Browsing by Subject "Law & Society"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Knowing about Genocide: Armenian Suffering and Epistemic Struggles
    (University of California Press, 2021) Savelsberg, Joachim J.
    How do victim and perpetrator peoples generate conflicting knowledge about genocide? Using a sociology of knowledge approach, Joachim J. Savelsberg answers this question in the context of the Armenian genocide committed during the First World War. Focusing on Armenians and Turks, Savelsberg examines strategies of silencing, denial, and acknowledgment in everyday interactions, public rituals, law, and politics. He draws on interviews, ethnographic accounts, documents, and eyewitness testimony to illuminate the social processes that drive dueling versions of history. Ultimately, this study reveals the counterproductive consequences of denial in an age of human rights hegemony, demonstrating the implications for populist disinformation campaigns against overwhelming evidence.
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    Police Misconduct, Monetary Sanctions, and Insurance Models in the Modern Police Accountability Era
    (2024-05) Wulff, Stephen
    Despite many police accountability efforts underway in the contemporary United States, financial immunization of officers continues to enable police impunity. Legal scholars have examined these issues from the vantage points of law and how governments pay for misconduct (Schwartz 2014, 2016); they have also mapped the police liability insurance terrain (Rappaport 2016, 2017). Yet little is known about how police accountability activists and municipal actors—e.g., public officials, police leaders, risk managers—approach and perceive the overlapping issues of insurance, risk management, police accountability, and police misconduct settlements. Furthermore, despite pioneering research in this area by legal scholars, few in-depth municipal case studies currently exist, especially from a sociological and sociolegal perspective. My qualitative case study of municipalities in Minnesota operating with and without market-based insurance elucidates how activists and key municipal representatives approach and perceive these issues and examines a potential insurance alternative. My dissertation grapples with a fundamental paradox: policing as an institution is charged with social control of the general public; however, police violence reflects a breakdown in the social control of what sociologist Howard Becker (1963) refers to as “rule enforcers.” To understand contemporary efforts to stem police violence, my project examines the role that insurance and risk management strategies play—or could potentially play—in regulating police departments and individual officers. I extend the sociology of punishment literature by reinterpreting Feeley and Simon’s (1992) classic “new penology” paradigm through a social movement lens. They argue that a late-twentieth-century penal shift occurred away from rehabilitation toward managing aggregates of dangerous criminal categories (e.g., violent offenders) using risk management approaches. I extend their thesis by examining how police accountability groups are implicitly inverting the new penology onto police in an effort to manage aggregates of dangerous police categories (e.g., violent officers) using risk management approaches. My study also extends the sociology of punishment literature on “monetary sanctions.” Existing research focuses on all the costs imposed by the criminal legal system on denizens accused and/or convicted of a crime (Harris 2016). Instead of focusing on how cities (like Ferguson, Missouri) budget for revenue generated from monetary sanctions and the micro-level predatory effects these sanctions have on traditional offenders, my project illuminates: 1) how police misconduct payouts contribute to tax revenue shortfalls, which can trap cities in long-term debt cycles; and 2) how financially immunizing officers and departments has meso-level predatory effects on cities by diverting tax revenue from the public sector to cover payouts. Since the 2014 killing by police of unarmed African American Michael Brown in Ferguson, policing has faced a public legitimacy crisis. To address core issues raised by Black Lives Matter and other racial justice movements in response to such killings—namely, racial injustice and police impunity—public debate has centered on adopting existing accountability mechanisms and reforms (e.g., body cameras, police de-militarization) (Weitzer 2015). Following the 2020 murder by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, some activists and community members have also called for defunding and/or abolishing police (Coleman 2020). Meanwhile, policing scholars have identified new accountability mechanisms (e.g., critical incident reporting) to address the weaknesses of past policing reforms (Walker and Archbold 2019). However, insurance as an accountability mechanism has received scant attention in both scholarly and national debates. My study seeks to add to the existing sociological and related interdisciplinary literatures, while shedding light on the salience of this accountability mechanism, by: 1) Elucidating key stakeholders’ approaches to and perceptions of existing and potential insurance models and risk management strategies for regulating police behavior. 2) Uncovering and/or further elucidating municipal, non-profit, and/or private sector insurance and risk management practices that either perpetuate or reduce police impunity and police violence. 3) Informing scholarly and policy discussions on reforming police via insurance. 4) Examining the implications of a potential insurance alternative.
