Bottom-up hybridity: how sexual violence plaintiffs’ attorneys blur the boundaries between civil and criminal law

Abstract Despite symbolic boundaries between civil and criminal law, sociolegal scholars note their conceptual and operational overlap, or hybridity. Values (e.g., restoration vs. punishment) and practices (e.g., monetary compensation vs. incarceration) thought distinct to each manifest in both, and contact with one legal system can generate involvement with the other. Scholars typically attribute hybridity’s emergence to top-down mechanisms like legislation. This article presents interviews with sexual violence plaintiffs’ attorneys who describe their efforts to improve case outcomes by incorporating criminal legal artifacts like police reports, police evidence and criminal convictions into civil litigation and inserting civil legal artifacts, including costly evidence, victim support and monetary compensation, into criminal prosecutions. Building on organizational theories of boundary work, this article argues that attorneys, in taking purposive action to win their cases, blur distinctions between civil and criminal law from the bottom-up, a distinct mechanism through which civil-criminal hybridity emerges.