Garcia Holgado, Benjamin & Sánchez Urribarri, Raúl. Court-packing and democratic decay: A necessary relationship? Global Constitutionalism 12(2): 350–377 (2023). This article challenges the common assumption that court-packing and democratic erosion are inherently linked. Drawing on rich case studies of Argentina under Carlos Menem (1989–1999) and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro (1999–present), the authors …
Gamboa, Laura; García-Holgado, Benjamín; & González-Ocantos, Ezequiel. Courts against backsliding: Lessons from Latin America. Law & Policy 46(4): 358–379 (2024). Across Latin America’s recent wave of democratic erosion, courts have often been portrayed as victims of executive encroachment or as instruments weaponized by autocrats. This article develops a different analytical frame by highlighting cases in …
Aguilar, A. (2012). Institutional changes in the public prosecutor’s office: The cases of Mexico, Chile and Brazil. Mexican law review, 4(2), 261-290. Given the critical role played by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in the criminal justice system, the reform of its powers and underlying framework is fundamental in enhancing the rule of law and democracy. …
Aguiar Aguilar, A. A. (2023). Courts and the judicial erosion of democracy in Latin America. Politics & Policy, 51(1), 7-25. How are courts used to erode democracy? Using the literature on democratic backsliding and judicial politics as a theoretical framework, in this work, Aguiar Aguilar shows the path of how courts are captured by incumbents and then …
Batesmith, Alex. “Lawyers Who Want to Make the World a Better Place – Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyering.” In Leading Works on the Legal Profession, 1st ed., Routledge, 2023. Scheingold and Sarat’s Something to Believe In (2004) remains a foundational statement on cause lawyering—one that challenges the narrow …
Batesmith, Alex, and Kieran McEvoy. “‘Closeted’ Cause Lawyering in Authoritarian Cambodia.” Law & Society Review 59 (2025): 463–495. doi:10.1017/lsr.2025.29. In this article, the authors analyze how lawyers in Cambodia pursue social justice, human rights, and rule-of-law commitments while navigating an increasingly repressive authoritarian environment. Drawing from seven years of interviews with 37 Cambodian lawyers and …
Levin, Leslie C., The Use of State Discipline to Sanction Attorneys General and Other High-Ranking Legal Officers (November 15, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5753303 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5753303 The United States Attorney General, state attorneys general, and high-ranking officials in their offices, like all lawyers, are subject to rules of professional conduct. Increasingly, when they push the boundaries of these …
In an unprecedented move, longtime federal judge Mark Wolf resigned from the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts after more than 40 years of service, publicly condemning President Donald Trump as an “existential threat to democracy.” In an essay in The Atlantic, Wolf said he could no longer remain silent under judicial ethics …
Alex, H. (2025). Fuzzy Boundaries: A Mechanism for Group Accumulation of Advantage. Sociological Theory, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751251378516 This article describes a strategic mechanism, fuzzy boundaries, that groups use to accumulate advantage. In contrast to the dominant view that rigid, well-defined boundaries maximize group rewards, I argue that ambiguity in membership criteria can, under certain conditions, more …
Satterthwaite, M. L., Sydow, K., & Polk, B. (2023). Unchecking Power and Capturing Courts: How Autocratization Erodes Independent Judicial Systems. Rutgers UL Rev., 76, 1147. The paper argues that courts have increasingly taken on legislative functions by issuing structural reform injunctions—broad, ongoing orders designed to overhaul public institutions such as prisons, schools, and mental hospitals. …