Recent literature calls for scholars to bridge the divide that has emerged between criminology and regulation and governance. In the current work, we propose that criminological opportunity theories provide one fruitful pathway to that end. Specifically, we introduce the notion of regulatory guardianship based on the concepts of guardians, guardian capability, and guardian willingness to intervene

OBJECTIVE To inform policies and practices that reflect the values and expectations of the communities that judges serve, we fielded a national survey of public perceptions regarding judicial roles and factors that could be considered in decision making. HYPOTHESES We had four questions: (1) What is public opinion on the importance of various judicial roles and considerations? (2) Can distinct

“Democracy’s Distrust” explores how the Supreme Court has eroded voting rights and weakened democracy. It argues that the Court prioritizes candidates and legislatures over voters, fostering public distrust. The Essay examines historical and contemporary cases, highlighting the need for legislative reforms and civic action to protect democracy.  

Assigning the preparation of decisions to specialized committees composed of member state representatives is a widespread response to the ‘governor's dilemma’, that is, the tension between competence and control, in international organizations (IOs). We theorize a causal mechanism referring to self‐selection and agenda‐setting effects and show how the resulting division of labor among IO bodies produces

Emerging technologies pose many new challenges for regulation and governance on a global scale. With the advent of distributed communication networks like the Internet and decentralized ledger technologies like blockchain, new platforms emerged, disrupting existing power dynamics and bringing about new claims of sovereignty from the private sector. This special issue addresses a gap in the literature

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Although political economy (PE) has long engaged with environmental issues, climate change has remained at the margins of the field until very recently. This article argues that fully addressing the transformative challenges brought up by climate change requires a fundamental rethinking of core PE concepts related to the state, distributional struggles, economic growth, varieties of capitalism, and

New governance models increasingly employ self‐regulation tools like pledges and nudges to achieve regulatory compliance. These approaches premise that voluntary compliance emerges from intrinsic motivation to cooperate rather than coercive measures. Central to their success is trust—both in government institutions and among citizens. However, rising societal polarization raises critical questions

Skills formation is a pressing issue for middle‐income countries given the pace of technological change. In Latin America, scholars point to the hierarchical type of capitalism and its segmentalist skills formation system as the main roadblocks to exiting the middle‐income trap. Yet we contend that focusing on national models of capitalism is limited because they do not explain within‐country variations

Given the ongoing climate crisis, the frequency and severity of natural disasters are increasing. These events result in enormous reconstruction costs, pose a high burden on state budgets, and potentially drive homeowners into private insolvency. One policy instrument for collectively covering such costs is a compulsory insurance scheme for natural hazards. As the impact of natural disasters is uneven

OBJECTIVE The Alford plea allows defendants to maintain innocence while pleading guilty, but this option is largely unknown to the public, and its effects are unknown to researchers and practitioners. Some legal scholars have argued that the Alford plea may attract innocent defendants who may not otherwise accept a plea, whereas others have asserted that it offers a beneficial alternative for those

The United States has criminalized cannabis since 1970. In response to pleas for reform and widespread state cannabis legalization, the federal government recently initiated rulemaking to reschedule cannabis. This Essay argues that the federal government should abandon its legally problematic rescheduling proposal and, instead, decriminalize and deregulate cannabis.  

Ifetayo Harvey explores the foremost drug reform issues by giving a broad overview of the Essays in this Collection. Harvey uses Oregon’s Measure 110 as an example of drug reform’s challenges when implemented on a state level. The piece concludes with guidance on how advocates can improve future drug reforms.  

Congress split drug scheduling authority between the Department of Health and Human Services and the Drug Enforcement Administration. However, this statutory separation of powers has collapsed, producing unscientific outcomes that undermine the CSA text, purpose, and history. Congress, courts, agencies, and the President can shift drug scheduling back on track.  

