Through an analysis of the structure of the community mediation movement in the United States and an ethnography of the practices of mediators in local programs, this paper examines how community mediation is made, and how it is ideologically constituted. The ideology of community mediation is produced through an interplay among three ideological projects or visions of community mediation and organizational models, and by the selection and differential use of mediators to handle cases. We argue that ideologies are formed through the mobilization of symbolic resources by groups promoting different projects. Central to the production of mediation ideology is a struggle over the symbolic resources of community justice and consensual justice. Although various groups propose differing conceptions of community justice, they share a similar commitment to consensual justice, and this similarity is produced through reinterpretations of the same symbols. The ambiguities in community mediation are, it appears, being overtaken by consensus on the nature of the mediation process itself.

In this article I argue that several conceptual and methodological deficiencies have plagued research on racial discrimination. Discrimination is usually conceptualized as a function of societal or institutional forces rather than as an attribute of individual decisionmakers, resulting in research designs that analyze decisions of courts, rather than those of individual judges. However, a finding of no discrimination in aggregate court data does not preclude the possibility that individual judges discriminate against or in favor of minorities. Thus the selection of the unit of analysis, and other methodological choices, can significantly affect substantive conclusions. Finally, research has largely been concerned with description, rather than explanation, and has therefore failed to illuminate the decisional processes that produce discrimination.

Each of these critiques is substantiated with data from the Fulton County (Georgia) Superior Court. My findings suggest three patterns of sentencing among judges: pro-black, anti-black, and nondiscriminatory. Anti-black judges are strongly tied to traditional southern culture, concerned about crime, prejudiced against blacks, and relatively punitive in their sentencing philosophies. In addition, they tend to rely more heavily on the defendant's attitude and prior record in making their sentencing decisions. Thus, discrimination seems to flow from both the attitudinal predispositions of the judges and the process they employ to make decisions.

My subject is postmodern politics and law, protest from below, and the “new” social movements. The question I am concerned with is the value of postmodernism for transformative politics.

Scholars concerned with the struggles of subordinate groups have long emphasized protest from below. Accounts of the resistance of blacks and poor people became prominent in the 1960s. This tradition, joined by feminists, gays and lesbians, as well as others, continued in the 1980s. The new social movements are, roughly, environmental, antinuclear, peace, feminist, and gay and lesbian. Whether these broad movements are "new" or variations of older movements is much debated. For our purposes, they are included here insofar as they are antimaterialist, antistatist, antibureaucratic; they seek to cross traditional class lines in favor of humanistic, interpersonal, and communitarian values.

The American legal profession is facing challenges that are sending tremors through its institutional foundations. On the one hand, U.S. lawyers appear to be wielding ever increasing power as reflected in recent victories in litigation with cigarette manufacturers and in the now pending challenges to the firearms industry. At the same time, the profession finds its traditional prerogatives under increasing challenge with the push for multidisciplinary professional practices, direct encroachment by a variety of service providers (accountants, consultants, paralegals, etc.), and mounting political attacks on the profession for its apparent greed (e.g., huge fees from the tobacco litigation) and apparent arrogance (Glaberson 1999). Much as the businesses and governments who bear the bulk of health care expenses forced major restructuring of health care delivery, the large consumers of legal services (which are consuming an ever larger share of legal services; see Heinz, Nelson, & Laumann 1998) are seeking means of limiting and monitoring the costs of those services (ibid.; Kritzer 1994). Lawyers increasingly find themselves working not as independent professionals but as employees of bureaucratically organized law firms, corporations, and government. The dynamics of this change, combined with shifts in where legal effort is directed, have attracted the attention of scholars (Galanter & Palay 1991; Heinz et al. 1997; Heinz, Nelson, Laumann, & Michelson 1998; Seron 1996; Spangler 1986; Van Hoy 1997) in no small part because it has major implications for how we think about the legal profession, in its multiplicity of forms, as a profession.

