This paper examines the impact of Turkey's radical introduction of Western law codes and secular courts by analyzing a portion (1950-67) of the docket of a rural district court, located in Bodrum, Turkey. We are particularly interested in whether a transplanted formal legal system can influence the countryside, and we ask: (1) To what extent are rural district law courts being used, and is this use increasing? (2) In what domains are rural courts used, and to what degree do these coincide with domains formerly covered by religious and/or customary law? (3) How is the use of the courts distributed between settling disputes (including disputes between the state and citizens) and processing routine, undisputed formalities, and is this distribution changing? (4) To what extent are women and other non-powerful groups (rural, poor, ethnic minorities) using the courts, and has this use changed over time? (5) To what extent is the government using the courts for social control purposes, and how does this use compare with non-governmental use of the courts? (6) How does the use of the courts relate to abrupt shifts in political power and ideology?

James Q. Wilson (1971: 4-5) has observed that militant police unions may constitute the greatest obstacle to reform and innovation in contemporary American police practice. To date, most social science studies of the police have focused on the analysis and consequences of individual officer behavior and not on collective actions by policemen to influence law enforcement policy. The absence of in-depth studies of police from a group perspective is significant in view of research (Horton, 1970; Kaufman, 1969) which indicates that municipal agencies in larger cities are moving toward a joint management-labor determination of goals and administration under the prodding of activist employee associations.

The avoidance of the stigma accompanying court appearance was one of the reasons for the development of a specialized court for children. Treatment-oriented reformers had been concerned for many years about the potentially harmful effects upon individuals of arrest, court appearance, and incarceration. As a result, they made efforts in the juvenile court to minimize stigmatization by having informal procedures, hearings closed to the public and press, and limited access to court records. More recently the avoidance of stigma has been used to rationalize the diversion of youths away from the juvenile justice system before they have any contact with it. This heightened concern about stigmatization through juvenile court exeprience flows in part from a growing interest in labeling theory among social scientists.

The impact of United States Supreme Court decisions on the administration of criminal justice by police and lower courts in this country has been the subject of extensive research. A number of empirical studies on the impact of Mapp v. Ohio (1961) (Kuh, 1962; Oaks, 1970), Miranda v. Arizona (1966) (Reiss and Black, 1967; Yale Law Review, 1967), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) (Blumberg, 1966; Sudnow, 1965) and in re Gault (1967) (Duffee and Siegel, 1971) have indicated that Supreme Court decisions have a much smaller impact upon police and court practices than might be expected and that systemic requirements of criminal justice agencies frequently override and suppress the policy objectives of these decisions. The result is the routinization of due process in a way which prevents its requirements from substantially interfering with the operation of the systems involved and the perversion of these requirements to serve organizational ends rather than the ends of justice. These studies raise substantial questions as to the efficacy of attempting to alter the operations of the criminal justice system through constitutional rule-making by the courts.

In their admirable “Legal Evolution and Societal Complexity,” Professors Schwartz and Miller (1964: 161) expressed doubts about the validity of Durkheim's (1933: 68-174) well known generalization that repressive sanctions characterize a society based on organic solidarity; as distinct from one based on a complex division of social labour, in turn characterized by restitutive, rather than repressive, sanctions. Although Schwartz and Miller express considerable diffidence in their views on the invalidity of Durkheim's generalization, some later literature has taken their valuable study to be a “refutation” of Durkheim's theory (e.g., Schur, 1967: 111-13). The present comment attempts to analyze the reasons justifying the diffidence expressed by Schwartz and Miller and to show that their findings do not result in a definitive invalidation of Durkheim's thesis.

At the outset, I wish to thank Professor Upendra Baxi for his critical reading of the Schwartz-Miller article. Several years ago, when we first talked, he expressed a lively interest in the issue to which his present comment is directed (Baxi, 1974). His observations, then and now, have helped me to understand some theoretical and methodological complexities in Durkheim's position which I had earlier missed. I acknowledge with gratitude his scholarly observations and also his courteous manner in presenting them.

The publication of an inter-disciplinary effort on child welfare law, co-authored by three such luminary figures as Joseph Goldstein (Walton Hale Hamilton Professor of Law, Science and Social Policy at Yale University Law School), Anna Freud (perhaps the foremost living authority on the emotional lives of children), and Albert Solnit (Director of the Yale University Child Study Center), is an intellectual event. The talents of these authors are such that their book, Beyond the Best Interests of the Child (1973), ought to have significance beyond its reconceptualization of the law of child custody; it ought also to be a landmark in the history of cooperation between social scientists and lawyers. Despite impressive achievements, however, the book's greatest utility may be as an example of the wrong way to employ social science to solve problems of social policy.