bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Research Note: Cops and ‘Stool Pigeon’-Professional Striving and Discretionary Justice in European Police Work
Authors: Walsh James Leo
Published: June 2006

The interplay between professionals and clients has been examined in a number of settings (Etzioni, 1964: 87-89; Becker, 1952; Willie, 1960; Schur, 1968; Myers and Roberts, 1959) and the impact of laymen on professional behavior is well-known to the sociologists (Friedson, 1960). In this research report these insights are applied to police-citizen interaction in an effort to explain the dynamics of discretionary decisions by police officers and the role such discretion plays in their quest to attain higher professional stature. Specific attention will be paid to variations in the willingness of policemen to develop and utilize informers or “stool pigeons.”
Group Influences on the Helpfulness of Accident Witnesses
Authors: Korte Charles
Published: June 2006

Action that occurs in a group or social context has always held a certain fascination for students of human behavior, partly because of our many notions about the powerful forces that groups exert on the individual. Impressions of group forces derive in part from Le Bon's (1895) early account of crowd behavior, which characterized the crowd's power over the individual as control that was essentially hypnotic, resulting in extremities of behavior, from brutal cruelty to altruism. More recent analyses of group influences have been concerned with the means by which groups elicit and maintain individual conformity to goals, values, and standards shared by the group. For example, Kelman's (1961) theoretical analysis of the processes of social influence has been a significant contribution to our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of conformity phenomena.
Comparative Analysis of Patterns of Compliance with Supreme Court Decisions
Authors: Milner Neal
Published: June 2006

Political scientists until recently have ignored the study of the process involved in complying with Supreme Court decisions. As Richard M. Johnson (1967: 4) has stated, to neglect such studies “is to neglect an indispensable segment of the total judicial process.” Despite the increasing awareness of the importance of this aspect to the judicial process, there are still almost no studies which attempt a comparative analysis of patterns of compliance with or resistance to Supreme Court decisions.
Nomotics
Authors: Hogan Robert , Henley Nancy
Published: June 2006

Several philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists have recently begun to reexamine the problem of explanation in social science. Instead of describing man in terms of organized traits, needs, drive-cathexes, coping and defense mechanisms, or self-actualizing tendencies, the new movement is concerned with “man as rule follower.” This paper outlines the essentials of such an approach (nomotics—from the Greek nomos, “law, convention”–refers to the study of human rule systems), beginning with an examination of four behavior systems which can be conceptualized as networks of rule-governed activities. We describe some key properties of rule systems, point out certain important differences in the manners in which they are used, and suggest methods for studying rule systems in general. We also present an analysis of the topic of obedience, a central factor in the operation and preservation of any given system.
The Decision to Prosecute
Authors: Cole George F.
Published: June 2006

This paper is based on an exploratory study of the Office of Prosecuting Attorney, King County (Seattle), Washington. The lack of social scientific knowledge about the prosecutor dictated the choice of this approach. An open-ended interview was administered to one-third of the former deputy prosecutors who had worked in the office during the ten year period 1955-1965. In addition, interviews were conducted with court employees, members of the bench, law enforcement officials, and others having reputations for participation in legal decision-making. Over fifty respondents were contacted during this phase. A final portion of the research placed the author in the role of observer in the prosecutor's office. This experience allowed for direct observation of all phases of the decision to prosecute so that the informal processes of the office could be noted. Discussions with the prosecutor's staff, judges, defendant's attorneys, and the police were held so that the interview data could be placed within an organizational context.
Automakers and Dealers: A Study of Criminogenic Market Forces
Authors: Leonard William N. , Weber Marvin Glenn
Published: June 2006

That the American culture contains criminogenic elements leading to blue-collar crime, white-collar crime and noncriminal exploitation has been recognized by sociologists. Sutherland (1949: 9) defined a white-collar crime as one “committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his legitimate occupation.” White-collar crime included such acts as false and deceptive advertising, mislabeling of goods, price fixing, selling adulterated goods, violating weights and measures statutes, performing illegal operations (by doctors), fee-splitting (by lawyers), and others. Thus crime could no longer be defined solely as the illegal activity of blue-collar, low-class and pathological persons, but extended to all classes, with the prestige group at the top setting a pattern of lawlessness reflected and emulated by subgroups.
Officeholding and Powerwielding: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Structure and Style in American Administrative History
Authors: Nelson William E.
Published: June 2006