Prior research has speculated about, but has not provided systematic empirical data on, how officers use their prior knowledge to interpret wife assault situations and how these interpretations shape their responses. Our findings challenge claims that officers' reluctance to pursue formal arrest stems primarily from their proclivity to blame victims. By manipulating whether or not a wife exhibited abnormal behavior, we show that experienced officers do not focus on whether wives can control their “provoking” actions and are to blame; instead they consider the relative credibility and dangerousness of the husband. Prior experience with handling wife assault situations thus shifts the focus of decisionmaking from normative considerations such as blameworthiness to efficiency considerations such as substantiating claims for successful prosecution. However, both novice and experienced officers base their arrest decisions on prior beliefs about whether wives provoke their husbands when wives have alcohol problems. Our findings indicate that future research can profitably examine how prior knowledge shapes interpretations to gain a better understanding of police decisionmaking.

Based on interviews with 100 members of mixed-status families in Los Angeles, California, this article analyzes how U.S. citizen children practice and understand citizenship in the context of punitive laws targeting their loved ones. Participants' narratives of citizenship as privilege, responsibility, and guilt reveal that despite normative conceptions of citizenship as a universally equal status, citizenship intersects with key social markers to determine the contours and inequalities of substantive citizenship. Specifically, U.S. citizens in mixed-status families make sense of their juridical category when they navigate unrealistic aspirations from relatives, maintain silence about undocumented family members' legal status, manage their fear of family separation through deportation, and take on financial and logistical responsibilities prematurely to help relatives. In each of these ways, family proves to be a key site for the social and relational production of citizenship.

To date, most disposition studies have been limited to exploring the effects of male defendants' social characteristics on severity of disposition; the few studies that have included female defendants have done so primarily to see if the sex of the offenders differentially affected sentencing. Utilizing the propositions set forth in The Behavior of Law (Black, 1976), this research looks at the role played by a woman's social status in determining the type of criminal court disposition she receives. Conviction data from a sample of 1,034 female defendants are explored to estimate the effects of (1) economic rank (2) prior criminal record, (3) age, and (4) employment status, controlling for the offense of conviction, on severity of criminal court disposition. The analyses indicate that women's various social characteristics are in fact good predictors of the nature and extent of their sentences and, further, that indicators of respectability and stratification/social integration contribute most to explaining these criminal court dispositions. Accordingly, the propositions of Black's theory of law are generally supported by the results of this study.

In this paper I note the growth of analyses of law that focus upon its ideological character and content, and I identify problems and difficulties manifest in the ideological analysis in recent critical and Marxist texts. The paper argues that work focusing upon the ideological character of law realizes significant advances over that produced by the more orthodox approaches within the sociology of law and jurisprudence employing normative analysis. It is possible to make ideological analysis more rigorous. The paper outlines the elements of a theory of and methodology for the ideological analysis of law.

A wealth of research suggests a direct association between minority group size and government social control, such as arrest or imprisonment rates. Prior work in this vein, however, gives scant attention to (1) types of law that explicitly address intergroup conflict and (2) regional variation in the salience of minority group threat. At the same time, research on organizational responses to law indicates that institutional linkages to legal environments dictate policy innovation and compliance, yet the relevance of such linkages for law enforcement agencies is less clear. The present research investigates these themes by focusing on law enforcement responses to hate crime in the United States. Data from a sample of large municipal and county policing agencies and their degree of compliance with the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act are analyzed. Main effects models show that compliance with federal hate crime law is less likely in places with larger black populations, an intriguing finding in light of extant work suggesting that both formal social control and race-based hate crime offending are typically more prevalent where more blacks reside. This effect of black population size on compliance with hate crime law, however, is contingent on region. A positive correlation in the Northeast contrasts with an inverse association in the South. The findings also suggest that organizational facets of law enforcement agencies, notably their engagement in community policing, are associated with compliance. The results elaborate and qualify group threat explanations of government social control and contribute to a burgeoning literature on the utility of organizational theory in the realm of law enforcement.

