Discourse, Identity, and Social Change in the Marriage Equality Debates. By Karen Tracey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12319

Criminal Defense in China was written as the leadership’s repres-

sion of activist lawyers started intensifying. In China’s tightening

political climate, the book itself is an act of solidarity, and the

authors plainly sympathize with the politically active lawyers they

profile. Still, real world events cast a shadow over the text, and the

political fears experienced by many criminal lawyers are unlikely to

disappear soon. Mounting a robust defense remains risky, as law-

yers can easily be charged with obstructing justice or tampering

with evidence. Signs that political liberalism is gaining strength are

also scarce. The most optimism Liu and Halliday can muster is to

say the future is uncertain. The last line of the book takes a long his-

torical view, casting the present as a moment when “forces for and

against political liberalism engage in epic struggles as the world

watches and waits” (182). Criminal Defense in China, then, is a snap-

shot of a profession in flux. It is a valuable portrait of criminal

defense lawyers’ beliefs and strategies, and vital reading for anyone

looking to understand the prospects for legal activism for China or

how the fight for political liberalism is unfolding worldwide.

***

Discourse, Identity, and Social Change in the Marriage Equality Debates.By

Karen Tracey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Matthew Mitchell, School of Social and Political Sciences,

The University of Melbourne

The twenty-first century has been a time of exceptionally rapid

change in the social status of gays and lesbians in the United States.

This change has been contested and reflected in the legal field,

where within 12 years the law’s regard of same-sex relations has

shifted from criminalization to legalization. In Discourse, Identity, and

Social Change in the Marriage Equality Debates, Karen Tracey tracks

how this shift occurred in debates regarding same-sex marriage in

Supreme Court and legislative hearings between 2003 and 2013.

She delivers a thorough empirical account of how law was made

and interpreted through discursive processes, and how it was

through these processes that changing social values infiltrated law

and transformed it from the inside-out.

Tracey illustrates how law emerges through discursive struggle,

the parameters of which are both structured and shifting. At the

beginning of Parts One and Two, she describes how Supreme Court

278 Book Reviews