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"Illiberal political societies come with varieties of labels - absolute monarchies, military dictatorships, authoritarian or totalitarian politics, Big Man regimes, or dual states. Yet they share key features in common - little or no restraint on arbitrary executive power, most especially as it is exercised through military, police and security apparatuses; law that is distorted and circumscribed and ultimately ineffectual in its protections of individuals and organizations offensive to the ruling power; little space for voices to speak freely about their rulers, their qualities of life, or their circumstances in times and places and organizations of their own choosing; severely constricted notions of rights-bearing citizens beyond those granted or withdrawn by the rulers themselves; and precariousness of property ownership, among others"--

AbstractHow do dignity discourses shift the framing of struggles for basic legal freedoms? Based on our decade-long empirical research on lawyers and politics in China, we provide a theoretical intervention in a burgeoning socio-legal scholarship on dignity in this article. Drawing inductively from in-depth interviews, we find that a powerful current of dignity consciousness and sentiment, joined by an acute awareness of dignity harms, flows through the community of Chinese activist lawyers. Their dignity discourses can be witnessed and explained in four streams of awareness: (1) dignity experienced as an ideal in juridical, philosophical, and theological idioms; (2) dignity takings experienced indirectly and directly in the property takings of clients' homes, farms, and livelihood; (3) assaults on dignity through property takings of spaces of religious worship; and (4) the takings of professional dignity from the lawyers charged with defending the dignity of others. This article points to the value of dignity framings in the general theory of collective action for basic legal freedoms.

AbstractThis article develops an ecological theory that shifts the paradigm of professional mobilization from causes to relational spaces. It analyzes different species of activist professionals by locating them in an ecology of activism and examining how collective action emerges from their boundary work with the ecology's increasing density and consolidation. It empirically grounds the theory by explaining the political activism of Chinese lawyers in the early twenty‐first century and how it led to a government crackdown in 2015. Using interviews, online ethnography, and archival data collected from 2005 to 2017, the research demonstrates that Chinese lawyers' political mobilization has experienced three stages: (1) vacancy and isolation (2000–2007), (2) spatial consolidation (2008–2011), and (3) boundary work (2011–2015). The study has implications for theories of social space and for understanding professional mobilization in authoritarian contexts and beyond.

Globalization of law may be defined as the worldwide progression of transnational legal structures and discourses along the dimensions of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact. We propose that a theory of the global penetration of law will require at least four elements—actors, mechanisms, power, and structures and arenas. A comparison of four approaches to globalization and law—world polity, world systems, postcolonial globalism, and law and economic development—indicates considerable variation in perceived outcomes and gaps in explanation, but with possible complementarities in both outcomes and explanatory factors. Research demonstrates that globalization is variably contested in several domains of research on law: (a) the construction and regulation of global markets, (b) crimes against humanity and genocide, (c) the diffusion of political liberalism and constitutionalism, and (d) the institutionalization of women's rights. We propose that the farther globalizing legal norms and practices are located from core local cultural institutions and beliefs, the less likely global norms will provoke explicit contestation and confrontation. Future research will be productively directed to where and how global law originates, how and when global norms and law are transmitted and enforced, and how global-local settlements are negotiated.