Professor of Law & Sociology University of Southern California Gould School of Law Ian Peacock Ph.D. Candidate University of California, Los Angeles Department of Sociology Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) pays hundreds of county jails in the United States to detain immigrants facing removal proceedings. Removal proceedings are civil proceedings against individuals alleged to have violated immigration laws. Immigration detention therefore presents a striking case of how penal institutions are used for civil confinement purposes. Yet we know very little about what types of counties have come to participate in this arrangement and the predictors of their participation. Using diverse sources of county-level data that span multiple decades, we conducted the first national study of the role of loca

Law and Society Review

Search This Blog