Although the United States Constitution presumably was designed to avoid “regulation” of religion, there is an interplay between religious individuals and private organizations, on the one hand, and the state, on the other hand, which has a regulatory effect on religion in some areas of public life. The First Amendment’s “Religious Clauses” prohibit an establishment of religion and preserve the right to free exercise of religion. An important area of contention and development in legislation and Supreme Court jurisprudence involves free exercise accommodations or exemptions to laws and rules that generally apply to everyone. These are particularly at issue in the workplace, in correctional institutions, and in the military. The latter two give rise to establishment issues, which have been resolved in favor of free exercise, as government support of religion has been held to be necessary to preserve the free exercise rights of inmates and service personnel. The enactment of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) have led to a much greater deference to religious rights, resulting in accommodations that would not have been required under preexisting legislation and judicial interpretation. Another such area involves religious organizations themselves, in particular issues regarding tax-exempt status, land use, and faith-based initiatives. A provision in the tax code known as the Johnson Amendment, which restrains religious (and other tax-exempt organizations) from certain political activities, has been challenged recently as a limitation on free speech, however without success so far. Issues involving local government limitations on religious organizations’ land use through zoning restrictions are now being addressed more favorably for religious organizations through the land-use provisions of RLUIPA, although not without controversy. Faith-based initiatives have promoted religious organizations, or faith-based organizations (FBOs), as important government partners, which are eligible to receive public funds for the delivery of social services.
Since the late 20th century, there has been a gradual, but significant shift toward greater respect for individuals’ and groups’ religious rights, especially reflected in recent legislation and Supreme Court decisions. Such trends suggest that, although religion has come into conflict with legal-policy developments in other areas, such as those involving gay marriage and contraception coverage, the right to practice one’s religion and participate in public endeavors alongside nonreligious individuals and groups, is likely to continue to expand for the foreseeable future.
Article
Religious Regulation in the United States
Barbara A. McGraw and James T. Richardson
Article
Revolutions and Constitutional Crisis
Johannes Vüllers
Revolutionary actions and constitutional crises are closely linked. However, research mainly looks at the two phenomena as distinct from each other. While studies on revolutionary actions are interested in the agency and the impact of the actions on the country’s institutions, legal research focuses on the constitution itself. The separation of the two strands leads to a limited understanding of their dynamics and complexity. What do we know about the relationship between revolutionary actions and constitutional crisis, and vice versa? The first question is how revolutionary actions trigger constitutional crisis, defined as a moment in which decision makers are unwilling or unable to manage the societal conflicts within the confinement of the constitutionally provided boundaries. Different types of revolutionary behavior—such as elite-led military coups, civil wars, and nonviolent resistance movements—trigger constitutional crises in many cases. They can lead to a new constitution with diverse implications for the political system. Whether the opposition or the old regime prevails in the constitutional crisis is a question of the power resources of both parties to the conflict. In some cases, the opposition movements succeed in making the political system more democratic. However, there are also cases where the constitutional crisis ultimately leads to more power for the ruling class.
The relationship also works vice versa: a constitutional crisis can trigger revolutionary actions. Constitutional coups, and processes of democratic backsliding and constitutional rot, can trigger violent and nonviolent revolutionary actions. Political elites can try to change constitutional norms for their own benefit, such as extending the presidential term of office. This often leads to a storm of public protest and can become a real threat to the regime’s survival. A constitution can enter a crisis phase for a long time if it no longer serves the needs of parts of society. The injustices that thus arise within society can be a strong motive for revolutions. The combination of agency and constitutional processes is a promising avenue for future research that could help analyze the complex relationship between constitutional crises and revolutionary actions. In addition to innovative theoretical approaches, new empirical data is needed to examine the process of constitutional negotiation in more detail.
Article
The Role of Reparations in the Transition from Violence to Peace
Peter J. Dixon
Reparations are among the most tangible, victim-centric, and personal of processes in the transition from violence to peace, symbolizing the recognition that an individual has been harmed and has rights in the eyes of the state or international community. Reparations are also an inherently political project, transforming official visions of violence, responsibility, and victimization into material and psychological benefit. Despite the power of reparations to shape transitions from violence to peace, they have been too often ignored in practice, leaving most victims of gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law without reparation. Partly as a consequence, research has tended to focus more on “harder” processes, like trials and truth commissions, than on the “stepchild of postconflict justice.” Yet, there have been significant developments in reparations theory and practice that motivate key outstanding questions for researchers.
