Law & Society Review 47(3)

Law & Society Review, September 2013: Volume 47, Issue 3

Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City
Silvia Pasquetti

Recent sociolegal scholarship has explored the role of emotions in lawmaking and policymaking on security and crime issues. This article extends this approach to the relationship between law enforcement and affect by addressing the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of long-term emotions, which bind a collective and fuel ethnonational division. An ethnography of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod, an Israeli city, shows that this climate is structured by two emotions: rampant distrust toward friends and neighbors, and intense fear of the Israeli authorities. This emotional climate is the product of the subterranean ties of Lod Palestinians with the Israeli security agencies as well as their experiences of the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement. I embed the initial creation and relative stability of this emotional climate in the broader relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens from 1948 to the present. The article concludes with a discussion of how the law enforcement's affective production has consequences for the salience and scope of citizenship and by arguing for a greater focus on the link between law enforcement, collective emotions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Paradoxes of Urban Housing Informality in the Developing World
Jean-Louis van Gelder

This article addresses a series of paradoxes regarding informal settlements in cities in the developing world and their relation with the legal system. The first paradox regards the penalization of illegal land occupations on the one hand versus the legalization of that same practice on the other. Second, it looks at the relationship between land occupations as systematic violations of property rights, but with the goal of forming new property rights and thus paradoxically supporting private property as a substantive principle. Third, the reasoning behind the fact that the same system that denies legal access to housing for poor sectors simultaneously attempts to incorporate informal settlements in an ad hoc manner through legalization schemes is examined. It is shown that there is a logic to these paradoxes, which, although contradictory from standard legal perspectives, can be accommodated within a theoretical framework that distinguishes an internal normative order operating within informal settlements, from the state legal system, operative outside it. The proposed framework not only settles the paradoxes, but, this article concludes, can also guide attempts to deal with the enormous anticipated growth of informality in the developing world.

Taking Hold of the Wheel: Automobility, Social Order, and the Law in Mexico's Public Registry of Vehicles (REPUVE)
Keith Guzik

Across the globe, governments are implementing electronic vehicle registration programs capable of locating automobiles instantaneously. In order to understand the impact of such programs on contemporary governance, this article draws upon the extant literature on automobility, law and society and science and technology studies theory, and data collected from Mexico, where the government has been implementing the Public Registry of Vehicles (REPUVE). The central argument of the article rests on three concepts. First, the automobile has recurrently served as a disruptive technology in modern society, a technology whose adoption unsettles the social order by drawing users away from their usual modes of social interaction. In response, state authorities over the course of the twentieth century created a collection of legal rules, actors, and institutions designed to take hold of the wheel. By penetrating automobility with law, the state transformed the car into a legal enactment device, a technology whose operation pushes people to enact the law and, in so doing, constitutes the sociolegal order. In Mexico, a host of forces have conspired to weaken the state's hold on the wheel. The REPUVE promises to change this by “delegating” policing duties to radio-frequency identification stickers affixed to vehicles and scanners placed on roadways. Rather than enforcing the law through corruptible humans sanctioning irresponsible drivers, the REPUVE opens the possibility of doing so through a “surveillant assemblage” denying roadway access to suspicious vehicles. In the REPUVE then, the automobile passes from a legal enactment device, a technology whose operation pushes users to enact the law, to a legal prescription device, a technology whose operation requires them to do so. By demonstrating the role of vehicular regulation in the “mutual becoming” of society and technology, this study contributes to the growing research on the intersection of law and technology and provides a glimpse into the changing nature of legal power in the contemporary state.