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    Power and the Quest for Justice
    (2017-07) Snell, Paul
    This dissertation asks how legal, political and social actors affect the beliefs and actions of public interest law organizations. In order to answer this question requires two conceptual prerequisites. The first is the concept of power. There are substantial limitation with current understandings of what it means to affect others . I conduct an ordinary language analysis to illustrate interest group scholars’ acceptance of one sense of power—as domination. In the process, I recover another sense of power— as influence—the ability to affect others through imperceptible and non-coercive means. The second conceptual prerequisite is what public law organizations do, and how these actions reinforce one another. I create the concept of triangular advocacy to explain how these groups try to change society through a combination of legal, political, and social advocacy. While legal advocacy is central to public law groups’ efforts, political and social advocacy complements their goals. With the concepts of power—as influence, and triangular advocacy, I examine the question that I posed at the outset: how key actors have power with public law groups. I find that legal and social advocacy are important ways for PILOs to overcome challenges that political actors and the broader public place in their way. If public law groups perceive themselves as having good relationships with political actors, however, then they can concentrate on insider forms of politics, and do not need to emphasize social change as strongly.
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    Remembering The Faces Of Law: Collective Memories And Legal Consciousness In Transitional China
    (2015-06) Liao, Wenjie
    Abstract Using a social survey of 556 individuals, my dissertation examines how Chinese urban residents remember the past and how they think of and act toward current laws. By linking Chinese people's different understandings of law with larger cultural themes, this project provides socio-legal scholars with the theoretical tool to articulate the complex cultural environments in which people experience, think about, and act toward law. In addition, the findings also suggest that it is fruitful to deconstruct the concept of law based on the social relations it seeks to regulate. Finally, my dissertation further expands collective memory research by revising theories on cohort formation and connecting memories of the past to attitudes toward present laws. In my first empirical chapter, I treat collective memories of the past as a core component of culture, situating the study of law in specific historical and cultural context. My survey results show that memories most influential in shaping people's understanding of law and the state are those that resonate with nationalist sentiments. This applies especially to memories of resistance against foreign invaders. Memories of these events contribute to people's support for laws that strengthen centralized state power. The next two chapters examine how people's perception of law's legitimacy is associated with their tendency to obey the law and mobilize it for dispute resolution. My research reveals that Chinese people's ideas of and potential behaviors toward law vary across different social relations. Specifically, family laws are considered to be much more legitimate than laws that regulate state-citizen relations or economic transactions. This difference in the perceptions of law translates into varying tendencies to report compliance or mobilization of the different types of laws. While the perception of law's legitimacy is positively associated with tendencies to obey and use the law, this is true to a much greater degree for family laws than for other types of law. Interestingly, people report that they are least likely to litigate for conflict within the family, despite the high level of legitimacy they attribute to laws in this social sphere. These chapters also report on how legal ideas and potential behaviors vary across respondents. These findings have implications for policy makers and activists who seek to change the legal system in China. On the one hand, reformers could repurpose these existing cultural themes to promote the legitimacy of their causes. On the other hand, the authoritarian state of China very shrewdly co-opted these discursive resources as well. The Chinese government has invested considerable resources in establishing its image as a rising super power and thus taps into the increasing national pride among Chinese citizens. To counter such nationalistic narratives could thus be the mission of activists and social reformers. Methodologically, my dissertation borrows from the culturalist tradition in collective memories study. Bearing in mind the pitfalls of oversimplification, I designed my survey to cover a wide range of cultural discourses. This has provided new insights into the larger context of contemporary China, context that has been either unduly neglected or misunderstood in previous research.