To what extent has the exercise of administrative power been directed during the course of American history toward highly political ends, such as repaying political debts or furthering the particularistic interests of rich or powerful individuals and groups? Even a cursory review of the facts reveals that the administrative process has not always been highly politicized. When the United States became independent some two centuries ago, magistrates generally sought to use their power to further non-political religious and ethical ends in which nearly all their fellow subjects believed. More than a hundred years later, at the close of the nineteenth century, the ideology of administrative decision-making was similarly an apolitical one, in which administrators sought to resolve disputes and decide upon policies by reasoning deductively from abstract, general principles which nearly all of the nation accepted. The administrative process in the late nineteenth century differed from that of the mid-eighteenth not in the degree of politicization, but in the substantive standards from which administrators reasoned: In the mid-eighteenth century, as I have already suggested, the standards were ultimately religious and ethical, whereas by the end of the nineteenth century they had become basically scientistic and utilitarian.
Mobilizing Private Law: An Introductory Essay
Authors: Lempert Richard O.
Published: June 2006

The mobilization of law may be thought of as the process by which legal norms are invoked to regulate behavior. In the area of private law, mobilization has two distinct aspects. The first is the process by which existing disputes become engaged in the legal system. In theory this means that disputes are transferred from an arena where their resolution and the enforcement of resolutions depends on the relative power of the parties as enhanced or constrained by nongovernmental normative systems to an arena where disputes are resolved by reference to governmental (legal) norms and resolutions are enforced by the power of the state. In practice the separation between the governmental and nongovernmental spheres is rarely complete. Legal norms may influence the way in which parties resolve their disputes even when there is no threat that the matter will be taken to law, and both the parties' resources (Galanter, 1974, 1976) and nongovernmental norms“ clearly affect the way disputes are resolved in the legal system.
Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the “Relative Autonomy” of the Law
Authors: Balbus Isaac D.
Published: June 2006

After a good deal of thought I have decided not to respond directly to Professor Trubek's exhaustive review of The Dialectics of Legal Repression, but will rather leave it to readers of my book to determine for themselves the adequacy of his description, analysis, and evaluation of the material contained therein. However, insofar as Professor Trubek also refers briefly in his essay to my “more recent,” and until now unpublished, work, it seems appropriate to present a sample of this work, especially since Trubek himself argues that it entails a “major refinement” which “allows Balbus to explain what remains unexplained in The Dialectics.” Indeed, in certain respects the following essay constitutes an autocritique of the theoretical analysis in my book, and a comparison of the two will thus permit the reader to assess indirectly the extent of my agreement with Trubek's critique. At the same time, what follows also constitutes an implicit and, at times explicit, critique of Trubek's own effort to elaborate and apply an alternative to my position, the effort he calls “critical social thought about law.”
Going to Court: Strategies of Dispute Management in an American Urban Neighborhood
Authors: Merry Sally Engle
Published: June 2006

An analysis of the strategies of disputing pursued by the residents of a polyethnic American urban neighborhood reveals that they frequently resort to courts to manage interpersonal and crime-related disputes. Because the legal machinery available to them rarely resolves these disputes, however, the court functions as a sanction rather than a dispute settlement forum. In the absence of effective alternative informal or formal modes of resolving disputes, disputants resort to violence, avoidance, and endurance, a pattern of tolerating ongoing conflict.
The Relevance of Policy Values for the Confirmation of Supreme Court Nominees
Authors: Songer Donald R.
Published: June 2006

The confirmation votes on the fourteen most controversial Supreme Court nominees of the twentieth century were analyzed. The data supported the conclusion that Senate opposition to Supreme Court nominees is due primarily to a predicted dissatisfaction with the policy-relevant voting of the nominee after confirmation. The policy position of senators supporting confirmation was found to be significantly different from the policy position of senators opposing confirmation even after controls were introduced for the political party and ethical standards position of senators.
Market Discrimination against the Poor and the Impact of Consumer Disclosure Laws: The Used Car Industry
Authors: McNeil Kenneth , Nevin John R. , Trubek David M. , Miller Richard E.
Published: June 2006

The poor pay more than the non-poor for many consumer products, and this disparity seems to be ignored by such consumer protection regulation as disclosure laws. Indeed, several lines of argument suggest that the poor will not benefit from disclosure regulation either because they lack the ability to use information effectively (“market irrationality”) or because they are restricted to particularly flawed markets and products (“separate markets/products”).