Through an institutional theory lens, this Essay examines how the family policing system’s historical emphasis on punishment and surveillance resists even well-intentioned legislative changes. Despite the inclusion of family-centered services in recent legislation, implementation barriers and institutional inertia within family policing agencies perpetuate default practices of policing and removal

OBJECTIVE We replicated research by ten Brinke and Porter (2012), who reported that a combination of four behavioral cues (word count, tentative words, upper face surprise, lower face happiness) could accurately discriminate deceptive murderers from genuinely distressed individuals, pleading for the return of a missing relative. HYPOTHESES We hypothesized that each of the four behavioral cues

OBJECTIVE We examined whether U.S. college students across multiple disability types were at an increased risk for sexual victimization (compared with students without disability) and whether disability type or registration with the accessibility office was associated with odds of reporting sexual victimization experiences to any campus-designated program/resource. HYPOTHESES We predicted (a)

We are grateful to prior Editorial Teams for being such outstanding stewards of Law and Human Behavior, and we are committed to maintaining the journal's high standards. We also appreciate the many contributions of the Editorial Board, ad hoc reviewers, Student Editorial Board reviewers, and participants in the Reviewer Mentoring Program for contributing their time and expertise to this journal. It

Law and Human Behavior's inaugural issue of 2025 begins with the publication of an official Scientific Review Paper (SRP) of the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS; Division 41 of the American Psychological Association). The article, "Police-Induced Confessions, 2.0: Risk Factors and Recommendations" (Kassin et al., 2025), was approved by a unanimous vote of the eligible AP-LS Executive Committee

OBJECTIVE Question-type classification is widely used as a measure of interview quality. However, question-type coding is a time-consuming process when performed by manual coders. Reliable automated question-type coding approaches would facilitate the assessment of the quality of forensic interviews and court testimony involving victims of child abuse. HYPOTHESES We expected that the reliability

This paper proposes a transdisciplinary approach to design future degrowth‐oriented industrial policies in pursuing a well‐being economy in the case of a specific growth model. Specifically, we show that the case of the Visegrad countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, V4s) is a clarion call for the degrowth literature to be much more modest and self‐critical. It addresses the puzzling question

This Essay argues that technological and procedural legal interoperability—that is, widespread consistency in legal technology design and related processes—can help stakeholders effectively leverage artificial intelligence to maximize access to legal services and fairness of outcomes through self-help options, with traditional legal services, and in the courts.

This Essay examines the legal basis for the requirement that agencies must respond to significant comments they receive during a rulemaking proceeding, the pros and cons of that requirement, and how the requirement fits together with other principles of administrative law, including procedural fairness and standing to sue.

This Essay uses a mixed-methods study to sketch operation of criminal legal systems in several rural counties in central and eastern Washington.  The study reveals how an attorney shortage, along with reliance on local funding of justice system functions, is leaving defendants vulnerable to delays and ineffective assistance of counsel. 

Access to justice in American civil courts won’t come through free or pro bono lawyers. To drive down costs, we need to loosen bar regulation and streamline procedures. And we should embrace technology and AI responsibly to give more people the legal help they need but can’t afford.

Though often framed as a technocratic tool, impact assessment is a core element of the political agenda‐setting process. In this article, we show that decisions about what is subject to legislative debate are made during impact assessment; specifically, during the drafting of the assessment report. Using a social process tracing methodology, we analyze the removal from the agenda of provisions for

How do provisions for administrative sanctioning affect the implementation of loose legal norms? To streamline regulation, governments have increased their penal capacity by authorizing administrative sanctioning, and they have decentralized regulatory responsibility by loosening legal norms. A case study of Norway's animal welfare governance shows how using administrative sanctions to enforce loose

Decarbonization forces societies to cope with the restructuring and outright unwinding of assets, firms, workers, industries, and regions. We argue that this problem has created legitimacy for industrial policies managing the reallocation of resources. We illustrate this dynamic by documenting incremental state‐building in the European Union, an administration institutionally tilted toward regulatory

The crisis of climate change threatens the existence of human civilization. As social scientists, we should be positioned to theorize and study whether or not the existing system of global capitalism can find ways to ameliorate the crisis or is doomed to cause that collapse because of the overwhelming power of dominant economic interests. This paper argues that right now our dominant theories of capitalism

In the past decades, scholars have provided novel insights on the role of media within regulation. Still, this strand of research has received less attention to the networked nature of contemporary regulatory governance. This article studies surrogate inspectorates, who focus on motivating the implementation/enforcement of regulatory rules, often temporary and without formal capacity. Based on a quantitative