Reparations derive their symbolic power from the law, which is an imperfect tool for responding to the varied forms of violence experienced in conflict and to the diverse, sometimes contradictory, priorities and needs that people hold. In such contexts, there is an inherent tension between expanding reparations programs to be inclusive and adaptable and preserving their fundamental distinction as a justice process. This is a difficult balance to strike, but there are frameworks and questions that can offer useful guidance. In particular, the lenses of economic violence and positive peace are useful for articulating the role of reparations in postconflict transitions, offering conceptual expansion beyond transitional justice’s traditional concern for political violence without delving too far into the customary terrain of development or postconflict reconstruction.
Yet, the specific mechanisms through which the inward and outward feelings and attitudes and broader social changes that reparations are expected to produce remain undertheorized in transitional justice scholarship, in large part because of a lack of empirical evidence about how recipients experience them in practice. Does the restoration of civic trust, for example, depend upon recipients of individual reparations telling their neighbors about their payments? Does recognition as a citizen depend upon a beneficiary publicly self-identifying as a victim? Questions like these about the particular variables that drive reparations outcomes represent the next frontier for transitional justice researchers interested in the role of reparations in the transition from violence to peace.
Article
Russian Legal System and Use of Law
Kathryn Hendley
The Russian legal system has a spotty reputation, both domestically and internationally. The distrust stems from well-publicized cases involving enemies of political or economic elites in which the outcome in favor of the elites is obviously predetermined. Coexisting with such cases are millions of mundane cases in which judges adhere scrupulously to the statutory law. This sort of legal dualism is not uncommon under authoritarianism.
Russia’s constitution reflects this dualism. Its relevance to daily life and its capacity to constrain arbitrary state actions is questionable. Adopted in 1993, it proclaims Russia to be a state governed by the rule of law and includes a chapter with a comprehensive list of rights guaranteed to citizens which cannot be changed without convening a constitutional assembly. The constitutional court, which is a post-Soviet institutional innovation, is charged with ensuring compliance with the constitution. Amending the constitution requires consent from both the national legislature and two-thirds of the regional legislatures. The electoral dominance of the political party associated with Vladimir Putin has made this seemingly high threshold for amendments easily achievable. He has bent the constitution to his political will with multiple amendments, culminating in a set of over 100 amendments approved in 2020.
The use of courts by Russian citizens and businesses has increased steadily during the post-Soviet period. As a rule, disputes are handled quickly and inexpensively. Even so, litigating is not the preferred option; Russians typically end up in court only when informal negotiations fail. As a rule, they go to court to solve practical problems rather than to advance issues of principle. The courts’ dockets are dominated by civil claims, such as family law disputes and various forms of debt collection. The straightforward nature of the procedural rules allows many litigants to represent themselves. In criminal cases, which are fewer, defendants are required to be represented by a licensed attorney (advokat). The state covers the cost of legal representation for the poor. Litigants who are dissatisfied with the outcomes of their cases can pursue appeals, culminating in the Russian Supreme Court. Citizens who believe that officials have violated their rights can pursue their claims in the stand-alone constitutional court, whose decisions serve as binding precedent.
The post-Soviet era has witnessed wide ranging reforms to the legal system. Some were aimed at depoliticizing the courts. Judges are selected by a professional council dominated by judges that assesses candidates’ knowledge of law and appropriateness for the bench. They enjoy life tenure, subject to removal for cause—a process that is occasionally hijacked to remove judges who fail to toe the line in political cases. The reforms also sought to ease the heavy workload of judges by introducing a form of plea bargaining in criminal cases and opening the door to a type of summary judgment in civil cases in which defendants have conceded their culpability.
