Annual Review of Law and Social Science - Volume 13, 2017

Since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has been immensely influential in shaping international law. It provides a compelling example of how nonstate actors, relying on principled positions rather than resources, can alter the course of global policy making. The Church's authority rests on three distinct features: (a) independence from the nation-state system; (b) a centralized transnational bureaucracy; and (c) its enduring ideology. In this review, we elaborate on the Church's role in promoting peace, serving the poor, and blocking the institutionalization of access to contraception and abortion. Church ideology finds strong secular counterparts in the cases of promoting peace and support for the poor. It is on shakier ground when it ventures into gender issues, which it has done with zeal in recent years. Its primary allies on gender issues have been other religious organizations and Islamic states, reinforcing the religious rather than human rights basis for Church positions. The Church's role as the moral authority in the secular United Nations system is therefore less clear when it speaks about gender and sexuality.

This article proposes a relational approach to studying judicial politics in non-Western societies—a framework for the systematic analysis of informal relations between judges and other actors, within and outside the judiciary, based on common political interests, ideas, social identity, and even clientelistic obligations. We reflect on how these relations might help explain a variety of outcomes of interest, such as the organization of courts, judicial behavior, and judicial reform. We also highlight some of the methodological challenges of this approach in collecting and analyzing comparative data. In doing so, we seek to build an agenda for research on informal judicial politics beyond Western democracies.

This article charts the trajectory of the judicialization of health care from the perspective of Global South countries. It shows how the emergence of health rights litigation in the 1990s and early 2000s was bolstered by the global expansion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and by major constitutional reforms that triggered a period of rights revolutions in South Africa and several Latin American countries. This article also tracks the litigation epidemic in countries like Colombia and Brazil, where the escalation of health rights lawsuits is threatening the financial stability of health systems and the fair allocation of scarce health resources. It concludes by discussing a fundamental challenge confronting the field, namely, how to look upstream for new approaches to the right to health to reinstate litigation and adjudication as mechanisms to promote more equitable health systems.

Perhaps few decisions have more of an impact on the operational functioning of the criminal justice system than the decision by victims of crime to notify the police. Researchers in the United States and abroad have found that victims often choose not to mobilize the criminal law in the aftermath of a victimization event. A large percentage of property and violent crimes never appear in official crime data estimates. Most remain hidden in the dark figure of crime. Victim nonreporting has numerous implications for criminal justice system processing, crime control policy, and substantive research on the causes and correlates of crime. Studies have long sought to identify the victim-, incident-, and community-based mechanisms that might account for patterns of police notification. Although several important findings have emerged, critical questions remain unanswered. This article provides a critical overview of the determinants of victim nonreporting and charts potential avenues for future research.

This article examines the role of social science in US same-sex marriage (SSM) court cases. The existing literature on the role of social science in courts is inconclusive, with studies suggesting social science exerts influence in some but not all areas of law. The literature on social science in SSM litigation is in its formative stage. This article reviews key SSM cases—including the three SSM trials and recent US Supreme Court cases—and describes how litigants and other interested parties invoked social science to address several key points related to legal recognition of SSM. A review of these cases suggests that social science may have exerted influence in SSM litigation because of the large volume of available evidence, the high level of scientific consensus on key issues, and contextual factors such as shifts in public opinion.

This article sets out an account of the historical development and the contemporary elaboration of sociological approaches to constitutional law. It argues that recent years have seen a broad sociological turn in constitutional theory, such that sociological constitutionalism now forms a distinct field of legal research. This is due to the general increase in the importance of constitutionalism in different national societies across the globe. This is also due to the emergence of new patterns of constitutional formation, both within and beyond national societies, resulting from the interaction between national and domestic constitutional law. The article separates different constitutional-sociological approaches into two categories: those with a primarily national, and those with a primarily transnational focus. Overall, however, it claims that sociological constitutionalism is driven primarily by engagement with transnational law, and the main insights in this field relate, in different ways, to global processes of transnational norm formation.

The question of how organized labor affects the content, enforcement, and outcomes of regulation is especially timely in an era in which protective laws and regulations are being scaled back or minimally enforced and union membership is in decline. This article surveys literature from a wide array of regulatory domains—antidiscrimination, environmental protection, product quality, corporate governance, law enforcement, tax compliance, minimum wage and overtime protection, and occupational safety and health—in an effort to identify common findings on what unions do for regulation. Literature on the topic has taken up five questions: how labor unions affect the passage of protective laws and regulations; how they affect the outcomes that regulators target; how they affect the intensity of regulatory enforcement; the specific activities and channels of influence they use to influence regulated outcomes; and the role they play in self-regulation. Drawing on empirical literature from the domains listed, I review and analyze literature on each of these questions and offer several conclusions and suggestions for future research.