Abstract
Legal scholars have long studied why laws are implemented differently across local court contexts. Key to understanding this localized variation is understanding how new laws are communicated, interpreted, and negotiated within the legal field. Few studies, however, have directly examined the process by which court actors interpret and negotiate new laws within the court. We explore these sensemaking processes through interviews and observations of court actors in Washington and Missouri after changes to monetary sanction laws. We identify three primary forms of sensemaking and analyze contextual factors that shape these processes. We find key differences in sensemaking based on differing levels of regulatory oversight but also that normative and cultural factors were still important in determining legal interpretation and implementation within each state. These findings have important implications for our theoretical understanding of courtroom communities and for policymakers seeking to enact reform.
- © 2022 Russell Sage Foundation. Smith, Tyler, Kristina J. Thompson, and Michele Cadigan. 2022. “Sensemaking in the Legal System: A Comparative Case Study of Changes to Monetary Sanction Laws.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 8(1): 63–81. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2022.8.1.03. We would like to thank Arnold Ventures for providing funding for this project (PI: Alexes Harris) and the Multi-State Monetary Sanctions Study team and research assistants who contributed to the data collection process. Partial support for this research came from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant, P2C HD042828, to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. Direct correspondence to: Tyler Smith, at tjsmith1{at}uw.edu, 211 Savery Hall, Box 353340, Seattle, WA 98195–3340, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.