This article evaluates two basic issues about dockets and case outcomes in American appellate courts. First, what determines the extent to which a court devotes its docket to civil cases involving asymmetrical power relationships between litigants? Second, in civil cases in which the “have-nots” are pitted against the “haves,” which forces determine the extent to which courts favor the less privileged? To answer these questions, we identify power asymmetric civil cases and the size of each court's docket by examining all 6,750 cases decided in state supreme courts in 1996. Results reveal that contextual factors are formidable in shaping both agenda space and win rates in civil disputes involving conflicts between advantaged and disadvantaged litigants. Institutional features of supreme courts and state court systems, the supply of legal resources, and public preferences all emerge as critical influences on the willingness of the states' highest courts to decide have/have not conflicts and on the ultimate disposition of these cases. In sum, a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which courts treat cases involving the disadvantaged and, more broadly, function as agents of redistributive change cannot be achieved without focusing beyond the ideological preferences of judges and the skill of the litigants.

Some of us see law as largely marginal to American life (see, e.g., Macaulay, 1984), but other colleagues assert that law constitutes society. One position does not contradict the other because we are talking about different things. Cases, statutes, and enforcement agencies very seldom directly influence everyday life. At the same time, law is an important part of culture. Despite many debates (see, e.g., Hall, 1977; Harris, 1980; Ortner, 1984), legal culture affects everyday life in important ways. At the very least, it provides a vocabulary with which we rationalize our actions to others and ourselves. As Geertz (1983: 173, 232) insists, “law is not a bounded set of norms …, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real.” Law is “meaning … not machinery.” It is “a species of social imagination.” It “is constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them.”

This article examines the nature of racial bias in the death sentencing process. After reviewing the various general explanations for the continued significance of race in capital cases, we report the results of an empirical study in which some aspects of racially biased death sentencing are examined in depth. Specifically, in a simulated capital penalty-phase trial setting where participants were assigned to small group “juries” and given an opportunity to deliberate, white male jurors were significantly more likely to sentence black defendants to death than were women and nonwhite jurors. This racialized pattern was explained in part by the differential evaluation of the case facts and the perceptions of the defendant that were made by the white male jurors. We discuss these findings in light of social psychological theories of contemporary racism, and we conclude that the demonstrated bias in capital jury settings should be understood as an interaction of several factors, including individual juror characteristics, group-level demographic composition, and group deliberation processes.

In recent years there has been substantial concern over the issue of whether the judiciary is a representative institution. Most research on the matter suggests that judges are to some degree sensitive to public opinion, but confusion exists over the process through which the public affects the courts. This research is designed to reduce the level of confusion.

Taking advantage of the quasi-experimental research design afforded by the “circuit” system of court organization used by the Iowa trial courts, this research investigates the “sharing” model of representation. In order to insure against spurious results, controls are introduced for three types of influences on sentencing decisions: defendant and case attributes, judge attributes and role orientations, and local system practices. Analysis of a path model consisting of measures of sentencing behavior, seriousness of crime in the local jurisdiction, and perceptions of crime seriousness reveals that one-sixth of the variance in sentences can be explained. However, substantial variation across judges in responsiveness to local norms is also discovered.

Further investigation of these data was undertaken to determine the factors that account for variation in the strength of environmental linkages. The analysis suggests that judges with greater contact with their constituencies, who have experienced electoral defeat, and who assume a “delegate” role orientation, are far more influenced by environmental factors.

The article concludes with some observations on how the process of recruitment and early career patterns affect representation.

Evidence that juries treat corporate defendants less favorably than individual defendants is often cited in support of the widely held view that juries are biased against wealthy “deep-pocket” defendants. Such evidence confounds defendant wealth and defendant identity. In two juror simulation experiments involving citizens on jury duty, these factors were separated by manipulating whether the defendant was described as a poor individual, a wealthy individual, or a corporation; the defendant's assets were described identically in the latter two conditions. In Experiment 1, liability was significantly more likely, and awards were significantly greater, for corporate defendants than for wealthy individual defendants, but verdicts against poor versus wealthy individuals did not differ. In Experiment 2, awards were larger against wealthy individuals who engaged in commercial rather than personal activities, and awards in the personal activity condition were larger against corporations than wealthy individuals. There was little evidence for a defendant wealth effect on juror judgments. While juries do appear to treat corporations differently, the explanation may have more to do with citizens' views about the special risks and responsibilities of commercial activity.