Conceptualizing Semi-Legality in Migration Research
Agnieszka Kubal

What is semi-legality, and why does it offer a viable alternative to the legality–illegality binary divide? Semi-legality, as a heuristic device, is useful to frame the various “in-between” statuses and not resorting to illegality every time ambiguities arise as this casts the net of potential fraud far too wide. It could be viewed as a multidimensional space where migrants' formal relationships with the state interact with their various forms of agency toward the law. As a sensitizing theoretical perspective, it helps to explain why many neoliberal regimes, which claim that law and order are the main features distinguishing them from others, actually engage in perpetuating the legally ambiguous modes of incorporation. Delineating the conditions of semi-legality, I use data from 360 qualitative interviews with migrants in four European countries. I discuss: (1) “incomplete” responses to regularization programs (amnesties) – de facto fulfilling the legalization conditions, yet facing barriers to formally (de jure) corroborate this; (2) balancing between the temporality of residence in various EU countries—under-staying in some and overstaying in others; and (3) the nexus with employment—where migrants' residence in a country is lawful, but their work exceeds the restrictions permitted by their visas.

When Do Laws Matter? National Minimum-Age-of-Marriage Laws, Child Rights, and Adolescent Fertility, 1989–2007
Minzee Kim, Wesley Longhofer, Elizabeth Heger Boyle and Hollie Nyseth Brehm

Using the case of adolescent fertility, we ask the questions of whether and when national laws have an effect on outcomes above and beyond the effects of international law and global organizing. To answer these questions, we utilize a fixed-effect time-series regression model to analyze the impact of minimum-age-of-marriage laws in 115 poor- and middle-income countries from 1989 to 2007. We find that countries with strict laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 experienced the most dramatic decline in rates of adolescent fertility. Trends in countries that set this age at 18 but allowed exceptions (for example, marriage with parental consent) were indistinguishable from countries that had no such minimum-age-of-marriage law. Thus, policies that adhere strictly to global norms are more likely to elicit desired outcomes. The article concludes with a discussion of what national law means in a diffuse global system where multiple actors and institutions make the independent effect of law difficult to identify.

The Privatization of Public Safety in Urban Neighborhoods: Do Business Improvement Districts Reduce Violent Crime Among Adolescents?
John MacDonald, Robert J. Stokes, Ben Grunwald and Ricky Bluthenthal

The business improvement district (BID) is a popular economic development and urban revitalization model in which local property and business owners must pay an assessment tax that funds supplementary services, including private security. BIDs constitute a controversial form of urban revitalization to some because they privatize economic development and public safety efforts in public space. This study examines whether BIDs provide tangible benefits beyond their immediate boundaries to local residents in the form of reduced violence among adolescents. The empirical analysis advances an existing literature dominated by evaluation studies by introducing a theoretically driven dataset with rich information on individual and neighborhood level variables. The analysis compares violent victimization among youths living in BID neighborhoods with those in similarly situated non-BID neighborhoods. We find no effect of BIDs on violence. However, we do find that youth violence is strongly correlated with neighborhood collective efficacy and family-related attributes of social control. In conclusion, we argue that BIDs may be an agent of crime reduction, but this benefit is likely concentrated only in their immediate boundaries and does not extend to youths living in surrounding neighborhoods.

Basketball in the Key of Law: The Significance of Disputing in Pick-Up Basketball
Michael DeLand

While the conception of law as a constructive and constitutive force is often stated, we have relatively few concrete and grounded case studies showing precisely where and how social actors construct the meaning of their engagements through the invocation of legality. Drawing on Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis (1974), I use the concept of “keying” to articulate how basketball players in informal “pick-up” games transform the meaning of their activity through disputing. By playing in a legalistic way, players constitute the game as “real” and “serious” rather than “mere play.” The analysis tracks basketball players in the heat of action as they perceive the game, call rule violations, contest those violations, and ultimately give up. Players organize each phase of the dispute's natural history in the “key of law” by constructing and comparing cases, invoking and interpreting rules, setting precedent, arguing over procedure, and proposing solutions. Through these practices, players infuse the game with rich meaning and generate the motivational context demanding that the game be treated as significant. This analysis contributes to an understanding of legal ontology that envisions law's essence as potentiating rather than repairing normative social life.