The development of Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime (1990; see also Hirschi & Gottfredson 1987, 2000) has provoked lively debate about the merits of the theory as applied to organizational crime (Steffensmeier 1989; Reed & Yeager 1996; Herbert et al. 1998). While the debate is provocative, the empirical evidence brought to bear is an insufficient test of competing theoretical claims. Using data drawn from a factorial survey administered to a group of corporate managers and managers-in-training, we subject Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory of crime and an integrated organizational theory to a theoretical competition. The results show that corporate offending propensity and behavioral indicators of low self-control are unrelated, a result inconsistent with the general theory. Instead, variables consistent with an integrated materialistic and cultural organizational theory predict managers' offending intentions. For instance, offending is inhibited when a firm has a working compliance program and when managers perceive the illegal act as highly immoral. Conversely, managers are more apt to offend when ordered to do so by a supervisor, or to gain financial or market position vis-à-vis competitors. The implications for general and organizational theories of corporate offending are discussed.

This article investigates how the consciousness of ordinary citizens enlisted as jurors in death penalty trials is racialized. The study draws on post-trial interviews with some 66 white and black jurors who served on 24 capital trials in which either a white or black defendant received the death sentence. Findings among white jurors reveal a hegemonic tale of racial inferiority. However, other characteristics such as social class or relevant biographical experiences help explain how jurors' stories are racialized. More specifically, racial inferiority is articulated in four congruous narratives: “individual responsibility,” “the tragedy of the ‘black’ group,” “the bad kid and the caring family,” and “the threatening outsider.” Furthermore, black jurors' stories are influenced by their background experiences as well. More-educated black jurors employ a sympathetic discourse toward the “culturally distant whites.” On the other hand, working-class blacks that have had negative experiences with whites in public are found to employ a narrative of “resisting white racism.” Understanding the subtle influences of legal agents' multiple identities in the remaking of racial hegemony has broader implications for a revised constitutive perspective of law—what I call a “theory of legal narrativity.”

Despite the criminalization of abuses inflicted upon women, laws are still considered major sources of women's oppression. This article discusses how Palestinian society and its criminal justice system, during a politically formative period of state building, relates to “femicide.” Femicide in this study pertains to the murder of girls or women for allegedly committing “crimes of family honor.” Official statistics, Cassation Court rulings, and six documented cases were analyzed in depth to determine the role played by the penal code, the legal system, and the external sociocultural context in exonerating the perpetrator of femicide and placing the victim on trial. The data reflect a silent masculine conspiracy that empowers sexist and gender-biased legal policies. The article concludes by challenging Palestinian legislators to fight legal discrimination against women. It argues that state-building periods can be a “window of hope,” offering societies such as Palestine's the unique opportunity to reexamine and reconstruct their laws from a gender-sensitive position.

This paper examines the role of the audience in the process that transformed executions from public spectacles to hidden rituals, and makes visible the ambiguities and uncertainties that accompanied the transportation of capital punishment from its monarchical origins to a modern democratic setting. From this vantage point, the evolving responses to concerns associated with the execution audience share many characteristics with efforts to control other problematic audiences. And yet, the particular forms that audience manipulation in the context of executions took cannot be fully understood without considering the occasion that brought the audience into being. Viewed as a mirror held up to the execution, the audience, whether conceptualized as a rowdy crowd or a solemn group of witnesses, emerges as a constitutive element of the execution and, in this sense, carries the potential to grant, or deny, legitimacy to the event and, by extension, capital punishment itself.

While many of the decisions of federal district court judges involve the routine application of settled legal rules, a significant minority of their decisions present the judges with the opportunity to engage in judicial policy making. A considerable body of literature suggests that when faced with policy-making opportunities, the policy preferences of the judges exert a significant impact on the nature of those decisions. The present study explores the question of whose preferences are manifested in the policy-relevant decisions of the district court judges. In particular, we seek to determine the relative impact of the preferences of the major elites involved in the selection of federal district judges: the appointing president, home state senators of the president's party, and home state elites outside the Senate who are consulted when a president makes an appointment from a state whose Senate delegation is in the hands of the opposition party.

The analysis is based on all published decisions of the district courts in civil liberties, economic and labor, and criminal procedure cases decided between 1961 and 1995. We find that contrary to the expectations derived from the existing literature on district judge appointments, the political preferences of the appointing presidents are most closely related to the policy relevant decisions of the judges.