The author reflects on the significance of violence (the theme of the 1997 Law and Society Association's annual meeting) for sociolegal scholars, considering the changing landscapes of law and difference, especially in the contemporary United States, as well as issues of vocation and agency.

The legal and administrative apparatus responsible for the social control of organizations relies extensively on the deterrent effects of punishment. This strategy presumes a rational choice model of organizational misconduct that decontextualizes decisionmaking, emphasizing consequences while ignoring how preferences are formed. I raise three challenges to the rational choice/deterrence model of social control: (1) research and theory on decisionmaking, (2) a sociological paradigm that situates individual action in a structure/culture/agency nexus that influences interpretation, meaning, and action at the local level, and (3) an analysis of the Challenger launch decision at NASA as situated action, showing how structure, culture, and history shaped preferences and choice. These challenges suggest a need to reorient regulatory activity toward the social context of decisionmaking. I conclude with a research agenda to explore the relationship between situated action, preference formation, and rational choice.

Economist Ronald Coase's famous theorem regarding the ways that neighboring property owners bargain “around” law and government has been refined by Robert Ellickson, who studied the ways ranchers and their ranchette neighbors resolve problems of fencing and animal trespass. Both Coase and Ellickson rely on rational actor models of Economic Man in predicting and explaining human behavior and dispute resolution. Both offer animal trespasses as the prime illustrations. Both models are flawed.

Ellickson asked what might one learn by mining historical sources to reconstruct “bargaining” between ranchers and farmers, but he found the task daunting.

In the course of research into the “high” (formal) legal cultures and the “low” (informal) legal cultures in the lands of the British diaspora, 1630–1910, I gathered information on just such interactions (over fencing and animal trespass), and in this article I put Coase's and Ellickson's models to the test of the historian's laboratory. While Ellickson's model has significant power in predicting the behavior of mature British settlements where the neighbors were of the same core culture, it is not as effective in predicting dispute resolutions in frontier conditions and is of little use in predicting the interactions of Puritans and Algonquins, Pakehas and Maoris.

This article explores the reemergence of the Law and Development Movement in the post–Cold War era, with special reference to the impact of foreign legal assistance programs on legal and political reforms in Vietnam. Relying on extensive interviews conducted in Vietnam, as well as traditional academic research, the article focuses on changes in Vietnam's legal culture in the first decade of political “renovation.” It then describes foreign legal assistance to Vietnam. Finally, it applies the critiques that emerged from the law and development debate to present-day legal assistance efforts in Vietnam, in an effort to determine the validity of those critiques in the post–Cold War era of foreign legal assistance.

State-society differentiation and political centralization interact to influence the amount, focus, and effect of legal activity. Using case studies of anti-nuclear power litigation in the 1970s in the United States, West Germany, France, and Sweden, this article develops a general theory of political systems and legal activity. While the United States, West Germany, and France all had considerable amounts of antinuclear litigation, in France and Germany such litigation was directed almost exclusively at the state. In the United States, the targets of antinuclear litigation were much more diffuse. Centralized Sweden with its corporatist political system had significantly less antinuclear legal activity than the other three countries, which were roughly comparable. Germany was the only country in which the state took an active role in shaping the content of legal cases, and it was the only country where litigation became a critical factor in modifying national policy. Through these case studies, this article explores how contextual factors such as the political frames of nation-states, which exist apart from individual litigiousness and even apart from legal systems themselves may create particular cross-cultural variations in patterns of legal activity.

This article examines the impact of state-level school finance litigation conducted in the wake of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. State supreme courts have handed down decisions in 36 states since the Rodriguez decision in 1973. The article looks at how these decisions have affected the distribution of educational resources in eight states—five states in which school finance activists have won and three in which they lost. The author shows that state supreme courts can have a significant impact on both the equity of school finance systems and their adequacy. This finding rebuts scholars who have recently argued that courts, acting alone, cannot achieve significant social or political change in the face of public opposition. The article also explores why some state supreme courts are more successful than others, putting forward a policy-centered model of judicial efficacy that takes into account the peculiarities of school finance as a policy issue.