Nancy Reichman

The Differential Valuation of Women's Work: A New Look at the Gender Gap in Lawyers' Incomes

This article seeks to identify the mechanisms underlying the gender wage gap among new lawyers. Relying on nationally representative data to examine the salaries of lawyers working fulltime in private practice, we find a gender gap of about 5 percent. Identifying four mechanisms – work profiles, opportunity paths and structures, credentials, and legal markets – we first estimate how much of the gap stems from the differential valuation of womens endowments; second, we estimate the effects of different endowments for men and women; and third we assess both these possibilities. The analyses indicate that none of these mechanisms can fully account for the gender gap. Experimental studies that indicate womens work is less valued and rewarded than mens suggest new directions for research on gendered compensation.

The Problem that is Global Warming: Introduction

Global warming poses significant challenges to society at every level, evading easy definitions that would make the usual instrumental approaches to policymaking and regulation a relatively straightforward task. The embeddedness of the carbon economy in contemporary methods of industrialization and development means that climate protection is at once a problem of environment, the global economy, and human rights. It requires us to understand the strengths and limitations of a regulatory approach, to tease apart the intricacies of international law and governance to find ways to turn economic, legal, and cultural norms toward creating climate justice. Sector specific approaches to dealing with human rights and refugees, as well as international relations based on interstate relations, also have limitations. These include insufficient capacity to appreciate the differentiated responsibility of various actors in the creation of this ecological crisis as well as creating obstacles in finding appropriate ways to motivate those with the most ability to reduce our impact on the climate. Mutual reinforcement and virtuous arbitrage across fragmented regulatory regimes might create new synergies with potentially positive transformative effects for climate protection. To achieve this, the development and maintenance of legitimacy is central. The articles in this edition tackle these issues and, taken as a whole, provide a springboard for future scholarship.

When every test is a winner: clean cycling, surveillance, and the new preemptive governance.

This article examines the trend toward risk-based, preemptive social control as it has developed in anti-doping regulation in professional cycling. Specifically, this research considers how the regulatory technologies of anti-doping surveillance have become a core component of the everyday routines of professional cyclists. Drawing from interviews with professional cyclists and analysis of mediated representations of anti-doping, we find that surveillance and disclosure have become not simply routine, but a central orienting practice in the everyday lives of professional cyclists. Blended into the everyday routines, surveillance technologies extend the gaze of those who watch and increase pressures to disclose. As athletes internalize surveillance and disclosure as consistent with their professional norms, the power relationships that surround sport performance become increasingly difficult to discern.

Regulating Performance-Enhancing Technologies A Comparison of Professional Cycling and Derivatives Trading

This article compares the efforts to govern performance enhancement technologies in two seemingly different competitive arenas—financial markets and professional cycling—where the pressures to outperform are enormous. In the two decades prior to the 2007 financial crisis, new derivative financial commodities such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) were created to “juice up” investment returns for extraordinary profits. Over roughly the same period, the development and use of blood boosting drugs and technologies brought so-called doping by cyclists to new levels of complexity and sophistication with extraordinary race results and new levels of commercialization of the sport. The efforts to “turbocharge” their respective competitive spaces took place within complicated regimes of self-regulation that had strikingly dissimilar narratives about performance enhancement and, consequently, different technologies for control. Looking across these seemingly disparate cases draws our attention to how regulation fits into the assemblage of competition and prospects for reform.

The Uncertain Promise of Law: Lessons from Bhopal.

This paper describes the course of the litigation following the Bhopal disaster. It begins with a brief description of the various failures in risk assessment and management that gave rise to the hazardous conditions in Bhopal, and then describes in more detail the resulting legal proceedings. Specifying a number of modest criteria against which the success of the litigation can be measured, the paper examines why traditional tort processes are unlikely to succeed in the case of mass hazards. The paper describes and analyzes a number of significant reforms forged by the Indian courts in response to the Bhopal disaster, and seeks to articulate some of the lessons to be learned from these efforts.