This essay presents three accounts or narratives of globalization. Each narrative describes the triumph of a central character or institution (science, markets, law) against its challenges or enemies (ignorance, regulated or planned economies, human caprice and unreason). The stories convey moral tales about what justice might look like and how social relations might be justly organized and governed. I argue that under the dominant accounts of globalization, the dynamics of power are obscured so that social relations seem to be produced by invisible or natural forces. When the operation of power is masked, I argue, justice, and efforts to confine and regulate power, is made less probable. Law and society scholarship can contribute to a critique of globalization by continuing to identify the ways in which law and power are mutually implicated and embedded in social relations. Rather than describe current forms of international social exchange as globalization, a seemingly neutral terms, the essay urges scholars to identify the role of power by naming global social exchanges as “postmodern colonialism.”

This study examines why the public supports the punishment of rule breakers. It does so within the context of a recently enacted California initiative mandating life in prison for repeat felons (the “three strikes” law). Antecedents of three aspects of people's reactions to rule breakers are explored: (1) support for the three strikes initiative, (2) support for punitiveness in dealing with rule breakers, and (3) willingness to abandon procedural protections when dealing with potential rule breakers. The results of interviews with members of the public suggest that the widely held view that public punitiveness develops primarily from concerns about crime and the courts and is primarily linked to public views about risk and dangerousness is incorrect. While these factors do influence public feelings, they are not the central reasons underlying public punitiveness. Instead, the source of people's concerns lies primarily in their evaluations of social conditions, including the decline in morality and discipline within the family and increases in the diversity of society. These concerns are about issues of moral cohesion—with people feeling that the quality and extent of social bonds and social consensus has deteriorated in American society.

Studies of legal decisionmaking have focused traditionally on how social influences, particularly the relative social standing of competing parties, affect case outcomes. More recently, sociolegal scholars have directed their attention to the significance of cultural categories in shaping case-based decisionmaking. We here examine how both social and cultural factors shape judicial decisions and their meanings for a “congregation” of court cases precipitated by the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Our logistic regression analysis of the opinions of 181 AIDS-related cases decided in the early years of the epidemic (1983-89) finds that two social factors, the relative social standing of parties and the types of claims brought to the court, and two cultural factors, the court's use of negative AIDS metaphors and references to individual rights, are significantly related to case outcome. Finally, in line with Galanter's (1990) notion that case congregations have histories that involve development and change over time, our temporal analysis reveals the emergence of two case congregations and suggests how each serves to bolster the legitimacy of the judiciary amidst social crisis.

Building on job satisfaction, occupational segregation, and life course literatures, I analyze temporal dimensions of career mobility within the legal profession with a sample of Canadian lawyers. I use a continuous-time stochastic model of the underlying processes of movement across work settings to examine factors accounting for gender differences in career paths. The findings suggest that women's integration into the legal profession remains marginal: women continue to be underrepresented in law firm partnerships, moving significantly more slowly than men toward these positions. In addition, women exit law firm practice at a rate significantly higher than that of their male counterparts. Empirical evidence also suggests that the rapidly increasing size of entry cohorts to the legal profession has restricted the number of partnerships available to aspiring associates and has hastened the departure of lawyers from law firm practice. I document emerging paths from law and examine causal factors “pushing” lawyers out of law firm practice, as well as those “pulling” them toward other more attractive options.

This study examines citation data in state wrongful discharge precedent cases from a network analytic perspective. The main question posed is whether, or to what extent, judges use citations as indicators of substantive influence on their decisionmaking versus devices primarily intended to justify decisions reached on other grounds (i.e., for legitimation). To address this question, I obtained evidence on the usefulness of distinguishing between “strong” and “weak” citations and between citation frequency and breadth. I conclude that citations in legal decisions are meaningful data and that there is evidence of both intercourt influence and legitimation at work.

This book by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, both a major empirical and theoretical contribution, has arrived at a propitious time for law and society scholars. If our discipline is not in crisis, it is certainly in a period of transition. As “globalization” has monopolized the attention of policymakers, journalists, futurists, politicians, and the business elite, scholars in law and society have not been far behind. Meetings of the Law and Society Association have become notably more international in their objects, if to a lesser extent in membership and attendance. As our scholarship ventures with more regularity over, under, and beyond the boundaries of nation-states, we encounter new conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges, as well as the exacerbation of some more familiar difficulties. The work of Dezalay and Garth represents one of the most advanced and concerted efforts in our discipline to rise to this array of new (and old) challenges. The book's scope and ambitions are such that a reviewer is compelled to ask whether the authors have presented us with a new paradigm for research in sociology of law in the context of globalization. As I am only presumptuous enough to pose but not to answer that question, this review essay will document both the considerable promise and some possible limitations of the approach developed by Dezalay and Garth, in the hopes of using their work to spark a wider debate on the future of law and society scholarship in conditions of globalization.

The American legal profession has experienced dramatic change in the late 20th century. Attorneys have witnessed vast growth in new entrants (Curran 1986; Curran & Carson 1991; Sander & Williams 1989), the abolition of restrictions on new methods of finding clients and price competition (Abel 1989; Reidinger 1987; Seron 1992), changes in the delivery of legal services and law firm organization (Nelson 1988; Seron 1992; Van Hoy 1995, 1997), the growth of large law firms (Galanter & Palay 1991), and an increase in employed lawyers (Abel 1989; Spangler 1986).

In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in “Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience.” He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is “impoverished theoretically” and “often not worth reading” (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the policy audience. He contrasts current scholarship with a golden age of police inquiry, the 1960s, in which theoretical breakthroughs were common, and scholars were driven by their critical instincts rather than by material interests. His review of current works is narrower than most published in the Review, covering only two monographs published in the 1990s, and holding out but one (Bayley 1994) as evidence of all that is wrong with contemporary, sociolegal inquiry of policing.