ABSTRACT What drives individuals to become immigration attorneys? Although much has been written about what motivates people to become lawyers broadly, little is known about the motivations and backgrounds of immigration attorneys. It has been suggested that immigration attorneys are “cause lawyers,” motivated by a desire to engage in immigration activism, advocacy, and reform. Drawing upon a national study of immigration attorneys conducted during Donald Trump's first presidential term, this paper explores the role of these and other established motivations for practicing law in the immigration context—including law school socialization, economic incentives and working conditions, and the social backgrounds, personal values and identities of lawyers. Interview findings reveal that immigration attorneys are not cause lawyers, at least not as traditionally defined in the sociolegal literature. Implications for the immigration bar and the future of immigration reform are discussed.

ABSTRACT Under what conditions do courts implement mechanisms of social participation in judicial decision‐making? Over the last two decades, Latin American constitutional and supreme courts have been opening themselves up to the public through institutional innovations such as public hearings and the acceptance of amicus curiae briefs. This paper analyses such court behavior from a comparative perspective. Theoretically, we argue that the implementation of these mechanisms requires both the presence of a court composition that values openness (ideational factors) and the contextual incentives to use them (with strategic considerations). Our empirical analysis consists of three steps: First, to assess the frequency of use and influence of the mechanisms in practice, we designed an expert survey and implemented it in 10 Latin American countries during the course of 2022. Second, three in‐depth studies of Argentina, Ecuador, and Uruguay allowed us to explore the causal relationship between the conditioning factors and the degree of court openness. Third, we briefly evaluate the impact of court openness on trust in high courts. Only the consistent and regular use of social‐participation mechanisms can help to improve trust, and our empirical analysis shows that this has only happened in the case of Colombia.

ABSTRACT Building on ethnographic fieldwork in welfare hearings in French‐speaking Belgium, this article explores how judges decide between irregular migrants claiming social assistance and the public welfare administrations refusing such claims. Investigating these cases helps to analyze how members of the bench establish truthfulness and ponder the social and political consequences of their decisions. In these contexts, irregular migrants, despite being the more disadvantaged party to the case, regularly win against the state. At the theoretical level, this article provides a counterpoint to two general trends in sociolegal and migration studies. First, it nuances the idea that judicial proceedings generally tend to further or reproduce inequalities by showing how courts can, under certain conditions, help uphold migrants' rights against the state. Second, it highlights the importance of law and formal institutions in the governance of precarious migrants.

ABSTRACTThis research examines the ability of the United States Supreme Court to influence behavioral change by federal environmental agencies through theories of Supreme Court power and principal–agent dynamics. I use a series of case studies to demonstrate Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers responses to publicly salient Supreme Court decisions, finding that agencies tend to behave as agents of the Supreme Court, even when faced with unpopular decisions.

ABSTRACTThe Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a tiny office in the United States Department of Justice, was designed to hold the executive branch to the law. But in practice, the office has often played a role in the expansion of presidential power. We analyze the publicly available OLC opinions from Trump's first term to understand whether, to what extent, and how lawyers in OLC provided legal scaffolding for President Trump's expansion of presidential power. We find that the OLC under the first Trump administration did expand power, but it did so in a manner largely consistent with previous administrations. The Trump OLC reinforced previous extensions of presidential power more frequently than it introduced novel extensions of power, citing OLC precedent from both Republican and Democratic administrations. We also note the prevalence in these opinions of language associated with the Unitary Executive Theory, a constitutional theory once considered radical that has been adopted by the conservative legal movement. Thus, even though the Trump OLC was functionally similar to previous administrations in advancing presidential prerogatives through its opinions, how it justified these reinforcements and extensions of power is functionally different from Democratic administrations—and, as some have argued, more dangerous.