This paper examines income stratification in the used car markets in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. We found that the poor did pay more for used cars, got less redress for defects discovered after purchase, and were less satisfied and more likely to believe something was misrepresented. Differences in product quality did not account for these results because the patterns persisted even after the model, age, and price of the purchased vehicles were held constant. Further, no evidence was found for “market irrationality” among the poor. No income differences were seen in buyers' discovery of defects before or after purchase, and low-income buyers complained at higher rates, albeit with less success, than did higher-income buyers. Furthermore, the adoption of disclosure regulation in Wisconsin did not increase or decrease price discrimination against the poor. These findings point to the need for more research on the causes of price discrimination and more attention to the problems of the poor in the design and implementation of consumer protection regulations.
Testing Durkheim: Some Theoretical Considerations
Authors: Turkel Gerald
Published: June 2006

Empirical tests of Durkheim's legal theories can neither confirm nor refute their central hypotheses. Rather than serving to substantiate or refute theoretical propositions, empirical evidence is best conceptualized as providing for the specification and elaboration of a research program. In the case of Durkheim's legal theories, the programmatic effort is to use social science to help resolve the major social, moral, and legal tensions characteristic of modern society. In this light, Durkheim's legal theories are viewed as comparative and contextual, containing insights into the relationship between law and the social constitution of morality.
Taking Stock
Authors: Abel Richard L.
Published: June 2006

This collection, which brings together critical reviews of the literature on a variety of contemporary issues in law and social science, has its origins in two judgments about our field that may appear contradictory but in fact are complementary. On the one hand, the empirical data and generalizations produced during the last several decades seem to call for, and amply to deserve, compilation and summary of the kind often found in propositional inventories. But at the same time recent scholarship often seems stagnant, further documentation (or falsification) of a well-established (or generally discredited) hypothesis, one more entry in a sterile, and ultimately unresolvable, theoretical debate—a by-product of the demands of tenure-review committees rather than the expression of any real intellectual engagement. If this judgment is fair, reflective and critical reassessment of the field is essential to break the hold of existing preoccupations and to formulate new questions. These dual motives will be apparent throughout this volume. Here I will offer my view of the kind of reappraisal that is needed, explain how the topics and authors were selected, and suggest some of the ways in which the essays that follow contribute to the task.
Racial Bias in the Decision to Grant Parole
Authors: Carroll Leo , Mondrick Margaret E.
Published: June 2006

Research concerning racial discrimination within the criminal justice system has focused largely upon the police and the courts. There is reason to believe, however, that differential treatment may be more common in less visible proceedings. This research addresses that possibility through an examination of the cases of 243 prisoners who appeared before a parole board from October 1, 1970, through September 30, 1971. There is no evidence of direct racial discrimination. There is evidence, however, that the board differentiated between black and white prisoners in selecting and weighting information when deciding parole. Compared to white prisoners, black prisoners had an additional criterion to meet in order to be paroled—participation in institutional treatment programs. The imposition of this additional criterion indirectly resulted in racial inequities. Black parolees who were treatment participants served a significantly longer portion of their sentence than did white treatment participants. The few black prisoners who were paroled without participating in treatment served a shorter proportion of their sentence than other prisoners. These few black prisoners were older, more likely to be property offenders and had slightly more prior convictions than black treatment participants. These findings are interpreted as indicating a bias against racial militancy.
The Selectivity of Legal Sanctions: An Empirical Investigation of Shoplifting
Authors: Blankenburg Erhard
Published: June 2006

This study examines the factors that determine the probability that a very common form of deviant behavior, shoplifting, will be detected, reported, and sanctioned. Data obtained both from self-reported crime, and from experiments in which researchers actually shoplifted goods from supermarkets and department stores with the authorization of their executive officers but without the knowledge of store employees, indicate that enforcement of the norm is highly selective. Less than 10 percent of all shoplifting is detected, and customers appear unwilling to report even flagrant cases. Even with an announced policy of full reporting and prosecution, only 70 percent of the shoplifting detected is reported, and only 55 percent is sanctioned. Foreigners, adults, and blue-collar workers are disproportionately represented among those sanctioned.

These findings challenge the common assumption that norms backed by legal sanctions are highly effective. One reason may be that the division of labor between stores, which detect, and police and prosecutor, who sanction, completes the differentiation of moral and legal norms, subverting the effectiveness of both. The results also highlight the misleading nature of criminal statistics, which purport to measure crime but in fact describe the behavior of detecting and enforcing agencies.
Human Information Processing and Adjudication: Trial by Heuristics
Authors: Saks Michael J. , Kidd Robert F.
Published: June 2006

This article addresses the role of quantitative evidence and methods in trials. Major arguments against the introduction of explicit computation information are considered and contrasted with findings about the characteristics of the unaided human decision maker. Emphasis is given to behavioral decision theory and the heuristic biases it reveals. Consideration is given to the symbolic versus “truth-finding” functions of trials, mathematical models (especially linear) of decision making, advocacy tactics that follow from what has been learned about how humans process information, the diagnostic value of aggregate probabilities, the notion of particularistic proof, and the evaluation of witness credibility. We conclude that unaided human decision making embodies certain normal and lawful errors, and that the exclusion of mathematical guides to aid a fact finder, while avoiding some problems, exposes the fact-finding process to the heuristic biases of intuitive decision making.
Unrecognized Father of Sociology of Law: Leon Petrażycki
Authors: Podgórecki Adam
Published: June 2006

