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Researchers have documented the power of legal officials to administer sanctions, from arrest to court surveillance and incarceration. How do those subject to punishment interact with officials and attempt to subvert their power? Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations among 63 criminal defendants and 42 legal officials in the Boston-area court system, this article considers how socioeconomically and racially disadvantaged defendants interact with their defense attorneys, and with what consequences. Given racialized and classed constraints, many disadvantaged defendants mistrust their court-appointed lawyers. Their mistrust often results in withdrawal from their lawyers and active efforts to cultivate their own legal knowledge and skills. Defendants use their lay legal expertise to work around and resist the authority of their lawyers. Defense attorneys and judges respond with silencing and coercion, given the unwritten norms and rules of the court. These findings complicate existing accounts of disadvantaged defendants as passive actors and contribute to cultural sociological and relational theories of how people engage with professionals across institutional spaces. Unlike in mainstream institutions such as schools and hospitals where self-advocacy is rewarded in interactions, criminal court officials reject disadvantaged defendants’ attempts to advocate for themselves.

Representation is a fundamental institution within civil law, playing a crucial role in the resolution of legal affairs. Subjects of law during the establishment of legal affairs or undertaking various procedural actions in civil litigation procedures may engage representatives who act on behalf and for the benefit of their interests. This paper explores the significance of representation as a legal mechanism including its impact on the efficacy of legal proceedings and the protection of parties' interests.The necessity to act through representation arises as a result of the intensification of social relations and finds wide application due to the lack of time and the impossibility of parties to personally carry out their actions every time. Additionally, it is due to the complexity of the legal affairs and the risks that may be encountered in the absence of professional knowledge, whether they are physical or legal persons.This paper aims to discuss difficulties faced by individuals who do not engage such representatives, like lawyers, to resolve their legal matters and examines the impact of such representation on court proceedings. It also addresses the challenges and limitations associated with representation, such as issues related to the quality and competence of representatives, and the potential disparities faced by those unable to afford legal services.This research employs various methods, including historical and theoretical analysis, examination of judicial practices, and comparative aspects. The historical method highlights the evolving nature of representation in civil law over time. While the comparative method is used to investigate how the right to representation is regulated across different jurisdictions, revealing similarities and differences in their legal frameworks. The findings underscore the importance of effective representation in ensuring fair and equitable outcomes in civil legal processes.

Lawyers keep the gates of public justice institutions, particularly through their roles in formal procedures like hearings and trials. Yet, it is not clear what lawyers do in such quintessentially legal settings: conclusions from past research are bedeviled by a lack of clear theory and inconsistencies in research design. Conceptualizing litigation work in terms of professional expertise, I conduct a theoretically grounded synthesis of the findings of extant studies of lawyers' impact on civil case outcomes. Using an innovative combination of statistical techniques—meta-analysis and nonparametric bounding—the present study transcends previous work to reveal a domain of consensus for lawyers' effect on case outcomes and to explore why this effect varies so greatly across past studies. For the types of cases researched to date, knowledge of substantive law explains surprisingly little of lawyers' advantage compared to lay people appearing unrepresented. Instead, lawyers' impact is greatest when they assist in navigating relatively simple (to lawyers) procedures and where their relational expertise helps courts follow their own rules. Findings for law generalize to other professions, where substantive and relational expertise may shape the conduct and consequences of professional work.

Existing scholarship finds that having an attorney in immigration legal proceedings increases the chances of a favorable outcome. This work, however, often acknowledges that the representation effect is underexplained: selection may explain outcomes, and variation among attorneys is difficult to assess. Through 103 interviews with attorneys who practice immigration law in three organizational environments (nonprofit legal services, private firms, and corporate law firm pro bono programs) in two East Coast areas, this paper argues that attorneys sorting of clients between different types of legal organizations helps explain the representation effect. Attorneys define what type of case is a good fit for their representation, selecting cases they think they can help increase the probability of a favorable outcome. However, what they define as a good fit varies by attorneys practice environments, and centers not only on the facts or characteristics of a client and their case, but also attorneys organizational constraints. By documenting the central role of practice environment variation and its organizational constraints on attorneys case selection, this paper helps explain the representation effect and its implications for increasing vulnerable immigrants access to legal representation in the United States.

Do immigration lawyers matter, and if so, how? Drawing on a rich source of audio recording data, this study addresses these questions in the context of U.S. immigration bond hearings—a critical stage in the removal process for noncitizens who have been apprehended by U.S. immigration officials. First, my regression analysis using a matched sample of legally represented and unrepresented detainees shows that represented detainees have significantly higher odds of being granted bond. Second, I explore whether legal representation affects judicial efficiency and find no evidence of such a relationship. Third, I examine procedural and substantive differences between represented and unrepresented hearings. My analysis shows no differences in the judges' procedural behaviors, but significant differences in the detainees' level and type of courtroom advocacy. Represented detainees are more likely to submit documents, to present affirmative arguments for release, and to offer legally relevant arguments. Surprisingly, however, I find no evidence that these activities explain the positive effect of legal representation on hearing outcomes. These findings underscore the need to investigate not only what lawyers do in the courtroom, but also less quantifiable factors such as the quality of their advocacy, the nature of their relationship to other courtroom actors, and the potential signaling function of their presence in the courtroom.

