Christopher Columbus Langdell (whose career ended a century ago) achieved fame by devising the case method to turn law into a laboratory science divorced from politics and to make his course so rigorous that it would attract able students seeking to test and prove themselves with the severest academic challenge. The method was adapted by many law teachers who were unpersuaded by the idea of law as apolitical science. These included Langdell's colleagues, James Bradley Thayer and John Chipman Gray, who shared Holmes's disdain for the theory. The method survived and flourished despite its theoretical weakness because it worked in practice. No mere rite of passage, it developed numerous traits and skills useful to lawyers, it revealed a true picture of the political and atomized nature of American law, and it nurtured many of the civic virtues that American law teachers have sought to nurture since the time of George Wythe.

In Nevada, individuals me excluded from entering licensed casinos when their names have been listed by state regulatory bodies in what is popularly known as the Black Book. As a state regulatory procedure, Nevada's Black Book is officially aimed at excluding organized crime figures from the gaming industry. Beyond its manifest function, however, we believe that the drama of entering persons' names into the Black Book symbolically affirms the legitimacy of gaming and the efficacy of its regulatory body against perceived threats to the industry. Application of the procedure solely to the southern part of the state—Las Vegas— and chiefly to Italians reflects the group interests, culture conflicts, and stereotypes that underlie regulation of gaming. Central issues explored are the relationships of perceived threats to the origin and implementation of the Black Book; the perceptions of threat to the industry as emanating from those most alien to established groups; the sharp distinctions between the ethnic origins of the regulators and of those selected for inclusion in the Book; and the dramatization of the disreputability of those whose names are entered.

This issue went to press almost exactly four years after the death of Charles Gillespie, in whose honor I wish to dedicate the lustration symposium. A political scientist at the University of Wisconsin with a broad range of comparative interests, Charlie's major work chronicled the reemergence of democracy in Uruguay. He would doubtless have been a contributor to this issue were he still alive, and there were many times during the course of working on it when I wished I could have asked for his advice. In addition to his passion for democracy, I remember Charlie for his learning and his humor, both of which he wore with an elegant English grace. Throughout his long illness, he never lost his appreciation for the silly; his life was proof that stoicism and courage need not be cold virtues, and the world is a much poorer place in his absence.

This article, by framing criminology and criminal law together, suggests that in the early years of the South African state both bodies of discourse served to evade reality and to construct a sense of self and other as a part of the development of the administration of South African criminal law. It considers the derivation of South African criminology from contemporary metropolitan formulations. South African legal doctrine and practice likewise depended on extra-South African sources. These imported discourses provided lenses through which a descriptive confrontation with the realities of the processes of criminalization, and the administration of criminal justice could be avoided precisely by hose “expert” in these fields. Instead, science and law, far from being pragmatic disciplines, provided the means by which to fantasize about the nature of white justice and black criminality.

The policy of lustration is set in the context of responses to abuses of power by previous regimes. Using examples from three recent forms of social reconstruction (in Latin America, the former communist states, and South Africa), the author reviews the “justice in transition” debate. How do societies going through democratization confront the human rights violations committed by the previous regime? Five aspects of this debate are reviewed: (1) truth: establishing and confronting the knowledge of what happened in the past; (2) justice: making offenders accountable for their past violations through three possible methods: punishment through the criminal law, compensation and restitution, and mass disqualification such as lustration; (3) impunity: giving amnesty to previous offenders; (4) expiation; and (5) reconciliation and reconstruction. A concluding discussion raises the implications of the subject for the study of time and social control.

Israel has since 1967 administered the West Bank and Gaza Strip through highly legalistic and strongly repressive military governments. Has advocacy in Israeli courts on behalf of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza Ship has legitimated, and thus helped to perpetuate, ongoing Israeli military occupation of those regions? By examining legitimation in lawyering under lsraeli occupation, insight can be gained into the factors and their relative weights that lawyers facing harsh or repressive regimes must consider in balancing the costs and benefits of litigation to serve a social or political opposition movement. The author concludes that the benefits outweigh the legitimating effects of lawyers' work and that, on balance, Palestinians' election to seek representation in Israeli courts, and lawyers' choice to assist them, has been justified.

How did the American legal elite come to reject the husband's privilege to rape his wife. What is the significance of that rejection. This essay traces theories justifying the marital rape exemption from the 17th century, focusing on the period following World War II. The history illustrates how the postwar legal elite's limited progressivism created inconsistent arguments that left the exemption open for attack, an attack that came from within the 1970s feminist movement. Radical feminist rhetoric about sexuality, rape, and marriage pulled away the last layer of theoretical support for the exemption and denounced the sex right it left exposed underneath. Connections in the 1970s, both literal and conceptual, between radical feminists and the legal elite allowed the feminist movement to discredit the exemption within that elite. To interpret the significance of that rejection, I consider how legal language affects people's senses of self. I argue that legal words like “rape,” “marriage,” and “husband” validate and inform people's, specifically husbands', identities in marriage. By changing the meanings of those legal words, legal reform can eventually change human behavior.