I. THE PERSON

Leon Petrażycki (1861-1931), a legal theorist and sociologist, came from the Polish gentry of the Witebsk area, a territory historically Polish, but then—and now—a part of Russia. After preliminary studies as a medical student, he turned to the study of law at the universities in Kiev, St. Petersburg, Heidelberg, Berlin, Paris, and London. He received a master's degree in Roman Law from the University of Kiev and a doctorate in Law from the University of St. Petersburg. In 1897 Petrażycki became a professor at the University of St. Petersburg; he was quickly promoted to the rank of full professor and subsequently appointed Dean of the Faculty of Law—the first, in Russia, to be democratically elected to that position. He became a Member of the Russian Parliament (DUMA) and later spent some time in prison as a result of his political activities. During his twenty years in St. Petersburg, Petrażycki published several books on such subjects as political economy, private international law, civil law, psychology, and matters dealing with the relation between law, morals, and the state. Many of these books (written in Russian) were controversial and stimulated much discussion and response in Russia. A brief bibliography is contained in Appendix A.
Judicial Authority and the Struggle for an Indonesian Rechtsstaat
Authors: Lev Daniel S.
Published: June 2006

The place of law in the state is largely the result of political struggle, which can be understood better by looking at social and political rather than cultural variables. Informed by Weberian models of legitimacy and political structure and by Marxist concepts of class conflict, the article analyzes efforts to establish an Indonesian “law state” in the context of middle-class assaults on patrimonial assumptions of political order. It concentrates primarily on issues that arose in the consideration of a new law on judicial organization and authority. Groups that favored fundamental political and legal change focused on the judiciary as a means of gaining access to and influence in the state and of imposing limits on the exercise of political power. They failed, but the struggle goes on, complicated by strains within the growing middle stratum of the population.
Plea Bargaining: A Critic's Rejoinder
Authors: Kipnis Kenneth
Published: June 2006

The paper is a reply to two defenders of a reformed system of plea bargaining: Thomas Church and Conrad Brunk. At the broadest level, it is argued that plea bargaining is in a twofold conflict with the constitutive purposes of the liberal-democratic idea of a criminal justice system: the practice is not conducive to the punishment of the guilty in accordance with their deserts and it violates basic liberties, among them the right against self-incrimination and the right to the lowest reasonable sentence. It is argued that the value of the jury trial is insufficiently appreciated in Church's analysis. Brunk is criticized for failing to distinguish between two critical responses to plea bargaining: that the agreement made by the defendant should not be honored by the courts and that public officials act wrongfully in coercing such pleas.
Judicial Specialization, Litigant Influence, and Substantive Policy: The Court of Customs and Patent Appeals
Authors: Baum Lawrence
Published: June 2006

Several courts of limited jurisdiction currently exist in the federal judicial system, and new specialized courts have been proposed. Opponents of some specialized courts have pointed to the potential policy implications of judicial specialization, and their arguments merit attention. In this article the effects of specialization on the influence of litigant groups over judicial decisions and on the substance of judicial policy are analyzed in general terms. These effects are then examined in greater depth through a case study of the U.S. Court of Customs and Patent Appeals. The findings are complex, but they indicate that specialization may have a significant impact on judicial behavior. This impact should be taken into account in decisions whether to create courts of limited jurisdiction.
Children's Images of the Supreme Court: A Preliminary Mapping
Authors: Caldeira Greg A.
Published: June 2006

Social scientists have offered numerous explanations for the support the public accords to the United States Supreme Court. Easton and Dennis have advanced the contention that such support is at least in part the product of youthful idealization of the Court, and this hypothesis has gained widespread, if tacit, acceptance. This paper argues that their conclusion is largely the consequence of a methodological artifact (the use of fixed-response survey instruments), and offers evidence that most children are not only unaware of the Supreme Court and its functions but demonstrate little or no positive affect toward that institution. If this is so, then why has the Easton-Dennis explanation persisted, despite its implausibility and lack of empirical grounding? One possibility is that the notion of a reservoir of trust in the Supreme Court is a useful rhetorical weapon for both judicial activists and those who advocate judicial restraint. But if public perceptions and evaluations of the Court are not strongly held, we must face the danger that those views will be susceptible to manipulation by people who do know and care about it—political, social, and economic elites.
Everyday Disputes and Mediation in the United States: A Reply to Professor Felstiner
Authors: Danzig Richard , Lowy Michael J.
Published: June 2006