A sample survey of 800 Oregon adults showed that nearly one in four admit they practice evasion. Higher percentages were found for people who were young, with low income, male, and who believed their chance of getting caught was low. Occupational prestige and belief that the tax system is unfair were unrelated to noncompliance. Differential opportunities to practice evasion is a promising explanation, and the deterrent effect of penalties seems uncertain. The evidence suggests conceptualizing tax evasion as a white-collar crime by the nature of the violation and not by the characteristics of the offender.

This article applies the dispute processing model developed by Felstiner, Abel, and Sarat (1980–81) to disputing between patients and doctors. We conducted interviews with 240 dissatisfied patients to examine the dispute resolution choices they made in response to unsatisfactory medical experiences. Probit models were constructed for each of five resolution choices, incorporating independent variables derived form the Felstiner et al. conceptual model. These analyses go beyond previous studies of medical malpractice by (a) presenting a comparative analysis of suers and nonsuers, (b) not relying on closed malpractice case data, and (c) presenting the perspective of aggrieved patients.

An analysis of the strategies of disputing pursued by the residents of a polyethnic American urban neighborhood reveals that they frequently resort to courts to manage interpersonal and crime-related disputes. Because the legal machinery available to them rarely resolves these disputes, however, the court functions as a sanction rather than a dispute settlement forum. In the absence of effective alternative informal or formal modes of resolving disputes, disputants resort to violence, avoidance, and endurance, a pattern of tolerating ongoing conflict.

This article examines the meanings of politics in everyday legal practice using the case of Chinese criminal defense lawyers. Based on 194 in-depth interviews with criminal defense lawyers and other informants in 22 cities across China, we argue that lawyers’ everyday politics have two faces: on the one hand, lawyers potentially can challenge state power, protect citizen rights, and pursue proceduralism in their daily work; on the other hand, they often have to rely on political connections with state agencies to protect themselves and to solve problems in their legal practice. The double meanings of politics—namely, political liberalism and political embeddedness—explain the complex motivations and coping tactics that are frequently found in Chinese lawyers’ everyday work. Our data show that the Chinese criminal defense bar is differentiated along these two meanings of politics into five clusters of lawyers: progressive elites, pragmatic brokers, notable activists, grassroots activists, and routine practitioners. They also suggest that a principal manifestation of political lawyering is not merely short-term mobilization or revolutionary struggle against arbitrary state power, but also an incremental everyday process that often involves sophisticated tactics to manage interests that often conflict.

This is a study of the criminal trial court as a formal organization. The processing of defendants through court can be seen simply as a task for the courtroom personnel—the cases presenting not only occasions for moral outrage or legal acumen but also presenting problems for the legal bureaucracy as such. From one perspective, defendants are as deviant if they do not conform to the routines of the court as they are if they do not conform to the rules of the state. Like the wider society it supports, the court has a social integrity which can be disrupted. The court processes persons alleged to have been deviant in the larger society. The defendants are then subject to the moral exigencies of the court itself. The discussion treats the court as a business as well as a prime sanctioning center for the outer society. But the control of crime is more than a business; it is an industry. The immediate suppliers of the court—the police—act upon and in turn are conditioned by courtroom configurations. Several features of this police-court interrelation also form a part of this study.

Do defendants who plead guilty receive lighter sentences than those with similar charges and attributes who exercise their right to trial? The assertion that they do has long been at the heart of the literature describing and explaining the plea-bargaining process, though it has been questioned in some important work published recently. The existence of sentence differentials is particularly hard to document statistically, because a successfully operating policy of punishing those who go to trial will in fact minimize the number of cases in which the sanction for trial has to be imposed. Examination of data from three California counties, as well as consideration of various theoretical concerns, leads us to argue that sentence differentials are likely to characterize jurisdictions whose disposition patterns are based on inducing most defendants to plead guilty.