Article
The Schengen Area
Steve Peers
Abolition of internal border controls—with corresponding harmonization of external border controls and other relevant policies (short-term visas, freedom to travel, control of irregular migration)—has become a cornerstone of the European Union’s (EU) overall integration project, being linked also to harmonisation of asylum policy, external relations issues, and policing and criminal law cooperation, including the ongoing development and extension of justice and home affairs databases such as the Schengen Information System and the Visa Information System. However, the Schengen process has been frequently contested over the past decade, first of all in the context of the Arab Spring in 2011 and subsequently due to the perceived migration crisis of 2015–2016. The EU has responded with a combination of further integration (such as more funding, more harmonization, and more power for EU bodies) along with deference to Member States regarding re-imposing border checks in order to stop flows of asylum-seekers. It may be questioned how well this strategy will work in the long term, but in the medium term it has succeeded in keeping the Schengen policy afloat in this modified form. The research in this field has concentrated on whether the Schengen system has accomplished its objectives and the possible tension between the system and human rights and data protection standards, as well as the overlapping tensions between the attempts to develop a uniform policy at EU level and the divergences in implementation and policy priorities at national level, particularly at times of crisis or intense political debate.
Article
Sex Reclassification for Trans and Gender-Nonconforming People: From the Medicalized Body to the Privatized Self
Ido Katri
Sex reclassification is a core issue of gender nonconforming legal engagements. Access to proper identification documents for trans and nonbinary people relates to lower levels of exposure to anti-trans violence, discrimination, and suicidality. In the first decades of the 21st century, the majority of global jurisdictions have seen some kind of reform with respect to sex reclassification. Nonbinary classifications, such as the X marker, are also becoming available for those who wish not to be classified as either M or F. Across the globe, five major policy streams can be found: total ban on reclassification, that is, having no law or policy in place that allows for reclassification; reproduction-related prerequisite, that is, requiring applicants to undergo sterilization or genital-related surgery; other medical intervention-based schemes, that is, requiring applicants to provide proof that they have modified their body using some kind of gender-related medical technology; corroboration requirements, that is, requiring that a third party, usually a medical professional, corroborates the identity of the applicant; and the emerging “gold standard,” gender self-determination, that is, laws and policies requiring only an expression of a desire or need to be reclassified.
These streams of policy provide varying levels of access to proper identification documents and place different burdens on applicants, some requiring bodily modifications while others rely on autonomous will. Yet all these policies still demand an alignment between the internal truth of the body and external facts, resonating with the logic of birth assignment of sex itself—that is, the idea that the allocation of differentiated legal status of M or F reflects an immutable truth about legal subjects. Current laws and policies fail to address harms caused to gender nonconforming people by state mechanisms themselves. They only provide remedies ex post facto. In the early 21st century, all countries assign a differentiated legal status of either M or F at birth based solely, in almost all cases, on external genitals of newborns. This differentiated legal status is recorded on the birth certificate and becomes a part of one’s legal identity for life. This allocation of status reflects the idea that external genitals of newborns are proof of their owners’ future roles as men or women, that is, an idea that there is a pre-legal alignment between certain bodily configurations, social role, and gender performance. This mundane administrative mechanism not only justifies different treatment for men and women but also marks trans and nonbinary people as others. In order to better address the harm caused by systems of gendered distribution of resources and opportunities, there is a need to go beyond sex reclassification to question birth assignment itself.
Article
The Supreme Court Decision Making Process
Timothy R. Johnson
The U.S. Supreme Court is but one of three political institutions within the structure of the U.S. federal government. Within this system of separated powers it rules on the constitutionality of some of the nation’s most important legal and political issues. In making such decisions, the nation’s highest court may be considered the most powerful of the three branches of the U.S. federal government. Understanding this process will allow scholars, students of the Court, and Court watchers alike to gain a better understanding of the way in which the justices conduct their business and to come to terms with some of the most important legal and political decisions in our nation’s history. Combining a theoretical account of Supreme Court decision-making with an examination of its internal decision-making process illuminates this opaque institution.
Article
Suriname: The National Army in Politics
Dirk Kruijt
Suriname is a multiethnic society (from African, Asian, and European countries, and smaller contingents of the original indigenous peoples) formed in colonial times. After 1863, a small colonial army detachment with conscript Dutch soldiers was stationed in Suriname. The colony was provided autonomy in 1954, except for defense and foreign affairs. The same army detachment was now open for Surinamese noncommissioned officers (NCOs). Independence was obtained in 1975; the Dutch transferred all infrastructure of the colonial detachment. Suriname’s political culture was (and partially still is) based on ethnic belonging and clientelism.
After independence, the government started spending big money and rumors of corruption arose. The NCOs, headed by Sergeant-Major Bouterse, staged a coup in 1980. They appointed a new civilian government but remained in control though a Military Council overseeing government. After two and a half years it generated a strong civilian opposition, supported by the students, the middle classes, and the trade unions. In December 1982, the military arrested the leaders and tortured and killed them. Between 1980 and 1987, Bouterse, now a colonel, was the de facto president as leader of the Military Council.