In a recent article in these pages Professor W.L.F. Felstiner (1974) made a substantial contribution to the literature on dispute processing by analyzing the role of avoidance as a means of ending disputes, and by correlating the ubiquity of this technique with differing forms of societal organization. In brief, his insight—richly developed in the article—is that the tendency to walk away from contentious situations is greater in “technologically complex, rich societies” than in “technologically simple, poor societies.” This is because the organization of richer societies minimizes the importance and the intertwining (multiplexity) of family and other group ties and maximizes social, occupational and geographic mobility. In contrast, citizens of poorer societies are bound closely to the individuals in their communities and thus have a greater need and capacity for resolving—rather than walking away from—disputes with those individuals.
Women Police in Weimar: Professionalism, Politics, and Innovation in Police Organizations
Authors: Fairchild Erika S.
Published: June 2006

This article details the history and philosophy behind attempted major changes in police tradition and organization that were fostered by women between 1920 and 1931 in Germany. Women police, led by Josefine Erkens and influenced by their background as social workers, tried to develop a social-work–oriented policing. Erkens held successive leadership positions in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. With each new position she pioneered ways of thinking about the role of women in police work and about the relation between social work as a profession and policing as a profession. She became a controversial figure and was finally dismissed from her position in Hamburg. The case examined in this paper shows the influence on police of gender role uncertainty, interest group pressures, the political environment, and conflicting views of police professionalism. The article also discusses the difficulties involved in trying to integrate within one organization two disparate professional paradigms: that of law enforcement, with its emphasis on deterrence, and that of social work, with its emphasis on rehabilitation.
Assessing the Effects of Case Characteristics and Settlement Forum on Dispute Outcomes and Compliance
Authors: Vidmar Neil
Published: June 2006

McEwen and Maiman (1986) have disagreed with my claim that the case characteristic of admitted liability explains more variability in dispute outcome and compliance than whether the case was resolved through a mediation or adjudication forum. Those authors reanalyzed some of my data from an Ontario small claims court and concluded that forum type is the stronger variable. I take issue with them on a number of conceptual and methodological points. In my own reanalysis of the Ontario data I am able to demonstrate statistically that admitted liability is the stronger predictor of outcomes. I also discuss why this should be so and raise some questions about compliance. Whether we can generalize to McEwen and Maiman's data from Maine courts is a matter of speculation, but I am inclined to infer that we can. Our debate raises important issues in the assessment of dispute resolution.
The Ideology of Law: Advances and Problems in Recent Applications of the Concept of Ideology to the Analysis of Law
Authors: Hunt Alan
Published: June 2006

In this paper I note the growth of analyses of law that focus upon its ideological character and content, and I identify problems and difficulties manifest in the ideological analysis in recent critical and Marxist texts. The paper argues that work focusing upon the ideological character of law realizes significant advances over that produced by the more orthodox approaches within the sociology of law and jurisprudence employing normative analysis. It is possible to make ideological analysis more rigorous. The paper outlines the elements of a theory of and methodology for the ideological analysis of law.
Cooperation, Deterrence, and the Ecology of Regulatory Enforcement
Authors: Scholz John T.
Published: June 2006

An ecological model based on evolutionary game theory is developed to analyze the role of egoistic cooperation in regulatory enforcement. The model demonstrates that socially beneficial cooperation depends on 1) a combination of cooperative and deterrence routines in an enforcement strategy that is at once vengeful and forgiving, 2) firms concerned enough about future enforcement encounters to forgo short-term gains from evasion, and 3) institutional arrangements that provide suitable sanctions and cost tradeoffs for existing enforcement and evasion technologies in the particular enforcement arena. Factors limiting the advantage of cooperation are also reviewed, and other applications of the model are suggested.
“Who Signs the Complaint?” Relational Distance and the Juvenile Justice Process
Authors: Dannefer Dale
Published: June 2006

This paper investigates the role of “relational distance” between complainant and offender as a determinant of legal sanctions in juvenile status offender cases. After reviewing evidence suggesting that greater relational distance is associated with harsher sanctioning, I develop the case for an alternative “relational resource” hypothesis, which emphasizes that conflicts among proximate parties entail an intrinsic loss of resources for the accused. This hypothesis is supported by status offense data from four decision points in the juvenile justice system which show, with some variation across decision points, that youth who are the subject of parent-initiated complaints fare consistently worse than youth accused by the police. The available evidence suggests that this is not explained by the possibility that parental accusations only occur when behavior is especially serious. Analyses of temporary detention and court disposition data reveal higher-order interactions that suggest that the impact of the complainant's identity is partially contingent on the formality of agency procedures and on the family's circumstances.
Law and Strategy in the Divorce Lawyer's Office
Authors: Sarat Austin , Felstiner William L. F.
Published: June 2006