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.

I employ a theoretical framework developed on the basis of the writings of Max Weber to analyze historical developments in the formation of international police organizations. I rely on a comparative analysis of selected cases of international police networks and centrally focus on the most famous and enduring of such structures, the International Criminal Police Commission, the forerunner of the organization since 1956 known as “Interpol.” Using a Weberian perspective of bureaucratization, I maintain that the formation of international police organizations was historically made possible when public police institutions were sufficiently detached from the political centers of their respective states to function autonomously as expert bureaucracies. Under such circumstances of institutional autonomy, police bureaucracies fostered practices of collaboration across the borders of their respective national jurisdictions because and when they were motivated by a professionally defined interest in the fight against international crime. In conclusion to this analysis, I argue for the value of sociological perspectives of social control that are not reductionist, but that instead bring out the specific socially and sociologically significant dimensions of control mechanisms.

Police reformers in the early 21st century place great importance on the development of police-community partnerships, but they have not recognized the deep obstacles that these relationships face. This study argues that the central problems of working in partnership involve conflict over values: Different organizations advance different social values, and when the partners who cling to them try to collaborate, conflict flares up at the point of contact. I draw on several case studies to describe how these conflicts surface and potentially undermine partnerships, and I analyze the strategies that police agencies have developed to respond to them. This analysis reveals that community policing has fundamental (and probably desirable) implications for police practice because it forces police to attend to many neglected dimensions of their mandate. The article thereby offers a new interpretation of community policing's implications for practice and a new interpretation of its value as a reform movement.

This article reports the results of a qualitative study of personal injury lawyers in Connecticut. Building on the results of an earlier study of lawyers in Florida, “Transforming Punishment Into Compensation: In the Shadow of Punitive Damages” (Baker 1998), the Connecticut study describes and explores the implications of professional norms and practices that govern tort settlement behavior. In particular, it examines the moral and practical barriers to collecting “blood money” (money from individual defendants, as opposed to liability insurance companies), as well as explanations for victims' apparent ability to partially trump the claims of subrogating workers' compensation and health insurance carriers. The results pose a challenge to the conventional understanding that tort law in action is a simpler, more streamlined version of tort law on the books. In addition, the results suggest that compensation and retribution figure far more prominently in tort law in action than does the deterrence emphasized in much of the theoretical and doctrinal literature.

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in the course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international politics and public international law. Consequendy, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical conditions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new conditions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law.

This paper estimates the voter registration, turnout, and party registration in the 2008 general election for men with felony convictions in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Missouri, and North Carolina. The findings indicate that turnout among felons is much lower than previous research has shown. Ex-felon turnout in 2008 varied by state, averaging 22.2 percent. People captured and convicted for their first offense after the election voted at similarly low rates. Also contrary to the expectations of previous literature, the ex-felon population does not seem overwhelmingly Democratic. In North Carolina and Florida, two states for which the data are available, party registration varies by race. Among registered black male ex-felons, 71.7 percent in North Carolina and 84.2 percent in Florida are registered Democrats. Among whites, however, only 35.3 percent and 36.4 percent of ex-felons are registered Democrats in North Carolina and Florida, respectively.

The role of law in social change has been a subject of many academic debates. However, not much attention has been given to the contradictory ways in which activists for social change justify or criticize the use of law. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 25 social justice activists, I analyze the ways in which activists evaluate the role of law in social change. I find that activists invoke three distinct schemas of evaluation: instrumental, political, and cultural. The instrumental schema emphasizes change in the allocation of concrete resources; the political schema views change as the empowerment of marginalized communities; and the cultural schema emphasizes the transformation of assumptions that are shared by all members of society. Each schema provides activists with a particular order of justification that enables them to justify or to criticize the role of law in social change. While the multiplicity of schemas sustains the commonsense notion of law as a means for social change, it also accounts for possible changes in this notion.

This article compares findings from two surveys of Chicago lawyers, the first conducted in 1975 and the second in 1995. The earlier study indicated that the Chicago bar was then divided into two broad sectors or “hemispheres,” one serving large corporations and similar organizations and the other serving individuals and small businesses. Analyses of the structure of co-practice of the fields of law indicate that the hemispheres are now less distinct. The fields are less tightly connected and less clearly organized—they became more highly specialized during the intervening 20 years and are now organized in smaller clusters. Clear indications of continuing separation of work by client type remain, however. Estimates of the amount of lawyers' time devoted to each field in 1975 and 1995 indicate that corporate practice fields now consume a larger share of Chicago lawyers' attention, while fields such as probate receive a declining percentage. Growth is most pronounced in the litigation fields, especially in business litigation. The organizational contexts within which law is practiced both reflect and contribute to these changes. The scale of those organizations has increased greatly, and the allocation of work within them has been divided along substantive, doctrinal lines. As a result, there is a greater disaggregation of work and workgroups within the profession today.

