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The concluding chapter expands on core ideas developed in the introductory chapter and integrated into the historical narrative, with an eye to reshaping the agendas of sociolegal scholars who research the politics of legal rights mobilization. One core theme is the need for greater attention to state legal violence. A second, and closely related theme involves the theoretical framework of “racial capitalism” in which the contemporary rule of law is embedded and whose hierarchical structures law works to perpetuate. The most original, provocative, and no doubt controversial aspect of this analysis is the development of ideas regarding the variegated traditions of liberal, repressive, and – especially in the post-World War II – hybrid legal forms that sustain racial capitalist hierarchies. Special attention will be given to racialized subjectivities of low wage workers and institutional practices of legal administration that repress them, including especially criminal justice, “crimmigration,” segregated housing policy, and workplace governance. The chapter concludes with the implications of the critical analysis for legal mobilization, as practical politics and intellectual research agendas, in the contemporary period.

This chapter analyses the legal-sociological trope of restitutive justice in Émile Durkheim’s 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, as well as in his later anthropological studies on punitive institutions and laws. It shows that Durkheim theorizes restitution in terms of the social effects of intensified division of labour in industrial societies, which is identifiable within the domain of law, and which consists of corrective and remedial response to wrongdoing that aims to do justice for, and to repair, the consequences of wrongdoing for the social fabric. This is expressed in the metaphor of a clock that is turned back, as if expressing the underlying desires of the restitutive law to ‘restore the past’ to ‘its normal state’. It is situated as a binary opposite to the categories of ‘repressive law’ or ‘punitive law’, which are said to characterize traditional societies, and which aim at making the wrongdoer suffer. In turn, in his later writings Durkheim makes a conceptual and philosophic link between restitution and humanitarianism. This shows that the corrective and remedial workings of modern law operates upon activation of humanitarian affects: what sets restitution in motion, is the extent to which such wrongs coincide with sites of suffering.

This chapter focuses on the Union parliament’s lawmaking record. It maps out the legislative process as it has unfolded in the course of the 2010s and highlights how both successive legislatures have developed contrasting lawmaking patterns. Building on Michael Mezey’s three-stage approach to policymaking, it demonstrates that the legislature under the USDP has exerted a stronger influence on the second phase of policymaking (deliberation process) while efforts were made by the NLD legislature to consolidate the first and (tentatively) third phases of lawmaking (policy formulation and policy oversight). The chapter ends with a critical analysis of the legislative outputs of both legislatures to assess the relative impact parliament has had over the startling decade of post-SPDC political, economic, and social transformations, and more generally the country’s democratization efforts. The evidence gathered suggests that resurgent parliaments can effectively serve as policy-influencing arenas, despite the domineering influence of the executive branch or the amateurism observed among legislative ranks.