In the research from which this paper is derived, we have observed and tape-recorded approximately 115 lawyer-client conferences. Our observations were made in two sites, one in California and one in Massachusetts. In this paper we take an in-depth look at the nature of lawyer-client discourse by focusing on one conference. We explore three of the most important themes in that discourse. First is the discussion and characterization of the legal system and its major actors. Next is the exploration of the advantages and disadvantages of disposing of disputed issues through negotiation or trial. Finally, the third theme involves the “legal construction of the client,” where a lawyer and client discuss rules of relevance that govern the legal process as well as the aspects of the client's experience that are to be the subject of legal inquiry. The paper concludes by exploring the way each of these themes expresses or embodies prevailing legal ideologies and influences the way cases develop and are managed.
Perceptual Research on General Deterrence: A Critical Review
Authors: Williams Kirk R. , Hawkins Richard
Published: June 2006

Recent perceptual studies of general deterrence have been guided by an unnecessarily narrow conception of general deterrence, despite the methodological advances in this type of research. These studies, moreover, have failed to recognize the complexity of the perceptual processes that intervene between the threat or experience of legal sanctions and behavioral outcomes. Consequently, the conclusions drawn from the findings about the process of general deterrence are questionable. This paper critically reviews perceptual studies of general deterrence with a view toward expanding the scope of deterrence theory and stimulating research in new directions. Suggestions are made about the kinds of data and analyses needed to test such theory more adequately.
Organizing for Deterrence: Lessons from a Study of Child Support
Authors: Lempert Richard
Published: June 2006

This study reanalyzes data collected by David Chambers on the enforcement of child support orders in Michigan. It finds that organizational factors interact with sanction factors to determine levels of general deterrence. Where the agency charged with enforcing child support orders, the Friend of the Court, is proactive and jail is a relatively common punishment for those who persist in not paying, overall collection rates are markedly higher than where neither or only one of these factors exist. The study also examines special deterrence and finds a special deterrent effect apparently associated with the experience of being jailed for failing to pay support. In the course of the investigation a number of contingencies important to deterrence theory are identified, and a behavioral response to threat—the avoidance response—is defined.
The Structure of Discourse in Misdemeanor Plea Bargaining
Authors: Maynard Douglas W.
Published: June 2006

This paper examines transcriptions of tape-recorded plea bargaining sessions. It treats plea bargaining as a naturally occurring activity and seeks to discover formal decision-making patterns. In plea bargaining, participants have ways of exhibiting and responding to positions on how the case they are involved in should be handled. A decision is reached when the negotiating parties agree on a single position, and this is achieved by one of three different patterns or modes. Each pattern involves the presentation of (A) an opportunity for arriving at a mutually acceptable disposition and (B) the option of delaying determination of the disposition by continuance or trial. The ordered ways in which opportunities and options are related to each other constitute a discourse system for negotiation. This system exerts a “pressure” for the here-and-now resolution of cases, independent of negotiating parties' desires and inclinations. The focus on patterns of decision-making reveals a diversity of results and an interesting distribution of cases among the decision-making patterns.
Prisons as Self-Regulating Systems: A Comparison of Historical Patterns in California for Male and Female Offenders
Authors: Berk Richard A. , Messinger Sheldon L. , Rauma David , Berecochea John E.
Published: June 2006

Building on our earlier work testing the stability of punishment hypothesis, we here combine the general modeling strategy previously employed with more behaviorally grounded models of actors' expectations and preferences. Using these tools, we model the historical attempts by criminal justice actors in California to balance prison admissions and releases in an equilibrating manner. We find that there have been efforts to regulate the flow of individuals through prison and that, contrary to expectations, these processes are not very different for males and females.
Case Processing: Consumer Protection in an Attorney General's Office
Authors: Silbey Susan S.
Published: June 2006

This paper examines complaint processing in an attorney general's office of consumer protection. It describes how, in the implementation and routinization of a new statute, considerations external to the law or the individual case arise, transform, and begin to characterize law enforcement. The paper describes how the staff attempts to confine the office's work by creating statistical records of work done. These records are creations because the activities of the agency—investigation and resolution of consumer complaints—do not generate unambiguous criteria of completion. The office operates within practical criteria for determining when a case is finished. As the statistical records help to routinize the task of consumer protection, they become a source of bias, direction, and legitimation for law enforcement.
Images of Law in Everyday Life: The Lessons of School, Entertainment, and Spectator Sports
Authors: Macaulay Stewart
Published: June 2006

