Special Issue Interdisciplinary Legal Studies: The Next Generation: Volume 51

Hybrid forms of international criminal justice have been lauded for combining the political and procedural legitimacy of international tribunals with increased attention to the local contexts where mass crimes occurred. This work critically examines the hybrid legal structure of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, a novel post-conflict institution empowered to draw from both international and Sierra Leonean law. Although formally hybrid, the Court neglects domestic law in practice, suggesting that “hybridity” refers more to a rhetorical strategy aimed at legitimating its work than to its ontological status. By symbolically including and substantively excluding domestic law, the court's legal structure inadvertently resembles a colonial form of legal pluralism rather than a hybrid jurisdiction.

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.

Following the military coup that toppled the government in September 1980, Turkish prisons, like the rest of the country, came under military control. Abhorrent levels of violence inflicted under military discipline became the source of horror stories. However, by early 1990s, official authorities had almost completely lost control of prisons to political prisoner organizations. This chapter analyzes how such a drastic change took place within a decade. Focusing on the ongoing struggles between political prisoner organizations and official actors over control of daily life, I argue that the resistance strategies developed by the political prisoners against the military disciplinary project in 1980s became the source of a prisoner-imposed disciplinary project in 1990s.

Many studies on legal consciousness suggest that the poor and working class are fundamentally excluded or disadvantaged, having a different legal consciousness from others that is “against the law” or cynical and dismissive about the law. My study is the first to examine polyvocality and change in legal consciousness among the poor. The women in my study are disadvantaged, to be sure, and face barriers to learning and mastering the law. But the interviews conducted for this study revealed that a remarkable shift in legal consciousness could take place as a result of the interface of perceptions, experience, and interaction with legal services, courts, and other members of the community. In this chapter, I develop a theoretical framework of legal entitlement in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the variations and changes in legal consciousness among low-income mothers as well as how these differences impact the ways in which marginalized group members come to develop and exercise legal consciousness and also to mobilize the law.

This chapter examines changes in the kinds of American legal issues that have attracted international attention since the end of the Cold War and looks at the extent to which they have resulted in higher levels or new forms of foreign participation and interest in Supreme Court cases. Suggesting that these changes may have an impact, at least indirectly, on the Court in ways not adequately explored in the existing literature, it considers their possible effects on its decisions and the way that the justices consider their role within increasingly globalized legal networks.

U.S. military facilities abroad are key sites around which foreign citizens and U.S. officers negotiate questions of sovereignty with a particular intensity. Between 1999 and 2009, Manta, Ecuador, was home to one of the most strategic U.S. Air Force “forward operating locations” (or FOLs) in the Western hemisphere. While rejected by most Ecuadorian legal scholars, anti-FOL activists, and the current Ecuadorian administration as a violation of national sovereignty, the facility was widely embraced by residents of the city itself, who actively rejected this characterization of “violation” by arguing that the FOL was, on the contrary, a strategic means of bolstering their “municipal sovereignty.” Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research on and around the FOL in 2006–2007, this chapter tracks the efforts of Manta residents, U.S. military personnel, and anti-base activists to both circumscribe and expand the various registers in which they articulated their understandings of “sovereignty.”

This chapter addresses how small businesses resist city regulations by using material things, by making craft knowledge claims about material things, and by letting material things organize their political activity. Chefs successfully resisted a foie gras ban in Chicago, where political resistance shaped the production and use of material things. Bakers successfully resisted a trans fat ban in Philadelphia, where material properties of things structured political resistance. We bring together analytic tools from the sociology of culture and science and technology studies to demonstrate how materiality can be both an instigator and an instrument of legal and political resistance.

This chapter is concerned with the question that is indigeneity, and its situation within literary and juridical imaginaries. As a persistently unsettling presence, indigeneity appears outside the law, before the law and beyond the law – indeed, in Derrida's terms, as an evocation of the unconditional. Whereas the law determines indigeneity to recognise it, I propose that its expression in Indigenous literature evokes a Derridean unconditional to which the law must perpetually, if momentarily, respond. This chapter elaborates a conception of indigeneity, as expressed in Indigenous literature, as disruptive and deconstructive of non-Indigenous law, opening its narratives to transformation.