This article addresses a series of paradoxes regarding informal settlements in cities in the developing world and their relation with the legal system. The first paradox regards the penalization of illegal land occupations on the one hand versus the legalization of that same practice on the other. Second, it looks at the relationship between land occupations as systematic violations of property rights, but with the goal of forming new property rights and thus paradoxically supporting private property as a substantive principle. Third, the reasoning behind the fact that the same system that denies legal access to housing for poor sectors simultaneously attempts to incorporate informal settlements in an ad hoc manner through legalization schemes is examined. It is shown that there is a logic to these paradoxes, which, although contradictory from standard legal perspectives, can be accommodated within a theoretical framework that distinguishes an internal normative order operating within informal settlements, from the state legal system, operative outside it. The proposed framework not only settles the paradoxes, but, this article concludes, can also guide attempts to deal with the enormous anticipated growth of informality in the developing world.

Field data from a longitudinal study of drug dealing reveal the importance of interpersonal networks in determining the impact of criminal sanctions. The level of perceived sanction severity was in large measure dependent on the degree of disruption created in interpersonal relations and on the resilience of these relations in adapting to the sanctioning process. Perceived certainty of sanctions was likewise dependent on characteristics of interpersonal interactions. Perceived certainty and severity of sanctions combined to define the level of fear. Sanction-induced fear increased network density and closure. These network properties were largely responsible for the paradoxical impact of sanctions. The relevance of these findings for deterrence research is noted throughout.

There is a long-standing debate over the role of human and social capital in explaining the gender gap in the earnings of professionals. Expanding on current research on sex differences in the incomes of male and female lawyers, we show how the process of earnings determination varies by sex and organizational sectors differing in sex composition and bureaucratization of decision making. Using data from a random sample of lawyers, we demonstrate that the effects of human and social capital on income vary among males and among females practicing law in private, corporate and government organizational sectors of the legal profession. We also show that there are sex differences in the effects of human and social capital on income within these sectors. Together, these findings suggest that stratification processes in the legal profession are based on both sex and organizational segmentation.

Data covering a ten-year period in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are used to estimate the effect of race and other variables on sentences given to persons charged with armed robbery and burglary. Longitudinal data, coupled with interviews of participants, are used to overcome problems of sample selection bias usually associated with cross-sectional studies of the determinants of sentencing. The research shows that race had a clear effect on both the decision to imprison and the length of prison terms in the earliest period (1967-1968) but not in the two later periods (1971-1972 and 1976-1977). The racial neutrality of sentencing in the later periods appears to be the result of changes in the composition of the judiciary, a greater bureaucratization of the prosecutorial and defense bar, and the rise of decision rules that reduce the effect of judicial ideology on outcomes.

This report describes a study of the effects of a Scandinavian-style law concerning alcohol-impaired driving. The past two decades have seen the adoption throughout most of the developed world of drinking-and-driving laws based on principles originally developed in Norway and Sweden. The French law of July 12, 1978, was a part of this general development. Interrupted time-series analysis of French data on crash-related injuries and fatalities shows that the 1978 law had a notable deterrent effect, but that the effect was not permanent.

For Émile Durkheim, crime and punishment were integral features of organized social life. He considered the study of crime and punishment essential to the sociological enterprise precisely because these “social facts” revealed the inner workings of society and the mechanism through which societies change. In The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim argues (1938:70) that “crime is … necessary, it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life,” and that “it is no longer possible … to dispute the fact that law and morality vary from one social type to the next, nor that they change within the same type if the conditions of life are modified.” Because he viewed law as a reflection of basic social arrangements, Durkheim grounded his theory of social change in an analysis of comparative legal types. He assumed (1933:68) that “since law reproduces the principal forms of social solidarity, we have only to classify the different types of law to find therefrom the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it.” In his central theoretical work, The Division of Labor in Society (1933), Durkheim linked the changing nature of legal controls (repressive to restitutive) to transformations in the nature of social solidarity (mechanical to organic).