The generally leftist but zig-zagging military government disrupted the economy. “Colombian entrepreneurs” assisted with financial support. Economic and political bankruptcy prompted the government to organize elections. The “old ethnic parties” won the election in 1987, but the army leadership remained in power. A second coup, in December 1991, was settled by general elections six months thereafter; the same ethnic parties returned to power.
Armed opposition had emerged in the Maroon region. The Army, backed by paramilitary forces, organized a counterinsurgency campaign during several years of civil war. The civilian government brokered a preliminary peace agreement, but Army Chief Bouterse continued the war. Eventually the Organisation of American States mediated, resulting in a formal peace. Bouterse and his staff were discharged and became businessmen and politicians. Consecutive civilian government strongly curtailed military budgets, personnel, and equipment. Instead, they strengthened the police.
In 2005, Bouterse participated in the elections with a pluriethnic political platform. His party became the largest one in parliament. He won the presidential elections in 2010 and was reelected in 2015. A Military Tribunal initiated a process against the actors of the December 1982 murders. In November 2019, the Tribunal convicted him of murder and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, without ordering his immediate arrest.
The National Army, after decades of neglect, was reorganized. It is in fact an infantry battalion equipped with Brazilian armored vehicles. Brazil, Venezuela, and India supplied some assistance and training. The Coast Guard is part of the Army, as well as the Air Force which has a couple of Indian helicopters. Of the 137 countries ranked in military strength by Global Firepower (2019), Suriname is positioned at place 135. On the other hand, the country has no external enemies, although there exists a dormant frontier dispute with Guyana since the late 1960s.
Article
Theoretical Perspectives on Subnational Public Policy and LGBT Law
Jason Pierceson
Subnational policymaking is central to LGBT politics and law, in contrast to other arenas of policymaking for marginalized groups. With barriers to national policymaking in Congress and in the federal courts, LGBT rights activists have leveraged opportunities at the state and local levels to create LGBT-supportive policies. Opponents have also used subnational politics to further their agenda, particularly direct democracy, while LGBT rights activists have used elite politics, such as state courts, effectively. Subnational LGBT politics is also marked by a significant variety in policy outcomes, with a notable urban and suburban versus rural divide in policymaking and in the presence of openly LGBT elected officials. The case of LGBT policy and law has caused scholars to rethink questions such as the role of public opinion in state policymaking, morality politics, and courts and social change.
Article
Theorizing the U.S. Supreme Court
Charles M. Cameron and Lewis A. Kornhauser
We summarize the formal theoretical literature on Supreme Court decision-making. We focus on two core questions: What does the Supreme Court of the United States do, and how can one model those actions; and, what do the justices of the Supreme Court want, and how can one model those preferences? Given the current state of play in judicial studies, these questions then direct this survey mostly to so-called separation of powers (SOP) models, and to studies of a multi-member (“collegial”) court employing the Supreme Court’s very distinctive and highly unusual voting rule.
The survey makes four main points. First, it sets out a new taxonomy that unifies much of the literature by linking judicial actions, modeling conventions, and the treatment of the status quo. In addition, the taxonomy identifies some models that employ inconsistent assumptions about Supreme Court actions and consequences. Second, the discussion of judicial preferences clarifies the links between judicial actions and judicial preferences. It highlights the relationships between preferences over dispositions, preferences over rules, and preferences over social outcomes. And, it explicates the difference between consequential and expressive preferences. Third, the survey delineates the separate strands of SOP models. It suggests new possibilities for this seemingly well-explored line of inquiry. Fourth, the discussion of voting emphasizes the peculiar characteristics of the Supreme Court’s voting rule. The survey maps the movement from early models that ignored the special features of this rule, to more recent ones that embrace its features and explore the resulting (and unusual) incentive effects.