In their essay, Tom Tyler and Ken Rasinski take issue with my analysis of legitimacy and procedural justice. Although my article covered a fair number of different issues, their critique focuses on one particular conclusion. I argued that citizen perceptions of procedural fairness by the U.S. Supreme Court contributed little to the willingness of citizens to comply with unpopular court decisions. Instead, compliance (or acquiescence) was most likely when citizens accorded high levels of diffuse support to the Supreme Court. That is, those who viewed the Supreme Court as a more legitimate institution were more likely to accede to an unpopular decision. I concluded (1989:489): “Thus there is some evidence that the legitimacy of the Court, at least as reflected in levels of diffuse support, affects compliance with unpopular decisons. No such evidence exists for perceptions of procedural justice.”

In Maine defendants in small claims court are nearly twice as likely to comply fully with mediated outcomes as with judgments imposed by the court after adjudication. Some of the explanation can be attributed to specific features that are more common to mediated and negotiated settlements than to adjudicated outcomes. In addition, consensual processes lead to social psychological pressures for compliance that are not associated with authoritative judgments. Our findings point to the value of consent—the most central difference between mediation and adjudication—as an adjunct to command in promoting compliance with rules and orders.

This article drew on expectancy theory in industrial/organizational psychology to explain arrest productivity for driving under the influence (DUI) in a sample of Pennsylvania police officers. Expectancy theory is a cognitive model of motivation and performance based on workers' perceptions of their situation. Its major elements are estimated in a regression model: the officer's capability and opportunity for DUI enforcement (performance-reward expectancy), the instrumentality of DUI enforcement behavior for the officer, and the reward-cost balance associated with making DUI arrests. These factors account for 26% of the residual variance in the number of DUI arrests made annually once organizational effects have been removed. The relationships revealed are as expectancy theory predicts, except for instrumentality variables, which show a negative relationship to arrest productivity. This is due largely to the orientation of a small number of “rate busters,” whose exceptionally high arrest rate and negative attitudes toward their peers and the department hierarchy make them a distinct group accounting for a disproportionate number of arrests.

Looking at power struggles primarily within national boundaries reifies the nation-state and misses larger issues of control in the international system. Using the example of female genital cutting (FGC), we consider the relative importance of local constituencies versus international normative influence in creating national policies. We find that the occurrence of anti-FGC legislation in countries where many individuals support the procedure, the timing and character of national legal action directed against FGC, and the uniformity of political action all lend weight to the importance of international norms. At the national level, we find (1) reform is often a top-down process in which national laws are developed to change rather than reflect local attitudes, and (2) African states tend to work around local communities by adopting bureaucratic policies to combat FGC (Western countries, in contrast, tend to adopt formal laws). At the international level, our findings suggest (1) the structural position of international actors influences whether they deploy assimilative or coercive reform strategies, (2) contradictions among international ideals limits Western hegemony, and (3) international ideals can simultaneously empower (by offering options) and disempower (by disengaging states from local constituencies) local individuals.

This article tells the story of the establishment of the Law and Society Association in the early to mid-1960s. To tell the story, the authors concentrate on the personal stories of the individuals active in that early period and on four university campus sites—the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Denver, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin—at which much of the impetus was focused. They also examine key institutions that funded and/or encouraged links between law and social science—the Russell Sage Foundation, the Walter E. Meyer Research Institute of Law, and the American Bar Foundation. The article seeks also to investigate more generally the factors that came together to build a field of law and social science—which in turn helped to provide the ideas and build the institutions involved in the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. The field was created in part by a process involving both competition and cooperation between law and social science over the new terrain of social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, and crime. The authors suggest that, over time, the center of gravity of the field moved toward law, leaving the social science disciplines for the most part outside. The development of the field generally was also affected by the strong shift in the relative values of these social sciences—especially sociology—in relation to economics in the 1980s.