What is it that sets legal systems apart from other kinds of systems of social control? Traditionally, legal philosophers have tried to answer the question in terms of some uniquely essential quality which distinguishes law from everything else. It now seems clear that the concept of law is best understood, not in terms of any single feature to be taken as the essence of law, but as a whole set of family resemblances between the various things we call legal systems (Hart, 1961: 1–17, 234). What I propose to do here is to deal with one particular facet of the concept which, I think, has not been given sufficient attention by the currently dominant positivist school of legal philosophy.

The research we report here has had as its aim a study of the acquisition of political philosophy during the adolescent years. We have always known, in a rough and general way, that adolescence is marked by a rapid growth in the comprehension of political ideas. At the threshold of adolescence, at eleven or twelve, the youngster has only a dim, diffuse, and incomplete notion of the political order; by the time he has reached eighteen, he will be, more often than not, a fully formed political creature, possessing a stable and coherent understanding of political structures and functions, and in many cases, committing himself to a philosophy of government. How does this transition take place? In particular, how do learning and cognitive maturation interact to produce these sweeping changes? As a first approach to these questions, we undertook a developmental and cross-national study of adolescents. Youngsters of eleven, thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen were interviewed in three countries: the United States, England, and Germany. (German eleven-year-olds were not interviewed because of fund limitations. Hence, the cross-national analysis compares subjects thirteen through eighteen years of age.) By interviewing youngsters from pubescence to late adolescence we hoped to discern the maturation of political perspectives; by comparing youngsters in three countries with rather different political traditions we hoped to get some sense of the differential impact of social ideas.

Despite the general recognition of its importance, it has been noted that there is a paucity of theoretical treatment of the problems of compliance to law (Krislov, 1966). While there is a vast literature dealing with rule-specified behavior, a direct focus on the peculiarities of legal rules and compliance to them seems to have been skirted in favor of more general treatments of social norms, less-structured rule and compliance systems, and basic or constitutional rules. And when law and the problems of compliance have received specific attention, it has usually been in terms of a broad, societal level, relating legal norms to cultural norms or focusing on “trouble cases” and instances of noncompliance. Detailed empirical studies in sociology have tended to focus on deviant behavior and its correlates, while in political science the approach has tended towards even less-general descriptions and case studies of the impact and consequences of legislative and judicial policy-making.

Social psychologists have traditionally been concerned with problems of social conflict, power, influence, and persuasion. Yet, when one looks for systematic theory and evidence regarding the determinants of behavioral compliance to rules, norms, or influence attempts, few prescriptions can be garnered by the practical man of affairs for developing policy in matters of law and order. In a day when shouts of black power, student protests, and antiwar demonstrations reverberate through the legitimate institutions of the country and when violence commissions report the degree of disorder existing in the urban centers of America, lack of social scientific evidence upon which to base policy is a disquieting comment upon the relevance of social scientific research.

Popular compliance with prescribed patterns of behavior is the fundamental constraint on social disruption. Even the effectiveness of control by legal sanctions depends on the public's acceptance of their use by authorities. Inquiry into the sources of popular adherence to norms conducive to compliance with authorities has been an aspect of socialization research. This essay comments on political science research on socialization, and points out how it differs from the research reported by psychologist Joseph Adelson and his associates (1970) in this journal and in a previous study (1966). The socialization studies are compared in order to determine their utility for discerning the sources of compliant behavior.

With increasing incidences of deviance exemplified by campus disorders, community crime, civil disobedience, and interpersonal aggression, demands for law and order emanate from various segments of the general population. Concurrently, the search for effective means of assuring compliance to law becomes more fervent. Some policy-planners, legislators, policemen, judges, and educators seek new insights and greater understanding about obedience, but society's response is primarily expressed in terms of increased surveillance, detection, and punishment (which ironically may function to complicate compliance problems). In coping with disobedience, whether individual or collective, violent or nonviolent, little serious attention is paid to the origins of deviance and particularly to the antecedents of compliance. Yet it is from knowledge about the origins of obedience and the related ideas of normal populations about the legal process that the problems of deviance can best be understood and stratagems for social change most effectively realized.

Only a few years ago it was customary and appropriate to begin an essay on Supreme Court efficacy by lamenting the paucity of empirical studies dealing with this problem. Such an introduction is no longer in order, since we have recently witnessed a flourishing of research on the actual consequences of judicial decisions. Both the appearance of at least one book of readings on Supreme Court impact (Becker, 1969) and the focusing of panels around this topic at political science conventions are indications of the emergence of “legal impact” as a significant field of scholarly inquiry.