Upper‐middle‐income economies face a specific set of trade‐offs when reducing carbon emissions, which differ from the trade‐offs faced in low‐ and high‐income economies. To mobilize domestic funds, middle‐income countries are developing carbon markets to attract private sector investment. This study advances a theoretical framework for carbon market development and explores the process in Brazil, Indonesia

This paper focuses on climate coalitions and commitments in the Global South by comparing the cases of two Latin American countries, Chile and Mexico. Chile, once a laggard, emerged as a regional leader in climate policy in the early 2020s, while Mexico, a pioneer until the early 2010s, experienced a backlash and retreated. How can we make sense of these diverging trajectories? How and why do climate

Bias is a pervasive aspect of human thought and behavior that influences how we perceive, interpret, and respond to the world around us. Although built on assumptions of fairness and equality, the justice and legal systems are not exempt from individual and structural biases, which contribute to differential outcomes and disproportionately affect individuals who are marginalized based on race, gender

OBJECTIVE Prior research suggests that jurors may commit the fundamental attribution error when evaluating confession evidence (i.e., failing to recognize the situational pressures inherent to coercive interrogations) and exhibit belief perseverance when presented with expert testimony or judicial instructions seeking to remediate juror knowledge. Given mixed findings regarding the use of safeguards

OBJECTIVE Myside bias-the tendency to evaluate and generate evidence as well as test hypotheses in a manner biased toward prior beliefs-causes disputants in litigation to harbor overconfident expectations of judicial awards and reduces odds of settlement. Two studies tested three interventions to suppress myside bias in civil litigation settings. HYPOTHESES I predicted that the participants in

OBJECTIVE Malingering is a particularly stigmatizing forensic opinion that may be prone to racial bias, although scant research has investigated the possibility. We examined whether forensic evaluators are more likely to opine that Black defendants or White defendants are overstating mental health symptoms. HYPOTHESES Study 1 (a field study) was exploratory. Following Study 1 findings, in Study

The idea of a “green economy” is one of the latest attempts to bridge the environment and development aims, with a focus on economic growth that makes it appealing to countries that still see a significant development gap to make up. Yet the green economy—most often studied in the Global North and made the target of explicit policy initiatives there, often with substantial public and private resources—also

David Pozen’s new book chronicles the constitutional arguments that American litigants once deployed to protect a “right” to use drugs. This Review supplements and critiques Pozen’s important contribution, situating his findings within a broad backdrop of race, crime, and the judiciary’s eagerness to just say “yes” to the drug war.

Aggressive applications of extraterritoriality under the protective principle in international law pose serious threats to states and individuals. This Note tracks the rise of protective-principle jurisdiction around the world. It then provides a reformulation of the principle to better cabin it within foundational doctrines of international law.

Honest services fraud is a vital anticorruption statute used by federal prosecutors to police state and local corruption. However, the statute’s undefined terms and perceived intrusions on federalism have invited scrutiny from the Supreme Court. To redress these concerns, courts should interpret the statute to require a predicate state-law violation.  

In its decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard, the Supreme Court appeared to take a new approach to what constitutes a Fourteenth Amendment violation. This Essay argues that the new standard should be applied to reduce race discrimination in jury selection.   

This Essay argues for reconceiving habeas corpus as a meaningful avenue for judicial power to push back against arbitrary executive power, and proposes a surprising source for this revival: Justice Scalia’s attack on the Sentencing Guidelines. Texas’s capital murder statute is proposed as ripe for such reinvigorated habeas review.  

The First Amendment is a well-known barrier to sensible technology regulation. While scholars blame the Court’s libertarian turn, we offer another explanation: the Court’s solicitude for religious speakers. Religious-speech cases have given firms a powerful suite of deregulatory tools. This Feature draws the through line from gods to Google.  

Professors Ellen Bublick and Jane Bambauer argue that the common law has expanded, and should continue to expand, the civil legal rights of wrongfully injured people, including police. There is value in using civil enforcement to hold both civilians and officers accountable for the unjustified harms that they cause.  

This Article offers the first legal history of the Comstock Act from its enactment to its post-Dobbs reinvention. From conflicts over Comstock’s enforcement emerged popular claims on democracy, liberty, and equality in which we can recognize roots of modern free-speech law and the law of sexual and reproductive liberty.

