Informal methods for dealing with conflict within both Japanese and Amish society have been interpreted as being the natural result of, and an important source of support for, traditional cultures. On closer examination we find similar patterns of intentional manipulation of informalist ideology as elements of strategy in the midst of conflict. In both cases, we find informalist ideology being selectively invoked to provide legitimacy to one or more partisan sides in ways which disguise such maneuvers from the majority of their constituent populations. Successful promotion of this ideology sustains the notion, both at the popular level and heretofore among scholars of dispute processing, that nonlaw methods for dealing with conflict have some special ingredient which makes them functionally superior to legalistic methods. If the Japanese and the Amish are in any way representative of a more general case, it apparently takes hard work to preserve anti-legal methods of dispute management.

This article is about claims manipulation and the influence of context on the careers and outcomes of disputes. We explore eleven cases in which civil tort action was used when citizen opponents petitioned the government (lawsuits called SLAPPs or “strategic lawsuits against public participation”). Rather than being totally contingent on interactional and situational factors, these disputes followed two general trajectories of transformation, depending on whether they arose from an “internal” or “external” setting. Disputes initially tied to a broad cultural or political claims base were transformed into more narrow and concrete claims. Yet the original political claims of the lawsuit targets were less likely derailed.

Little is known about the reactions of tort litigants to traditional and alternative litigation procedures. To explore this issue, we interviewed litigants in personal injury cases in three state courts whose cases had been resolved by trial, court-annexed arbitration, judicial settlement conferences, or bilateral settlement. The litigants viewed the trial and arbitration procedures as fairer than bilateral settlement, apparently because they believed that trials and arbitration hearings gave their case more respectful treatment. They were less satisfied with the outcome of judicial settlement conferences than with the outcome of bilateral settlements, because judicial settlement conference outcomes were more likely to fall below their expectations. In general, procedural justice judgments and outcome satisfaction were little related to objective outcome, cost, or delay; instead the evaluations appeared to be determined largely by perceptions of whether the procedure met litigants' criteria for procedural fairness and expectations on outcomes and costs. Gender, income, and race did not have much effect on evaluations.

This study uses a framework in which disputants' litigation decisions are based on optimizing expected returns and minimizing losses to analyze outcomes of medical malpractice disputes—the probability of payment, stage of resolution, and amounts paid, based on closed medical malpractice claims from Florida and jury verdict reporter abstracts from five jurisdictions. Using judgments of an expert panel and other indicators, the analysis reveals that cases are more likely to result in paid claims when the defendant appears to be liable. By contrast, cases brought to satisfy a claimant motive of vindication are less likely to result in payment; such cases have a higher probability of being tried. Claimants with more serious injuries tend to receive higher payments. Payment appears equitable vertically, but there is appreciable variability in payment for similar injuries which may reflect horizontal inequities.

This article examines violations of the employer sanctions provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 as a case study in white-collar crime. Using interviews with 103 “immigrant-dependent” employers in three southern California counties, the study reveals that employer sanctions violations are numerous and that violators feel relatively protected from detection and punishment. It then traces both the prevalence of this crime and the impunity felt by violators beyond a simple cost/benefit analysis on the part of employers to the nature of the law itself. The study shows how legislative and implementation processes produced a low-risk crime, indicating that the shape the law took from the beginning ensured that its effect would be primarily symbolic and that violations would be widespread. This pattern suggests that the symbolic nature of the law and subsequent violations are dialectically linked and that both stem from contradictions inherent in immigration lawmaking. The article concludes that lawmaking and lawbreaking, while analytically distinct processes, must be seen as connecting pieces of the same theoretical puzzle.