This essay takes the theme of the 1999 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, “The Legal Imagination: Taking on Cultural Studies,” as an occasion for trying to promote an engagement between sociological studies and cultural studies. It argues that mass mediated images are as powerful and pervasive as other social forces with which sociological studies is already engaged and that the time has come to move from the study of law on the books and in action to law in the image. This argument is developed by analyzing the significance of the ubiquitous presence of tropes of fatherhood in popular cultural iconography about law. Drawing on psychoanalysis, gender theory, and film studies, this essay presents a close reading of a single film, The Sweet Hereafter. This film exemplifies the ways in which fatherhood becomes one of the key terms through which law is mythologized and through which fantasies and anxieties about law are expressed. Exploring the imagination of law in and through mass medicated images, like those contained in The Sweet Hereafter, is an important and engaging new frontier for sociolegal studies.

Much of the British empire was acquired by purchase rather than conquest, but indigenous peoples usually acquired little wealth despite extensive land sales. Explanations of where the money went tend to blame either the imprudence of indigenous sellers or the duplicity of British buyers. This article suggests that a focus solely on the conduct of the individuals operating within the land market rests on a poor theoretical understanding of the relationship between law and markets, an understanding that blinds historians to the allocative effects of markets' constitutive rules. Using New Zealand as an example, the article shows how the British modified the structure of the land market over the 19th century, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently, to transfer wealth from the Maori to themselves.

I draw on the archives from two Indonesian courts to analyze how judges have reached decisions in the face of conflicting legal norms. Judges in the town of Takèngën, in the highlands of Aceh province, hear claims based on Islam and on local social norms (adat). Between 1960 and the mid-1990s, they changed the way they resolved disputes over inheritance cases, from accepting village settlements as valid, to rejecting those settlements as either contrary to Islam or as coercive. I examine the justifications offered in the earlier and the later periods for these decisions. I find that in both periods judges employed creative legal devices to resolve or bridge differences between Islam and adat, and that they consistently referred to broader cultural values of agreement and fairness. I suggest that the change in their decisions was due to the combination of political centralization, increased legitimacy of the Islamic court, and judges' perceptions of a more individualized society.

One of the most controversial issues in policing concerns allegations of racial bias. This article examines citizens' perceptions of racialized policing in three neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., that vary by racial composition and class position: a middle-class white community, a middle-class black community, and a lower-class black community. In-depth interviews examined residents' perceptions of differential police treatment of individual blacks and whites in Washington and disparate police practices in black and white neighborhoods. Findings indicate, first, that there is substantial agreement across the communities in the belief that police treat blacks and whites differerently; and secondly, there is racial variation in respondents' explanations for racial disparities. On the question of residents' assessments of police relations with their own community relative to other-race communities, a neighborhood difference is found, with the black middle-class neighborhood standing apart from the other two neighborhoods.

At issue in the debate over social norms are different conceptions of human nature and the social order, of the ways people behave, and of the ways the law can both modify and be modified by social conduct. Three interpretive frameworks to the discussion of social norms are discussed: (a) whether social norms affect individual behavior merely as environmental/external factors or whether they also shape people's intrinsic predispositions; (b) the specific process by which norms influence people (i.e., whether preferences are considered predetermined or assumed to be modifiable as a result of internalization and persuasion); and (c) the ways social norms themselves are formed (whether merely via rational choice or also through historical transmissions). It is concluded that the discussion of social norms within a legal context is enriched by considering a “law and socio-economics” model, which combines the law and economics and law and society perspectives into a single discipline.

The social norm movement in criminal justice has received a lot of attention in academic and public policy circles. This essay critically examines social norm writings and explores some of the implications for methods of proof and research design in the social sciences. In the process, the essay offers an alternative theoretical approach. This alternative focuses on the multiple ways in which the social meaning of practices (such as juvenile gun possession, gang membership, or disorderly conduct) and the social meaning of policing techniques (such as juvenile snitching policies, youth curfews, or order-maintenance policing) may shape us as contemporary subjects of society. This alternative theoretical approach has its own important implications for methods of proof and research design, and the essay develops these implications into a four-prong research agenda.