In civil litigation, police most commonly appear as defendants. But police also act as plaintiffs, suing the individuals they police. This Article argues that these plaintiff police claims cause significant democratic harms and should be limited. Compensation and deterrence can be achieved through other, less politically corrosive mechanisms.

This Note argues that Indian tribes can best address disenrollment by viewing the problem through the lens of international norms regarding citizenship revocation. In choosing to embrace these norms, tribes can restrict disenrollment in a manner that does not simply invoke tribal sovereignty but instead promotes it.

The Catholic Church has concluded close to two hundred treaties in the last sixty years with nations across the globe. Many of these agreements integrate Church doctrine into state legal systems at the expense of LGBTQ rights. This Note unearths this vast treaty regime—and suggests ways to challenge it.  

We live in perilous times, where acrimony and contempt poison our republic. But as others have long recognized—from Washington to Lincoln to current observers—there is an antidote: civic charity. It has helped heal our nation in some of our most difficult times; it can do so again.  

Investor‐driven climate governance (ICG) is premised on mobilizing finance to address climate change by leveraging investors to pressure companies to reduce emissions. Examining the rapid growth of ICG from an institutional political economy perspective, we argue that powerful financial and regulatory actors with varied interests coalesced to promote the discourse that climate risks equal financial

Public housing suffers from disinvestment, and, today, many residents live in substandard conditions. By combining the literature on public-housing history and tenant-rights law with the lived experiences of public-housing residents, this Essay uses Chicago as a case study to explore litigation and other advocacy strategies for systematically improving public-housing quality.  

This Essay explores public-benefits agencies’ increasing reliance on technology and remote services and its impact on welfare-rights litigation. The Essay argues that the lack of direct regulation of these practices threatens benefits access. However, creative impact litigation is still a powerful tool for enforcing benefits recipients’ rights.   

Despite decades of awareness, societies have failed to adequately respond to climate change, as evidenced by rising CO2 emissions and the continued dominance of fossil fuels in global energy consumption. This failure underscores the structural constraints of capitalist modernity, where economic and political incentives, as well as consumer behaviors, obstruct effective climate action. Beyond the challenge

This article pursues two objectives. First, it aims to trace the genealogy of data protection regulation in major liberal democracies. To do so, it examines the evolution of this regulation in the United States, France, and Germany, among others, and relies on the policy actors' triangle framework. Second, the article provides an explanation for the paradox that emerges from this diachronic analysis:

Lobbying is a multi‐faceted phenomenon that involves interest groups and corporations contacting politicians and officials in order to try to achieve their policy preferences. While interest group policy‐related lobbying has received a great deal of attention, studies of corporate contract lobbying are rarer even though this is a much older phenomenon. The article critically examines the commonly‐held

Secrecy jurisdictions play a crucial role in the legal framework perpetuating climate change. This paper demonstrates how these jurisdictions sustain the dynamics of climate change by enabling capital accumulation rooted in environmental degradation. A regulatory approach to law and climate change must address the global nature of the legal structure that upholds exploitative and ecocidal social relationships

The budget is the outcome of bargaining between spenders and guardians. Most research on budgeting sees all spenders as a unitary actor. This article argues, instead, that there are different relations at play between guardians and each spending ministry. Based on a comparison between four social ministries in Israel, it shows that these relations differ in terms of the level of involvement of guardians

OBJECTIVE We aimed to review research on recidivism risk assessment tools with individuals convicted of child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) offenses and make recommendations for use in forensic, correctional, and legal settings. HYPOTHESES Multiple tools would be defensible to use with individuals convicted of CSEM offenses. METHOD We discuss a minimum threshold of predictive accuracy

While outsourcing of public services is today widespread, maintaining their quality remains a challenge. External inspections are seen as essential for overseeing private providers, yet their effectiveness has not been thoroughly investigated. This study evaluates the impact of pre‐scheduled inspections on the performance of private and publicly operated prisons in England and Wales between 2004 and

“The Law of the Territories” is an emerging academic heading for legal scholarship on the status of U.S. territories. This Essay argues that the current momentum of this narrow “emerging field” presents an obstacle rather than a pathway to meaningful scholarly engagement, sidelining broader perspectives and more consequential inquiry.