The wrongful death statutes enacted in most states during the mid-nineteenth century have long represented a classic moment in the narrative of American legal history. Historians have not observed, however, that American wrongful death statutes amended the English act on which they were modeled to introduce a gender asymmetry peculiar to the United States. Led by New York, most American jurisdictions limited wrongful death actions to “the widow and next of kin” of the decedent, categories that did not include husbands of deceased wives. Thus, a wife could bring a wrongful death action for the death of her husband, but a husband could not bring a wrongful death action on his own behalf for the death of his wife.

The wrongful death statutes represent a heretofore unrecognized conjuncture of the beginnings of the modem law of torts with the nineteenth-century legal reconstruction of the family. The statutes mowed accident litigation away from an eighteenth-century model of masters suing for loss of the services of a servant, slave, wife, or child, toward the now more familiar model of suits for loss of wages and support. Moreover, the gender asymmetry of the statutes embodied and reproduced a new nineteenth-century conception of the family in which men worked as free laborers and women were confined to relatively narrow domestic roles, removed from the market and dependent for their support on the wages of their husbands. Indeed, the statutes anticipated by over half a century the American welfare state's two-track approach to support for wage-earning men and dependent women.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring the entry into the United States of all Chinese laborers. This article explores the dilemmas and contradictions associated with the enforcement of this legislation, focusing on the early years during which the most glaring dilemmas were exposed. Drawing from congressional documents, as well as unpublished letters, memoranda, and circulars of immigration officials, I argue that the difficulties encountered by enforcement personnel, and the sometimes chaotic and inconsistent nature of enforcement, were related to paradoxes associated with prevailing assumptions about the nature of race, class, and identity more generally. I then document how these same paradoxes, and the techniques employed by inspectors to deal with them, ironically facilitated aspiring immigrants'resistance to the full force of the law. This case study, with its emphasis on the contradictions implicit in the law and the dialectical quality of enforcement and resistance, may contribute to OUR understanding of the law's fundamental indeterminacy. Finally, I suggest that the focus on the everyday dilemmas faced by frontline officials may tell us more about the ordinary life of the law and its indeterminacy than the heavily scrutinized landmark cases that constitute much of the literature.

This paper tests the effects of minority partner representation on minority associate representation in a sample of 97 law firms from 1980 to 1990. We perform separate analyses for women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, and we consider both within-group and cross-group effects. We find that minority partner representation has a positive effect on minority associate representation, which is statistically significant in the case of women and Asian Americans. Our findings are consistent with lawyers' own accounts, which emphasize the impact of partner composition on the distribution of rewards within law firms. We also show how our findings clarify previous studies about the effects of minority representation on the distribution of organizational rewards, focusing particularly on Kanter's work and subsequent related research.

A key problem in trying to manage diverse societies is finding social policies that will be acceptable to all individuals and groups. Studies suggest that this problem may not be as intractable as is often believed, since people's acceptance of policies is shaped to an important degree by the fairness of the procedures used by authorities to make policy. When policies are fairly made, they gain widespread support, even among those who may feel that the consequences of the policy for them or their group are undesirable or even unfair. These findings support an optimistic view of the ability of authorities to manage diverse societies. On the other hand, research suggests that the ability of procedural justice to bridge differences among individuals and groups may not be equally strong under all conditions. People's willingness to accept policies is more influenced by procedural justice judgments when they identify with the society that the authorities represent and view them as representing a group of which they are members. They are less influenced by procedural justice judgments when they identify more strongly with subgroups than with society and/or view the authorities as representatives of a group to which they do not belong.

A society which penalizes some children because they are not white, others because they are not male, indoctrinating in them a sense of worthlessness, can still lay the blame for the waste of its young on the bad mothers who have somehow failed to be superhuman, who have somehow failed to rear, in a callous and ruthless social order, welladjusted obedient, achieving, nonalienated children.

The new model for economic and political renovation mandates the entrenchment, beyond the reach of majoritarian control, of rules for the free movement of transnational capital. This “new constitutionalism” removes key aspects of economic life from the influence of domestic politics within nation states. A manifestation of this new orthodoxy is the network of bilateral investment treaties designed to ensure foreign investors security from “discrimination” and “expropriation,” and conferring standing on investors to sue in the event that their investment interests are impaired. This paper examines the agency of the state in promoting this self-binding regime of investment rules and its potential impact on domestic constitutional regimes. Of particular concern here are constitutional arrangements that protect property, such as that recently enacted in the Republic of South Africa, that deviate from the norms expressed in the transnational investment-rules regime.

The relationship of law to antagonisms and contradictions within state socialism is explored from a Weberian and a Marxian perspective. Examining legislation, court decision making, legal control of economic behavior, and law enforcement reveals contradictions between (I) a radical participatory ideology versus muted or extinct civil society; (2) the ideology of comprehensive planning versus the impotence of law; (3) strategies aiming at total control of public life versus the emergence of a niche society outside the reach of the state; (4) regulatory norms versus the functional necessity of norm-breaking behavior; (5) reliance on a revolutionary sense of justice versus the cultivation of “doublethought”; (6) a program of total control of economic behavior versus the emergence of deviant, even criminal, forms of organization to fulfill functionally necessary but ideologically unapproved economic tasks; and finally, (7) two distinct practices of law, responsive or postliberal versus repressive. Yet, contradictions typically did not lead through conflict to subsequent reform during the state socialist era, as conflicts were repressed. When reforms were attempted, they furthered conflict and system breakdown.

