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Compliance with Legal Regulations: Observation of Stop Sign Behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Johannes Feest
Johannes Feest*
Affiliation:
Center for Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley
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There is an age-old controversy over the relative importance and feasibility of formal and informal controls of human behavior. One body of theory, most notably the Sumner tradition, has held that control by formal laws is unimportant and dependent compared to controls by other means: “Acts of legislation come out of the mores. … Things which have been in the mores are put under police regulation and later under positive law. … The regulations must conform to the mores, so that the public will not think them too lax or too strict.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , May 1968 , pp. 447 - 461
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 by the Law and Society Association.

References

1. W. G. Sumner, Folkways 55 (1906).

2. G. Myrdal, An American Dilemma 1031ff., 1048ff. (1964).

3. E. Lemert, Social Structure, Social Control, and Deviation, in Anomie and Deviant Behavior 88ff. (M. B. Clinard ed. 1964). See also The Folkways and Social Control, 7 Am. Sociological Rev. 394-99 (1942).

4. Recently, interesting attempts have been made by so-called legal “impact studies” along quasi-experimental lines. These studies involve the comparison between actual behavior patterns in jurisdictions having a certain law, and the behavior patterns which would have existed in those same jurisdictions, had the law in question never been enacted. The main flaw in the ingenious research designs developed is, that they rely mainly on official statistics. See R. Lempert, Strategies of Research Design in the Legal Impact Study, 1 L. & Soc'y Rev. 111ff. (Nov. 1966).

5. H. L. Ross, Traffic Law Violation: A Folk Crime, 8 Social Problems 232 (1961).

6. For details on the collection of data see Appendix.

7. Department of Motor Vehicles (ed.), 1966, at 54. Section 22450 reads:

“The driver of any vehicle upon approaching any entrance of a highway or intersection, or railroad grade crossing signposted with a stop sign provided in this code, except as otherwise permitted or denoted in this code, shall stop:

  1. (a)

    (a) At a limit line, if marked, otherwise before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection or, if not, then before entering the highway or intersection.“

Comparable regulations are assumed to exist in other states and thus, they are likely to be familiar to out-of-state drivers.

8. Another indicator, but again only an indicator, would be a statement of the actor as to whether he knew the norm and/or conformed voluntarily.

9. F. H. Allport, The J-Curve Hypothesis of Conforming Behavior, 5 J. Soc. Psych. 141-83 (1934). Quoted after the abridged version in Readings in Social Psychology, 55-67 (Newcomb et al., eds. 1947).

10. G. A. Lundbert, et al.. Sociology 344 (1958).

11. F. H. Allport, supra note 9, at 57.

12. G. Myrdal, supra note 2, at 973.

13. See H. L. Ross, supra note 5, at 233.

14. Out of a total of 22,158 moving violations in Berkeley, which resulted in citations during 1966, only 617 were stop sign violations.

15. Some such measures for traffic law enforcement have been devised by John A. Gardiner. As to the impact of enforcement, however, he claims that “while few empirical studies have been made on this point, there is some evidence that police enforcement rates have no influence whatsoever on the rate of traffic violations …” in Police Enforcement of Traffic Laws: A Comparative Analysis, Sept. 1966, at 17 (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New York).

16. Traffic Institute of Northwestern University, Required Stops (Traffic Law Enforcement Series, Pub. No. 2541, 1958).

17. Id. at 5.

18. Id. at 10.