Some of us see law as largely marginal to American life (see, e.g., Macaulay, 1984), but other colleagues assert that law constitutes society. One position does not contradict the other because we are talking about different things. Cases, statutes, and enforcement agencies very seldom directly influence everyday life. At the same time, law is an important part of culture. Despite many debates (see, e.g., Hall, 1977; Harris, 1980; Ortner, 1984), legal culture affects everyday life in important ways. At the very least, it provides a vocabulary with which we rationalize our actions to others and ourselves. As Geertz (1983: 173, 232) insists, “law is not a bounded set of norms …, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real.” Law is “meaning … not machinery.” It is “a species of social imagination.” It “is constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them.”
Law, Politics, and Judicial Decision Making: Lower Federal Court Uses of Supreme Court Decisions
Authors: Johnson Charles A.
Published: June 2006

Lower federal courts are crucial to the interpretation and implementation of Supreme Court decisions. Research demonstrates considerable variation in their responses to these decisions. Explanations of these responses are not well developed, and few efforts test competing hypotheses. My research tests the hypotheses derived from two models of lower court behavior—a legal model and a political model. The analysis demonstrates that the legal model accounts for more variation in the use of Supreme Court decisions by lower federal courts.
Growth and Maturation in Psychology and Law
Authors: Diamond Shari Seidman
Published: June 2006

The growth of research in psychology and law during the last decade is easy to document. The Annual Review of Psychology has included two chapters on the subject, the first in 1976 and the second in 1982. In 1981 the American Psychological Association approved a new Division of Psychology and Law and selected that theme for the 1982 Master Lecture series at its convention. New journals (e.g., Law and Human Behavior) and collections of articles (e.g., Sales, 1981; Kerr and Bray, 1982; Konečni and Ebbeson, 1982) have reported on the burgeoning literature.
The Effectiveness of Increased Police Enforcement as a General Deterrent
Authors: Watson Roy E. L.
Published: June 2006

Social scientists have long been skeptical of the power of the threat of legal sanctions, as invoked by enacted laws, to control behavior. This skepticism has been supported by the failure of empirical studies, especially those based on official records of crimes and of the apprehension of offenders, to provide convincing evidence of the deterrent effect of legal penalties. The possibility that an experimental design might avoid the defects of other studies of deterrence has been suggested, and for this purpose, traffic law and its enforcement are especially salient. This paper reports on such a field experiment, which resulted in the conclusion that an increased threat of legal punishment, albeit a relatively small fine, reduced by one-half the number of customary offenders.
What is Procedural Justice?: Criteria Used by Citizens to Assess the Fairness of Legal Procedures
Authors: Tyler Tom R.
Published: June 2006

This paper examines procedural justice in the context of citizen experiences with the police and courts. It is based on interviews of 652 citizens with recent personal experiences involving those authorities. I will consider two issues: first, whether the justice of the procedures involved influences citizen satisfaction with outcomes and evaluations of legal authorities; and second, how citizens define “fair process” in such settings. The results replicate those of past studies, which found that procedural justice has a major influence on both satisfaction and evaluation. They further suggest that such procedural justice judgments are complex and multifaceted. Seven issues make independent contributions to citizen judgments about whether the legal authorities acted fairly: (1) the degree to which those authorities were motivated to be fair; (2) judgments of their honesty; (3) the degree to which the authorities followed ethical principles of conduct; (4) the extent to which opportunities for representation were provided; (5) the quality of the decisions made; (6) the opportunities for error correction; and (7) whether the authorities behaved in a biased fashion. I found that the meaning of procedural justice varied according to the nature of the situation, not the characteristics of the people involved.
Lay Expectations of the Civil Justice System
Authors: O'barr William M. , Conley John M.
Published: June 2006

In this paper we present results from a study of small claims litigants' expectations about the civil justice system. Interviews with plaintiffs at the time they file their cases reveal that many people come to court with profound misunderstandings about the authority of civil courts as well as the procedural and evidentiary burdens that the civil justice system imposes. These findings, based on the empirical investigation of litigants' beliefs about and understandings of civil justice, complement experimental studies of procedural justice conducted over the past two decades. We find that litigants are at least as concerned with issues of process as they are with the substantive questions that make up their cases. Yet litigants' preconceptions of procedure are frequently at variance with what the law requires and what will happen in the legal process. Such differences suggest that litigants' expectations and understandings deserve attention in the study of their attitudes toward the legal process.
Courts and Public Schools: Educational Litigation in Historical Perspective
Authors: Tyack David , Benavot Aaron
Published: June 2006