Using a mixture of court docket data and case files, we construct a data set of business litigation in Rhode Island Superior Court during 1987 and 1988. Business litigation is defined as a suit involving an economic firm as both a plaintiff and a defendant. The empirical analysis complements recent scholarship providing answers to descriptive questions about the frequency, nature of, parties to, and intensity of the business litigation docket. Using Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, indicators of industry participation in litigation are developed, and positive analysis undertaken to explain variation across industries. Several hypothesis are developed and tested using quantitative analysis. We conclude that contextual economic conditions favoring the creation of long-term business relationships help prevent litigation between firms.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 make universities liable for sexual harassment that occurs within both the employment and academic contexts. This article examines how universities implement and enforce the mandates of both Title VII and Title IX through exploratory research about sexual harassment complaint procedures at a public university system on the West Coast. In-depth interviews with personnel at each campus shed light on problems with inserting a complaint resolution process into an institution that simultaneously strives to eliminate sexual harassment, while wanting to protect itself from liability. This inherent conflict of goals is reflected in the differing roles of the Title IX office and the Women's Resource Center, in creation of a user friendly policy, and in the two branches of dispute resolution.

Truth is a thing of this world: It is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.

—Michel Foucault 1977

Students of the intersection between monetary transfers and intimate social relations face a choice among three ways of analyzing that relationship: as hostile worlds whose contact contaminates one or the other; as nothing but market transactions, cultural constructions, or coercion; or as differentiated ties, each marked by a distinctive set of monetary transfers. A review of payment practices, legal disputes, and recent legal theory illustrates the weakness of the first two views and the desirability of further pursuing the third alternative.

Drawing upon an analysis of the political vectors behind constitutional reform in Israel (1992), Canada (1982) New Zealand (1990), and South Africa (1993), the article suggests that the trend toward constitutionalization in culturally divided polities has not been adequately delineated by extant theories of constitutional transformation. An examination of the political origins of these four constitutional revolutions suggests that judicial empowerment is in many cases the consequence of a conscious strategy undertaken by threatened political and economic elites seeking to preserve their hegemony vis-a-vis the growing influence of “peripheral” groups in crucial majoritarian policymaking arenas. In response to perceived threats by peripheral groups, elites who possess disproportionate access to and influence upon the legal arena often initiate a constitutional entrenchment of rights in order to insulate policymaking from popular political pressure. Power is transferred from majoritarian decision-making arenas to national high courts, where they assume their policy preferences will find greater support. This process of conscious judicial empowerment is likely to occur (a) when the judiciary's public reputation for political impartiality and rectitude is relatively high and (b) when the courts are likely to rule, by and large, in accordance with the cultural propensities and policy preferences of the traditionally hegemonic elites.

The outrageous history of German judges during the Third Reich should not so structure historical research as to distract historians from examining their role in the nineteenth century. Prussian judges played an important role in electoral politics by serving as parliamentary deputies between 1849 and 1913. This essay poses and answers two questions: What was the political, legal, and social setting that led to judges sewing in parliament? And, why did their number decline after 1877? Theoretical discourses of separation of powers, construction of a Hegelian “general estate,” and independence of the judiciary converged with administrative-legal-constitutional developments in Prussia begun under the absolutism of the eighteenth century and professional and personal interests of judges to bring them into parliament, often as members of the liberal opposition. But success in the liberal project of building a national state, including legal reform, professionalization, and the advent of mass politics, reduced the need and attraction for judges in parliament, resulting in a decline after the 1860s.

This paper reports the results of a 1997–98 survey designed to explore the careers of the University of Michigan Law School's minority graduates from the classes of 1970 through 1996, and of a random sample of Michigan Law School's white alumni who graduated during the same years. It is to date the most detailed quantitative exploration of how minority students fare after they graduate from law school and enter law practice or related careers. The results reveal that almost all of Michigan Law School's minority graduates pass a bar exam and go on to have careers that appear successful by conventional measures. In particular, the survey indicates that minority graduates (defined so as to include graduates with African American, Latino, and Native American backgrounds) are no less successful than white graduates, whether success is measured by the log of current income, self-reported satisfaction, or an index of service contributions. Also, although an admissions index that combines LSAT scores and undergraduate grade-point average is a significant predictor of law school grades, it does not predict career success on any of our three outcome measures. Michigan is a highly selective law school; our results may not generalize to people who have graduated from other law schools.

When death row inmates elect to waive appeals and proceed directly to execution a series of problematic legal and ethical questions are raised. This article examines the ethics of volunteering from the perspective of death row inmates'defense attorneys. Studying attorneys is important for two reasons: since they are charged with protecting their clients' interests they must resolve the difficult question of whether death is ever in someone's best interest; and perhaps more important, most death row defense attorneys are themselves against the death penalty and must thus negotiate between their clients' desire for execution and their own personal value systems. Interviews were conducted with 20 attorneys who have participated in representing would-be volunteers. Qualitative analysis suggests that most are faced with profound ethical dilemmas, both professional and personal, when a client elects to waive appeals. This article explores how attorneys interpret, experience, and resolve those dilemmas.

This article analyzes the relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior. The efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions fry incorporating their preferences into their models for evaluating plans. But the terms under which people could express their values and interests were strictly controlled in ways that some felt misrepresented their concerns. How we conceive of rationality has important implications for how and which people are included in bureaucratic decision making.