During the twenty years since the founding of the Law and Society Association, a distinctive “law and society” discourse has emerged and been institutionalized in a multidisciplinary scholarly community, which has been instrumental in producing a tremendous increase in systematic knowledge about the law in action. The growth of law and society research has accompanied other changes in the distribution of information about the legal process, including a new legal journalism and greater media coverage that make the law in action more visible to a wider audience. Current distress of legal elites about the hypertrophy of legal institutions is viewed as a reaction to the increased currency of information that discredits the received picture of the legal world. The coincidence of structural changes in law with changes in the social institutions of knowledge about law creates the possibility of a more responsive and inquiring legal process.

This article examines the impact of court-ordered structural reforms on a Texas penitentiary. The staff's prisoner control structure is analyzed before, during, and after the reform measures decreed in the complex and sweeping prison reform case Ruiz v. Estelle (1980). Participant observation and inmate disciplinary report data are utilized to examine how legal intervention affected the prison community. Results show that after the court order was inaugurated, inmate-inmate and inmate-guard violence escalated to new plateaus. The final section compares several aspects of the old and new prisoner control structures and discusses the implications of court reforms for prisoner control.

This paper examines the cases of 1017 homicide defendants in Florida. Two main data sources are used: the police department's classification of the case, as found in the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports, and the prosecutor's classification, as determined by court records. Each data set characterizes the homicide as involving felonious circumstances, possible felonious circumstances, or nonfelonious circumstances. Attention is focused on cases that differ in their police and prosecutorial classifications. Results indicate that differences in these classifications are related to defendant's and victim's race, with blacks accused of killing whites the most likely to be “upgraded” and the least likely to be “downgraded.” The process of upgrading is then shown to significantly increase the likelihood of the imposition of a death sentence in cases with white victims where no plea bargain is offered.

This paper takes as an example of Anglo-American legal ideology the work of legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart, analyzing it in light of current linguistic theories. Linguists have proposed that ideological reflection can be affected in particular ways by the structure of the language used to convey it. We find that Hart's theory, with its emphasis on decontextualized rules and prerequisite conditions, fits the linguistic predictions. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the effect of language structure on cultural and/or legal ideologies is, however, socially and culturally circumscribed.

This article examines litigant narratives in small claims courts from two perspectives: the degree to which relaxed procedures and evidentiary constraints provide greater satisfaction to litigants than more formal courts, and the problems litigants encounter in providing legally adequate accounts without the assistance of attorneys. Data for this study are 55 trials in two states (North Carolina and Colorado). The findings show that narratives in small claims court bear many resemblances to everyday talk about trouble, provide litigants significant opportunities to tell their stories in court, but frequently fail to include critical components of legally adequate claims.