This study is an exploratory social history of litigation about public education. Using West digests as an index of appellate cases, it first examines the changing volume and character of litigation from the earliest recorded cases until 1981. It then relates trends in litigation to two broad phases of educational history: the system-building era, when courts helped to clarify the lines of authority in an ambiguously decentralized system; and the new functions of litigation in the twentieth century, when administrative progressives sought to use legislation to reshape schooling. It turns then to the relation between school law and social conflict over basic dividing lines of religion, race, and ethnicity and suggests that courts played a relatively small role in adjudicating such issues until recent times. Finally, it contrasts the recent history of litigation—by some called a “legal revolution”—when excluded groups sought to reshape schooling.
Equal Employment Opportunity and the Mobilization of Law
Authors: Burstein Paul , Monaghan Kathleen
Published: June 2006

During the 1960s and 1970s the American social movement for equal employment opportunity (EEO) succeeded in getting Congress and the courts to prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. We believe that the effectiveness of EEO laws depends not just upon their passage, however, but also upon their continuing successful mobilization. This is the first article to describe quantitatively the extent and outcomes of the mobilization of EEO laws at the appellate court level. It shows that mobilization is increasing; that the federal government and various interest groups are actively involved in the enforcement process; that much is at stake in many EEO cases; that alleged victims of discrimination win their court cases over half the time; and that reverse discrimination in EEO does not seem to be a serious problem.
Holistic Effects in Social Control Decision-Making
Authors: Emerson Robert M.
Published: June 2006

Most research on social control decision-making takes the individual case as the sole unit for the analysis of decision outcomes. Yet under a variety of organizational circumstances, social control agents process and respond to cases in relation to, or as part of, some larger, organizationally determined whole. This paper identifies three such larger units of cases found in social control decision-making—case sets, caseloads, and collections of cases grouped by the demands of establishing precedent and consistency—and suggests conditions which increase and decrease the effects of such holistic units on decisions made in particular cases.
“Extra” Judges in a Federal Appellate Court: The Ninth Circuit
Authors: Wasby Stephen L.
Published: June 2006

Much attention has been devoted recently to intercircuit doctrinal conflicts in the United States Courts of Appeals (Commission, 1975b: 30-32, 37-44). Less attention has been paid to the equally—if not more—serious problem of intracircuit doctrinal conflict, which causes difficulties for lawyers attempting to advise clients and for district judges trying to apply circuit law (Wasby, 1979). Observers have suggested that decreased frequency of communication among appellate judges leads to less consistency in their decisions. Where judicial interaction is infrequent, because of increased numbers of judges on a court or the judges' geographic dispersion, the “law of the circuit” tends toward disharmony (Commission, 1973: 19-20, and 1975b: 130; also Friendly, 1973: 45). The existence and extent of intracircuit inconsistency may thus be viewed as dependent variables, the number of judges and the judges' geographic dispersion, or both, as independent variables, and communication among judges as a key intervening variable.
Managing Ideologies: Harmony as Ideology in Amish and Japanese Societies
Authors: Kidder Robert L. , Hostetler John A.
Published: June 2006

Informal methods for dealing with conflict within both Japanese and Amish society have been interpreted as being the natural result of, and an important source of support for, traditional cultures. On closer examination we find similar patterns of intentional manipulation of informalist ideology as elements of strategy in the midst of conflict. In both cases, we find informalist ideology being selectively invoked to provide legitimacy to one or more partisan sides in ways which disguise such maneuvers from the majority of their constituent populations. Successful promotion of this ideology sustains the notion, both at the popular level and heretofore among scholars of dispute processing, that nonlaw methods for dealing with conflict have some special ingredient which makes them functionally superior to legalistic methods. If the Japanese and the Amish are in any way representative of a more general case, it apparently takes hard work to preserve anti-legal methods of dispute management.
Making Law at The Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and The Construction of Community in a New England Town
Authors: Yngvesson Barbara
Published: June 2006

This paper analyzes the politics of disputing in complaint hearings held by the court clerk in a district criminal court in Massachusetts. By examining struggles over the meaning of local conflicts, it suggests the implications of detailed studies of dispute processing for our understanding of how systems of legal and social meanings are constituted and reproduced. The paper argues that the work of the court, the roles played by court officials, and the meaning of law and of community at particular moments in time are shaped in the interaction of court staff with local citizens. At the same time, it argues that these interactions are constrained by culturally and historically embedded relations of class, ethnicity, and power. Thus the paper suggests how the practice of complaint hearings both reproduces and transforms systemic inequalities and oppositions, and points to the importance of interactive rather than dichotomizing approaches for studying the interconnection and interpenetration of law with society.