Article
Transgender Law and Policy in the United States
Shannon Gilreath
Transgender people have a complicated history in U.S. law and policy. Once thought of as a symptom of homosexuality, gender nonconformity has long been the subject of social disapprobation and legal sanction, including criminalization. Beginning in the 1950s, an emergent interest by the medical community in individuals suffering from “gender dysphoria” precipitated an identity politics primarily organized around a goal of access to competent medical care and treatment for transsexual individuals. In ways both significant and ironic, this medicalization both promoted a binary ideology of gender, most obvious in concepts like male-to-female or female-to-male transsexualism, and created space for more transformative concepts of gender fluidity and transgender identity to emerge. Long conceptualized as a kind of subsidiary of the gay and lesbian rights movement in the United States, a status that entailed considerable turmoil, the transgender movement, especially since the 1990s, has emerged as a vocal and relatively effective rights lobby in its own right. The advent of the Trump administration presents a pivotal moment that will likely test not only the durability of recent policy gains but also whether those gains can be expanded in any significant measure.
Article
Transgender-Specific Policy: Gender Identity Inclusion in Public Accommodations
Andrew R. Flores and Justin O'Neill
In the early 21st century the public debates about the inclusion of gender identity in public accommodations municipal ordinances and statewide and national laws represent another step in the ongoing struggle of the social movement seeking to advance the rights and liberties of lesbians, gay men, bisexual, transgender, and other queer (LGBTQ) people. Situating these current debates in the larger context of the LGBTQ movement connects this emergent issue to that broader struggle. The LGBTQ social movement and its counter-movement, often referred to as the Religious Right, have had numerous battles over social policy since the late 20th century. Importantly, movements and their counter-movements identify winning strategies and, at times, tactically innovate so as to effect a shift in current tactics in light of a failing strategy. Tactical innovation includes shifting policy debates, which has been a primary tactic of the counter-movement to LGBTQ rights. Transgender rights broadly and public accommodations policies specifically represent a tactical innovation in the ongoing development of LGBTQ rights in the United States.
How has gender identity inclusion in public accommodations been addressed in politics, policy, and law? There are numerous dimensions of gender identity public accommodations policies as understood in social movements, American law, public policy and administration, public opinion, and sociology and social psychology. Public accommodations are a constant source of public contention. The legal landscape in constitutional, federal, state, and municipal approaches to these policies remains uncertain, and there are competing interpretations of law in whether gender identity protections are covered in existing federal statutes. The rhetoric of the policy debates in both state legislatures and initiative and referendum campaigns primarily focuses on the potential harms to women and girls brought about by men taking advantage of such laws to assault them in sex-segregated public facilities. An account of public opinion about these policies also shows that American adults are far more divided about transgender people using restrooms consistent with their current gender identity than other aspects of transgender rights such as employment nondiscrimination policies. Experimental interventions, such as in-depth conversations encouraging people to consider the day in the life of a transgender person, reduce transphobia and make people more resistant to arguments opposed to the inclusion of gender identity in public accommodations laws. Finally, some have questioned whether sex classifications are needed in public policy and how current nondiscrimination laws achieve their stated goals without such a system. Further development and inquiry absolutely are needed in all these areas.
Article
Transgender-Specific Politics and Policy in Asia
Natasha Israt Kabir and Khadiza Tul Qubra Binte Ahsan
Acute discrimination has been witnessed across Asia regardless of individual countries’ specific policies towards transgender people. As individuals, it would be reassuring to believe that Article 1 of the UN Charter, which states that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” would encourage people to ignore gender differences. In different parts of Asia, even where transgender people have been officially recognized, their rights are fragile. Indeed, today activists focus more on women’s rights than on the rights of all sexual minorities, who as a consequence often live in extreme poverty and ill-health. The exclusion of the transgender community in governmental policymaking is another salient reason for their current living conditions. Even though transgender candidates participate in elections in most countries, their representation in parliaments is rare. Furthermore, violence toward the transgender community is such a common scenario that it has become normalized. Victims rarely get support because of legal loopholes and the unwillingness of the law enforcement agencies to help. Transgender and gender diverse people are not only targeted but also discriminated by law through a denial of gender marker change on official documents; the criminalization of the gender and sexual preferences of transgender and gender diverse people; the exploitation of public order, homelessness, and minor offenses; the criminalization of consensual homosexuality and intimacy; and police abuses even in the absence of a specific offense. Regardless of parliamentary legislation and other legal frameworks, policymakers and law enforcement agencies routinely operate outside the law to violate the rights of transgender and sexual minority people. Among the abuses reported by transgender persons are blackmail, extortion, public humiliation, and physical and sexual violence. If policies to socially integrate transgender and gender diverse peoples are not implemented, the state of the transgender community in Asia will not improve.
