Tamir Moustafa. “Law and Courts in Authoritarian Regimes.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 10, (2014): 281–299. This article surveys emerging research on the role of courts in authoritarian regimes, challenging earlier assumptions that they function solely as instruments of repression. It highlights how courts can serve as tools of governance, shape interactions …
Ethan Michelson. “Lawyers, Political Embeddedness, and Institutional Continuity in China’s Transition From Socialism.” The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 113, no. 2 (2007): 352–414. This article examines how Chinese lawyers navigate professional challenges by developing and relying on political embeddedness, defined as their bureaucratic, instrumental, or personal ties to state actors. Drawing on data from …
Mary E. Gallagher. Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2017. This book explores how authoritarian regimes may adopt democratic legal institutions to reinforce their rule, using China’s protective labor laws and judicial access as a case study. It analyzes how Chinese workers mobilize these laws and under …
Lynette J. Chua. “Pragmatic Resistance, Law, and Social Movements in Authoritarian States: The Case of Gay Collective Action in Singapore.” Law & Society Review, vol. 46, no. 4 (2012): 713-748. This article examines how legal strategies shape advocacy under authoritarian rule through a qualitative study of Singapore’s gay movement. It analyzes how activists engage in …
Yueduan Wang. “Embedded Supervision: China’s Prosecutorial Public Interest Litigation Against Government.” Regulation & Governance, (2024): 1-41. This study challenges the assumption that diminished institutional autonomy necessarily weakens legal oversight in authoritarian regimes. Focusing on prosecutor-led public interest litigation in China, it shows that legal professionals can, under certain conditions, enhance their influence over state agencies …
Yueduan Wang and Ying Xia. “State-Sponsored Activism: How China’s Law Reforms Impact NGOs’ Legal Practice.” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 49, no. 1 (2024): 451–77. This study explores how attorneys and law-related NGOs navigate legal opportunities in China amid ongoing democratic backsliding. Following “law-based governance” reforms that professionalized the judiciary, expanded legal aid, and granted …
Dias, V. M., & Schapiro, M. G. (2026). Resisting democratic backsliding from within the state: Environmental politics in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70101 The article argues that polycentric governance can enable meaningful resistance to democratic backsliding from within the state by fragmenting executive power across multiple institutions with overlapping authority. Focusing on environmental politics …
Levesque, C., DeWaard, J., Chan, L., McKenzie, M. G., Tsuchiya, K., Toles, O., … Boyle, E. H. (2023). Crimmigrating Narratives: Examining Third-Party Observations of US Detained Immigration Court. Law & Social Inquiry, 48(2), 407–436. doi:10.1017/lsi.2022.16 Crimmigrating Narratives: Examining Third-Party Observations of US Detained Immigration Court examines how U.S. immigration courts criminalize non-citizens through what the authors call …
Levesque, C., Horner, K., & Chan, L. (2022). Process as Suffering: How US Immigration Court Process and Culture Prevent Substantive Justice. Alb. L. Rev., 86, 471. Process as Suffering: How U.S. Immigration Court Process and Culture Prevent Substantive Justice argues that U.S. immigration courts impose a unique form of “double punishment” on noncitizens: first through …
Kureshi, Y. (2022). Seeking supremacy: The pursuit of judicial power in Pakistan. Cambridge University Press. The emergence of the judiciary as an assertive and confrontational center of power has been the most consequential new feature of Pakistan’s political system. This book maps out the evolution of the relationship between the judiciary and military in Pakistan, explaining …