This article demonstrates the legal consequences that flow from the conceptualization of the Bedouin as rootless nomads and from the imposition of certain legal categories of land ownership as means for solving disputes across the indigenous/nonindigenous divide. I argue that the law works by imposing conceptual grids on time and space and that this conceptual ordering, in turn, gives rise to a series of binary oppositions that affirm the distinctions between “us” (Progressive Westerners) and “them” (Chaotic Oriental nomads). Once the Bedouin are placed on the side of nature, judicial practices tend, on the one hand, to objectify the denial of Bedouin claims of land ownership and, on the other hand, to facilitate state policies of forcing the Bedouin into urban setdements.

By requiring that police issue fourfold warnings to silence and appointed counsel prior to any custodial questioning, Miranda v. Arizona (1966) created universalistic criteria for the legal regulation of police interrogations. While Miranda appears to be partly responsible for the dramatic decline in violence in the interrogation room in the 20th century, American police have become skilled at the practice of manipulation and deception during interrogation. Drawing on more than 500 hours of participant observation fieldwork in three police departments, I argue that the sequence, structure, and process of contemporary American police interrogation can best be understood as a confidence game based on the manipulation and betrayal of trust. Understanding interrogation as a confidence game, I argue, goes a long way toward explaining (1) the paradoxical observation that criminal suspects continue to provide police with incriminating statements, admissions and confessions in the majority of cases; (2) the nature of the social interaction during interrogation more generally; and (3) how contemporary police interrogators both exercise and mystify their power inside the interrogation room.

Historiography and epistemology are two subjects not often brought together in sociolegal studies. This article takes reconstructions of legal history as a subject of sociological investigation. The institutional “acceptability” of any historical representation is a complex social achievement since there are no objective criteria for verifying historical accounts. I juxtapose two competing reconstructions of Fourteenth Amendment history, by legal scholars Charles Fairman and William Crosskey, and examine how both reconstructions took place with reference to preexisting interpretive frameworks. I also examine the social and institutional settings in which these histories interacted and competed for credibility. The Fairman/Crosskey dispute served to socialize future participants in Fourteenth Amendment debate. With the Fairman/Crosskey exchanges, battle lines were drawn and topics of debate were established.

Through presentation of ethnographic research findings on court-appointed defense attorneys, this article examines plea bargaining as a component of a recursive process for deciding whether a case should be settled immediately or proceed further. The decisionmaking process has three types of activities: assessing the offer for a guilty plea, negotiating the terms of a plea bargain, and counseling the defendant and deciding on a course of action. Until a criminal case is actually settled either through a final plea agreement or a jury trial, this decisionmaking process occurs over and over again. Viewed as a component of this recursive process, plea bargaining encompasses multiple episodes of negotiating behavior as well as a wide range of formal litigation proceedings. Perhaps more important, plea bargaining and trial procedures can actually be seen to converge. I conclude that this mode of plea bargaining is not merely an effective method for representing defendants but perhaps equally or more effective than trial. Some important limitations of the findings are also discussed.

Interrupted time series designs are commonly used to assess the impact of gun control legislation, as well as other legal and policy changes. Three common problems in the use of these designs—(1) selection of an appropriate control series, (2) specification of the intervention model, and (3) specification of the time series studied—raise questions about the validity of the conclusions reached in research on the impact of gun control. We illustrate these problems with a critical reassessment of Loftin et al.'s (1991) evaluation of the 1976 District of Columbia Gun Law. We then use monthly homicide data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Health Statistics to illustrate how careful consideration of these three design issues results in a significantly different conclusion about the effectiveness of the District of Columbia Gun Law.

The strength of research designs is relative. Compared with true experiments, quasi-experimental designs are weak. Compared with cross-sectional designs, they are strong. One can further strengthen inferences from quasi-experiments by examining a broader pattern of data. We agree with Britt, Kleck, and Bordua when they recommend that researchers expand the range of inquiry. We disagree with them when they recommend that researchers restrict it. The District of Columbia study is largely consistent with the available evidence, but it does not prove that restrictive handgun licensing will always reduce firearm deaths.

McDowall, Loftin, and Wiersma (1996) avoid our criticisms of the univariate interrupted time series design (ITSD) by misstating our criticisms, by addressing what they claim we “implied” rather than what we plainly stated, and by ignoring crucial points in our article in this issue (Britt et al. 1996). We reiterate: McDowall et al.'s (1992) conclusions regarding the alleged efficacy of the Washington, D.C., handgun ban (mislabeled by McDowall et al. as a licensing law) collapsed once any of three improvements were made to their analysis: (1) use of a more appropriate control series, (2) use of a more appropriate, theoretically based specification of the intervention model, and (3) use of an alternative, extended time series beyond the period studied by McDowall et al. (1992). Nothing McDowall et al. (1996) write has rebutted our assertions.

In measuring the impact of court-ordered prison reforms on state budgets, Taggart (1989) challenged Harriman and Straussman's (1983) conclusion that court decisions have affected state spending for corrections. This Research Note explores important questions left unanswered by both studies: (1) What impact did the courts have on cases litigated during the 1980s? (2) Why are the courts able to influence spending in some states but not others? The results support Taggart's conclusion that spending for corrections follows an incremental pattern. Judicial influence on state budgets declined during the 1980s as courts narrowed the scope of prison reforms.