This mticle examines whether anti-apartheid lawyering might have legitimized the South Afncan legal system by asking what black South Ahcans actually thought of that system. Perhaps surprisingly, blrcks, and in particular African, appear to have accorded the legal system a measure of legitimacy despite the oppression they often suffered at its hands. Three paradigms of African opinion are offered to help us understand the complex African response to the legal system: the conservatives, forbearing, mutely concerned with such issues as order and security, and perhaps disposed to be deferential to institutions of white authority; the speakers, fueled by faith in the truth or power of their speech, and welcoming the opportunity to be heard that courts could povide; and the activists, adamantly detennined to bnng down apartheid, and judgrng institutions and people by their conhibution to that goal. For men and women thinking in these ways, anti-apartheid lawyering probably did contribute to legitimizing the legal system and that system's ideals. But this partial legitimation of the legal system is, in the end, no came for regret; instead, it may have helped the new South Africa begin building a nation governed by law.

The author looks at one component of transitions to democracy: the strategies successor elites develop to deal with injustices committed by the previous, authoritarian regime. He compares post-transition justice in Belgium, France, and The Netherlands after World War II and in Eastem Europe after the fall of communism. He discusses several factors that influence policy choices. Among the most influenrial are the legacy of the past regime, the internutwnal legal context at the time of the passage to democracy, and the mode of transition and its ensuing impact on the balance of power between the old and the new order.

Throughout the world, judges are often asked to implement the repressive measures of authoritarian rulers. Which conception of legal interpretation and judicial role, if any, make judges more likely to resist such pressures? That question, central to Anglo-American jurisprudence since the Hart-Fuller debate, is addressed by examining recent military rule in Argentina and Brazil. In Argentina, judges were sympathetic to military rule and so criticized its “excesses” in the jurisprudential terms favored by the juntas: positivism and legal realism. Brazilian judges, by contrast, were largely unsympathetic to military rule, and so couched their criticism in terms of natural law, in order to raise larger questions and reach a broader public. Empirical study of the cases and conceptual analysis of existing theories both reveal that no view of legal interpretation inherently disposes its adherents to either accept or repudiate repressive law. Contingent political circumstances—the rulers' favored form of legal rhetoric, and the degree to which judges accept the need for a period of extra-constitutional rule—determine which legal theory fosters most resistance. But since most authoritarian rulers nominally affirm their constitutional predecessors' positive law and are often unwilling to codify publicly their most repressive policies, strict literalism usually offers the most congenial idiom for judicial resistance to such regimes.

In recent years, Latin American countries have sought to come to terms with prior periods of widespread human rights violations, relying increasingly on investigatory commissions. Investigatory efforts have been undertaken by democratically elected governments that replaced military dictatorships, by UN-sponsored commissions as part of a UN-mediated peace process, and by national human rights commissioners. This article examines truth commissions in Chile and El Salvador, an investigatory effort in Honduras, and a proposed commission in Guatemala. It compares the achievements and limitations of these commissions within the political constraints and institutional reality of each country, focusing on four major goals: the effort to create an authoritative account of the past; vindication of victims; recommendations for legislative, structural, or other changes to avoid repetition of past abuses; and establishing accountability or the identity of perpetrators.

Litigation has not been a significant strategy in Taiwan for challenging injustice due to the use of the Civil Law tradition as a model for the Republic of China legal system and the diminished autonomy of the ROC legal profession and legal system under martial law and authoritarian rule. Individual lawyers, however, were among the leading proponents of reform during Taiwan's recent transition to democratic rule. Furthermore, one of the significant liberalizing reforms ushered in by the democratic transition has been the reform of the ROC legal profession. We examine the contribution of some lawyers to democratization and consider what role the reconstituted ROC legal profession may play in the political economy of Taiwan in the future.

This article focuses on discourses conducted in Central/East European countries, and Poland in particular, with respect to the issue of participation of former secret agents in the new power structures. It exposes the reader to the range, style, content, and variety of lustration discourses. It explores their relevance for the ongoing power struggle, paying special attention to their focus on and contribution to the processes of construction and control of truth about the past.

Given that the procedural and legal-institutional issues occupy a marginal place in the debate, it is inferred that the main sources of discord are more ideological and political than legal. The two main strains within the global lustration discourse are identified as: (1) dystopian discourses that paint a frightful picture of a lustrated society and imply that the upheaval of lustration would ruin the chance for democratic evolution, and (2) affirmative discourses that assert the need for lustration and portray the refusal to implement it as a barrier to successful transition to democracy. The article elaborates on assumptions and beliefs, which tend to link the dystopian opposition to lustration with the left-wing political affiliation or self-identification and the affirmative discourse with the right-wing orientation.