Although there is now a considerable literature on how law and legal principles serve as institutionalized models for organizations, there has been far less attention to how organizational practices may serve as institutionalized models for courts. This article offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of legal endogeneity -a subtle yet powerful process through which institutionalized organizational structures and practices influence judicial conceptions of legality and compliance with antidiscrimination law. We argue that, irrespective of their effectiveness, organizational structures, such as grievance procedures, anti-harassment policies, evaluation procedures, and formal hiring procedures, become symbolic indicators of compliance with anti-discrimination laws, first within organizations, but eventually in the judicial realm as well. As organizational structures become increasingly institutionalized, lawyers and judges become more likely to associate them with rationality and fairness and to infer nondiscrimination from the mere presence of those structures. Legal endogeneity has observable manifestations: judges increasingly refer to organizational structures in their opinions, find them relevant to determinations of legal liability, and ultimately defer to those structures by inferring nondiscrimination from their presence. We test legal endogeneity theory by analyzing a random sample of 1024 federal employment discrimination decisions from 1965-1999. We find that legal endogeneity has increased over time; that judicial deference is most likely when plaintiffs lack social and economic clout; and that judicial deference is most likely when the legal theories require judges to rule on organizational attributes that are not directly observable. We suggest that legal endogeneity weakens the impact of law as judges come to view organizational structures as indicators of legal compliance even when those structures are ineffective in combating discrimination.2

The Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers to provide job‐protected leave, but little is known about how these leave rights operate in practice or how they interact with other normative systems to construct the meaning of leave. Drawing on interviews with workers who negotiated contested leaves, this study examines how social institutions influence workplace mobilization of these rights. I find that leave rights remain embedded within institutionalized conceptions of work, gender, and disability that shape workers' perceptions, preferences, and choices about mobilizing their rights. I also find, however, that workers can draw on law as a culture discourse to challenge these assumptions, to build coalitions, and to renegotiate the meaning of leave.

How do Family and Medical Leave Act rights operate in practice in the courts and in the workplace? This empirical study examines how institutions and social practices transform the meaning of these rights to recreate inequality. Workplace rules and norms built around the family wage ideal, the assumption that disability and work are mutually exclusive, and management's historical control over time all constrain opportunities for social change. Yet workers can also mobilize rights as a cultural discourse to change the social meaning of family and medical leave. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from social constructivism and new institutionalism, this study explains how institutions transform rights to recreate systems of power and inequality but at the same time also provide opportunities for law to change social structure. It provides a fresh look at the perennial debate about law and social change by examining how institutions shape the process of rights mobilization.

This article expands upon the idea that repeat players influence the development of law by settling cases they are likely to lose and litigating cases they are likely to win. Through empirical analysis of judicial opinions interpreting the Family and Medical Leave Act, it shows how the rule-making opportunities in the litigation process affect the development of law and the judicial determination of statutory rights. In addition, the article explains how early judicial opinions might influence later judicial interpretations of the law. Although individuals may successfully mobilize the law to gain benefits in their disputes, that success often removes their experiences from the judicial determination of rights, limiting law's capacity to produce social change. This paradox of losing by winning separates the dispute resolution function of courts from their lawmaking function and raises questions about the legitimacy of law.