In the United States, legal representation increases the likelihood that undocumented immigrants win legal claims. Yet private attorneys are expensive, and free and low-cost attorneys are scarce. How do legal services providers make representation decisions when demand outweighs capacity? Drawing on interviews with attorneys in thirty-eight nonprofit organizations who represent affirmative, humanitarian status seekers, this article describes how lawyers face pressure to represent winnable cases. Attorneys assess case winnability in two ways. First, attorneys aim to maximize clients’ cultural legibility as “deserving immigrant victims.” Simultaneously, attorneys aim to minimize case representation burden by considering the time, resources, and expertise needed to represent each claim. Attorneys assess both cultural legibility and case burden at every stage of the representation process (client selection, attorney assignment, relief pursual, and application production). In doing so, attorneys try to represent clients as the most deserving of status and in the most efficient way. These findings extend past research on attorneys’ selection processes that occur well before a client’s application is filed with the federal immigration bureaucracy. By highlighting how attorneys’ constrained decisions exacerbate legal stratification, these findings complicate calls for an immigrant legal inclusion strategy that depends on the labor of attorneys rather than on changes to the state’s demands on immigrants themselves.

Substantial research and policymaking have focused on the importance of lawyers in ensuring access to civil justice. But do lawyers matter more in cases decided by certain types of judges than others? Do lawyers matter more in certain political, legal, and organizational contexts than others? We explore these questions by investigating removal proceedings in the United States—a court process in which immigration judges decide whether to admit noncitizens into the United States or deport them. Drawing on over 1.9 million removal proceedings decided between 1998 and 2020, we examine whether the representation effect (the increased probability of a favorable outcome associated with legal representation) depends on judge characteristics and contextual factors. We find that the representation effect is larger among female (than male) judges and among more experienced judges. In addition, the representation effect is larger during Democratic presidential administrations, in immigration courts located in the Ninth Circuit, and in times of increasing caseload. These findings suggest that the representation effect depends on who the judge is and their decisional environment, and that increasing noncitzens’access to counsel—even of high quality—might be insufficient under current circumstances to ensure fair and consistent outcomes in immigration courts.

We report the results of the first of a series of randomized evaluations of legal assistance programs. This series of evaluations is designed to measure the effect of both an offer of and the actual use of representation, although it was not possible in the first study we report here to measure constructively all effects of actual use. The results of this first evaluation are unexpected, and we caution against both overgeneralization and undergeneralization. Specifically, the offers of representation came from a law school clinic, which provided high-quality and well-respected assistance in administrative \"appeals\" to state administrative law judges (ALJs) of initial rulings regarding eligibility for unemployment benefits. These \"appeals\" were actually de novo mini-trials. Our randomized evaluation found that the offers of representation from the clinic had no statistically significant effect on the probability that unemployment claimants would prevail in their \"appeals,\" but that the offers did delay proceedings by, on average, about two weeks. Actual use of representation (from any source) also delayed the proceeding; we could come to no firm conclusions regarding the effect of actual use of representation (from any source) on the probability that claimants would prevail. Keeping in mind the high-quality and well-respected nature of the representation the law school clinic offered and provided, we explore three possible explanations for our results, each of which has implications for delivery of legal services. We also conduct a review of previous quantitative research attempting to measure representation effects. We find that, excepting the results of two randomized studies separated by more than thirty years, this literature provides virtually no credible quantitative information on the effect of an offer of or actual use of legal representation. Finally, we discuss disadvantages, advantages, and future prospects of randomized studies in the provision of legal assistance.

Public interest lawyers seek to empower clients through collaborative approaches to direct representation that redistribute legal knowledge and affirm clients’ agency; however, the legal settings in which attorneys operate shape their capacity to subvert dynamics they consider oppressive. Based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork at a legal nonprofit serving asylum seekers in Los Angeles, this study explores how the broader environment of a restrictive immigration system transforms the aspirations, possibilities, and strategies of public interest lawyering. Drawing from sociolegal literature on cause lawyers, access to justice, and the U.S. immigration system, the article argues that the politicization of the U.S. immigration bureaucracy destabilizes foundational legal norms, hindering the agenda of public interest attorneys. Procedural formalism constitutes one of the only resources at attorneys’ disposal, yet here it often impedes lawyers’ ability to disrupt perceived power hierarchies. Specifically, the prevalence of complex legal procedures that obstruct access to asylum reconfigures opportunities to uplift clients. These findings illuminate how hostile legal settings strain lawyers. They also contribute to timely debates around how attorneys protect access to justice and advance meaningful social transformation.

This Article rethinks the functions and functioning of litigation booms. Using an original data set that tracks Fair Labor Standards Act cases during the 2000-2016 period, the Article shows that booms are not anomalies but are instead an expected behavior in our distributed system of civil law enforcement. Specifically, plaintiffs and their lawyers \"herd\" or converge on a particular type of case, fueled by information transmitted via networks, made available to the general public, or both. The data also reveal that booms can end on their own, reaching a natural tipping point without legislative or judicial retrenchment. This analysis has normative implications, suggesting that litigation suppressing legislative or judicial intervention may not always be necessary, though tweaks to system design could achieve more efficient outcomes and more equitably distributed access to legal representation.