Article
Transgender-Specific Politics and Policy in Europe
Camille Vallier and Djemila Carron
Transidentity raises numerous legal questions as it challenges the way the law fundamentally categorizes society in two different groups. The European legal landscape has evolved towards greater recognition of transgender people’s rights, notably in terms of legal gender recognition and non-discrimination, but many inequalities remain deeply rooted in the law.
Gender identity has increasingly been recognized as a ground of discrimination by national and regional instances in Europe, and in 2002 the European Court of Human Rights acknowledged the existence of a right to legal gender recognition under Article 8 of the Convention, in the famous Goodwin v. UK case. Since then, the conditions deemed admissible or not in order to access legal gender recognition and name change have been under scrutiny, and the Court took an important step ahead in 2017, when it held that compulsory sterilization and mandatory medical interventions leading with a high probability to sterility were inadmissible conditions for accessing legal gender recognition (A.P., Garçon, and Nicot v. France). However, other criteria for legal gender recognition remain unclear. Additionally, even when European instance decisively set a principle, the difficulty lies in the implementation on the national level, as the rights of transgender people are far from respected in practice. Legal gender recognition and access to gender confirmation treatment entail particular obstacles for minors, since the debate of whether self-determination regarding legal gender change and access to gender confirmation treatment should prevail over other public and private interests is even more pressing when children are concerned.
Many further obstacles remain, notably in the domain of parenthood and employment, access to transition-related treatments, and their reimbursement by health insurance. Additionally, transphobic hate crimes are rarely identified as such by national criminal legislations, and very few states collect statistics on the matter.
It remains difficult to draw general conclusions on transgender policies in Europe, as domestic laws are diverse and do not always match with international law, and national practices do not always comply with domestic and international law—with transgender people often being caught in a labyrinth of incongruent rules and practices.
Article
Transitional Justice During Armed Conflict
Cyanne E. Loyle
Armed conflict is ultimately about the violent confrontation between two or more groups; however, there is a range of behaviors, both violent and nonviolent, pursued by governments and rebel groups while conflict is ongoing that impacts the course and outcomes of that violence. The use of judicial or quasi-judicial institutions during armed conflict is one such behavior. While there is a well-developed body of literature that examines the conditions under which governments engage with the legacies of violence following armed conflict, we know comparatively little about these same institutions used while conflict is ongoing.
Similar to the use of transitional justice following armed conflict or post-conflict justice, during-conflict transitional justice (DCJ) refers to “a judicial or quasi-judicial process initiated during an armed conflict that attempts to address wrongdoings that have taken or are taking place as part of that conflict” (according to Loyle and Binningsbø). DCJ includes a variety of institutional forms pursued by both governments and rebel groups such as human rights trials, truth commissions or commissions of inquiry, amnesty offers, reparations, purges, or exiles.
As our current understanding of transitional justice has focused exclusively on these processes following a political transition or the termination of an armed conflict, we have a limited understanding of how and why these processes are used during conflict. Extant work has assumed, either implicitly or explicitly, that transitional justice is offered and put in place once violence has ended, but this is not the case. New data on this topic from the During-Conflict Justice dataset by Loyle and Binningsbø suggests that the use of transitional justice during conflict is a widespread and systematic policy across multiple actor groups. In 2017, Loyle and Binningsbø found that DCJ processes were used during over 60% of armed conflicts from 1946 through 2011; and of these processes 10% were put in place by rebel groups (i.e., the group challenging the government rather than the government in power).
Three main questions arise from this new finding: Under what conditions are justice processes implemented during conflict, why are these processes put in place, and what is the likely effect of their implementation on the conflict itself? Answering these questions has important implications for understanding patterns of government and rebel behavior while conflict is ongoing and the impacts of those behaviors. Furthermore, this work helps us to broaden our understanding of the use of judicial and quasi-judicial processes to those periods where no power shift has taken place.
Article
Trial Courts in the United States
Christina L. Boyd and Adam G. Rutkowski
Trial court judges are often referred to as the workhorses of the judicial system. This is unsurprising given that millions of civil and criminal cases are filed and resolved in U.S. state and federal trial courts each year. Very few of these cases ever reach appellate courts, meaning that trial courts are often the first and only court with which people directly interact. At the same time, trial courts can make local and national policy, both in individual cases and in the aggregate. This important role of trial courts and their actors has not gone unnoticed by scholars across social science disciplines.
