In the control of stock fraud, criminal prosecution is the road not taken: only six of every hundred parties investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission ultimately stand in judgment before a criminal court. This paper examines the role of criminal prosecution in controlling securities violations. It traces the SEC enforcement process in which most stock swindlers are diverted from criminal prosecution and treated civilly or administratively or spared legal action entirely. It finds that the criminal process attracts the most significant offenses, but also those about which little else can be done. In this light, the paper reconsiders the controversial finding that upper status white-collar offenders fare no better and often worse than their lower status counterparts at criminal sentencing. It finds a double standard, but one with some surprising implications.

Legal powers given to administrative agencies are frequently used as bargaining chips in negotiations between government and business. This paper develops a typology that helps to explain the empirical variety of such bartering. Inquiring into the historical development of bartering, the article shows that what is new is not the practice of but the discourse about bartering. The discourse legitimates bartering with legal powers. This, in turn, will reshape practice, affecting the bargaining positions of the parties, the mode of law-making, the role of third parties and the public, and the potential of the law to induce social change.

This paper focuses on the impact of fee arrangement on the amount of time lawyers are likely to devote to civil cases (“effort”). Drawing upon data collected by the Civil Litigation Research Project, we compare the behavior of lawyers working on an hourly fee basis with the behavior of contingent fee lawyers. Like previous work on this issue, the paper finds that fee arrangement does influence the amount of effort lawyers devote to a given case. However, contrary to previous work, the analysis indicates that the effect is not a simple effect on hours worked but a more complex effect on a number of aspects of lawyers' behavior. Together these produce an effect on hours that varies by size of case. For modest cases (with stakes of $6,000 or less), contingent fee lawyers spend less time on a case than hourly fee lawyers. Yet we find no statistically significant evidence of a differential in effort for larger cases but rather an indication that, if there is an effect, it may be in the opposite direction.

This article analyzes the Philippine system of compulsory conciliation both in terms of its significance in the context of the political system as a whole and in terms of its operation at the village level. I argue that the mediation structures established by national law are part of a pattern in which the Philippine state is incorporating within it the various sectors of civil society, but that the cooptation of the customary method of dispute processing is not meeting resistance from the rural Filipino. This analysis supports the more general argument that systems of informal justice operate to enhance centralized political authority, yet it reveals the dialectical nature of such arrangements for dispute processing.

This paper examines the relationship between social structures and community justice. It rejects both those arguments that see community justice as independent experiments for the development of an alternative system of justice and those that see such experiments as functioning solely in the interests of dominant legal and social structures. Based on a study of the collective justice systems of a variety of small-scale cooperatives, the paper develops a theory in which community justice is shown to be ambiguously related to the larger system in which it is set and to the groups and individuals who make up that system. This ambiguity, it is argued, is capable of transforming the wider structure, and the theory allows us to glimpse a potential for broad-based socio-legal change.