One can consider trial courts in a broad sense by tracking the historical developments that led to the trial courts in the United States. As caseloads have increased, trial courts—particularly those with specialized jurisdictions—have been created out of necessity. State trial courts feature variation in their judicial selection methods, including elections and appointments. At the federal level, increased polarization has led to contentious partisan confirmation battles for federal trial court judges.
Trials are a rare occurrence, with plea agreements and settlements being the most frequent methods of resolving cases. To understand trial court actor behavior, it is important to remember that state and federal trial courts sit at the bottom of their judicial hierarchies. The preferences of their hierarchical superiors, along with the presence of high trial court caseloads and the rarity of trials, rein in judges’ discretion and the potential effects of their personal characteristics and attitudes. Because of these judge constraints, actors such as prosecutors, defense attorneys, and juries play a significant role in trial court outcomes. As the literature reveals, the “repeat players” in trial courts hold significant advantages over less experienced litigants and attorneys that affect their likelihood of gaining favorable outcomes, among other things. Race and gender of these actors can have significant effects on behavior in certain types of cases.
There are many hurdles that remain for scholars seeking to study trial courts. For example, state trial courts, in particular, continue to be difficult to study empirically. This is due largely to a lack of data availability. Relatedly, scholars must continue to strive to find ways to study trial court outcomes and events that do not lead to published opinions—for example settlements, plea bargains, prosecutorial declinations, and many decided motions. Each of these involves important decisions and outcomes that affect parties and may be affected by judges and lawyers.
Article
Violence Against and Policing of LGBTQ Communities: A Historical Perspective
Courtenay W. Daum
Law enforcement has a lengthy history of policing LGBTQ communities. Throughout the 20th century, police utilized laws prohibiting same-sex sexual conduct to criminalize LGBTQ individuals, and to target public gathering places including gay bars. Sodomy prohibitions were supplemented by mental health diagnoses including assumptions about criminal pathologies among LGBTQ individuals and the government’s fear that LGBTQ individuals’ sexual perversions made them a national security risk to subject LGBTQ communities to extensive policing based on their alleged sexual deviance. The successes of the gay rights movement led the American Psychiatric Association to declassify homosexuality as a mental health disorder in the 1970s, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that prohibitions on sodomy run afoul of the Constitution ended the de jure criminalization of LGBTQ individuals based on their sexual conduct.
Today, policing of LGBTQ communities consists of both overpolicing and underenforcement. Law enforcement regularly profiles some facets of LGBTQ communities in order to selectively enforce general criminal prohibitions on public lewdness, solicitation, loitering, and vagrancy—consistent with the goals of “quality of life” policing—on gay men, transwomen, and LGBTQ youth, respectively. The selective enforcement of these laws often targets LGBTQ people of color and other intersectionally identified LGBTQ individuals in order to criminalize their existence based on ongoing stereotypes about sexual deviancy. In addition, police regularly fail to recognize LGBTQ individuals as victims of crimes, with the exception of particularly heinous hate crimes, and do not adequately attend to their needs and/or subject them to secondary victimization. As such, the relationship between many LGBTQ communities and law enforcement continues to be characterized by antagonisms and mistrust.
Article
Visa Policy in the European Union
Jelena Dzankic
Most European Union (EU) Member States participate in the common visa regime, even though there is no common visa policy applicable to all of them. The visa policy explored here covers the Schengen Area (including EU Member States and other countries, as well as EU countries that are still outside the Schengen). The Schengen Area does not include two EU Member States—the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland—that have opted out from the EU’s visa policies and operate a common travel area between them. Furthermore, the common visa policy in the EU is related to the issuance of short-term visas, while visas of longer duration and residence permits remain in the national domain. Against this background, the visa policy of the EU has four relevant aspects. First, the gradual evolution of the Schengen Area has been driven not only by political developments within the EU and its Member States, but also by broader global developments (e.g., the fall of communism). Second, the consolidation of the internal and external aspects of the visa policy in the EU took place through the growth of the Schengen acquis. Third, visa liberalization has become one of the most powerful tools for policy diffusion beyond the EU’s borders. Finally, securitization of migration has had a strong impact on the EU’s visa policy, particularly in the domains of information exchange and police cooperation.
