To achieve institutional goals, public agencies commonly rely on the political support of interest groups, the executive, and the legislature. While much is written about public agency vulnerability to pressures from these sources, little is known about how influence and agency behavior are linked. This article provides an in-depth look at one agency's response to an important segment of its environment. Drawing on an empirical study of administrative discretion, the study explores the Immigration and Naturalization Service's dependence on the support of politicians and pragmatic response to their “casework” on behalf of constituents. The article highlights a neglected feature of the influence process—how it affects the behavior of front-line public officials, particularly through their anticipation of the possibility that there will or might be casework complaints. It describes the inspection context as understood by front-line immigration inspectors, the asymmetric risks posed to them by casework, and the strategies they “rationally” employ to deal with these risks—strategies that promote accommodation as well as responses based on the perceived power of violators. The article suggests that a lack of countervailing incentives in certain kinds of cases underlies a cultural-political environment of accommodation to outsiders.

A number of contemporary scholars have argued that Max Weber sought to establish a positive relationship between the highest form of rationality in legal thought—logically formal rationality, and the most advanced type of economic rationality, that embodied in capitalism. Since capitalism actually developed first in England, where no such logically formal legal system existed, these scholars conclude that Weber's sociology of law suffers from various contradictions that are frequently referred to as the “England problem.” This paper rejects the idea of the “England problem” and argues that Weber actually identified formal justice and guaranteed rights, rather than logically formal legal thought, as the features of modern law that directly facilitated the rise of capitalism. It also challenges Habermas's claim that Weber ignored the normative dimension of modern law and argues that he considered the “rightness” of law to be an important factor in the rise of capitalism but found that with the disenchantment of law this normative dimension has weakened.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have signaled the need for sound empirical studies of the secondary effects of adult businesses on the surrounding areas for use in conjunction with local zoning restrictions. This study seeks to determine whether a relationship exists between adult erotic dance clubs and negative secondary effects in the form of increased numbers of crimes reported in the areas surrounding the adult businesses, in Charlotte, North Carolina. For each of 20 businesses, a control site (matched on the basis of demographic characteristics related to crime risk) is compared for crime events over the period of three years (1998–2000) using data on crime incidents reported to the police. We find that the presence of an adult nightclub does not increase the number of crime incidents reported in localized areas surrounding the club (defined by circular areas of 500- and 1,000-foot radii) as compared to the number of crime incidents reported in comparable localized areas that do not contain such an adult business. Indeed, the analyses imply the opposite, namely, that the nearby areas surrounding the adult business sites have smaller numbers of reported crime incidents than do corresponding areas surrounding the three control sites studied. These findings are interpreted in terms of the business mandates of profitability and continuity of existence of the businesses.

Many studies suggest that courts fail to protect individual rights since they support and uphold state repressive practices during periods of emergency or confrontation. Previous studies focused on judicial policies as reflected injudicial declarations and decisions that were fully disposed by judges and officially published. I argue that the study of out-of-court settlements and the comparison between the outcomes of settlements and the judicial rhetoric are key to understanding the behavior of courts in times of national crisis. At such times, courts may hesitate to openly confront the government on the issue of minority rights, but they may strive to protect minorities by exerting pressure on the governmental legal apparatus and by effecting out-of-court settlements more favorable to minorities than official decisions. Thus, courts influence social practices while avoiding government or public opinion counterreactions that would impair their institutional autonomy. This argument is demonstrated in a case study of the Israeli High Court of Justice during the Palestinian Intifada.

How does law change society? To gain new leverage on this long-standing question, this article draws on two lines of research that often ignore each other: political science research on the mobilization of law, and sociological research on the diffusion of organizational practices. Our insights stem from six case studies of diverse organizations' responses to the accommodation provisions in the Americans with Disabilities Act and related state laws. We found that different modes of exposure to the law combined with organizational attributes to produce distinct “rights practices”—styles of standard operating procedures and informal routines that reflect the understanding of legal requirements within an organization. The diversity of the organizational responses challenges simple dichotomies between compliance/noncompliance, change through deterrence/change through norms, and mobilization/nonmobilization, and it underscores the importance of combining political science and sociological perspectives on law and social change.

During the 1960s and 1970s the American social movement for equal employment opportunity (EEO) succeeded in getting Congress and the courts to prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. We believe that the effectiveness of EEO laws depends not just upon their passage, however, but also upon their continuing successful mobilization. This is the first article to describe quantitatively the extent and outcomes of the mobilization of EEO laws at the appellate court level. It shows that mobilization is increasing; that the federal government and various interest groups are actively involved in the enforcement process; that much is at stake in many EEO cases; that alleged victims of discrimination win their court cases over half the time; and that reverse discrimination in EEO does not seem to be a serious problem.

Interest in legal innovations, particularly in the criminal law realm, often centers on an innovation's emergence, but not its subsequent diffusion. Typifying this trend, existing accounts of the prison's historical roots persuasively explain the prison's “birth” in Jacksonian-Era northern coastal cities, but not its subsequent rapid, widespread, and homogenous diffusion across a culturally, politically, and economically diverse terrain. Instead, this study offers a neo-institutional account of the prison's diffusion, emphasizing the importance of national, field-level pressures rather than local, contextual factors. This study distinguishes between the prison's innovation and early adoption, which can be explained by the need to replace earlier proto-prisons, and its subsequent adoption, particularly in the South and frontier states, which was driven by the desire to conform to increasingly widespread practices. This study further attributes the isomorphic nature of the diffusion to institutional pressures, including uncertainty surrounding the new technology, pseudoprofessional penal reformers and their claims about competing models of confinement, and contingent historical factors that reinforced these institutional pressures. This study illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the motivations that initiate criminal law innovations and those that advance their diffusion.

This article advances a new account of judicial behavior: the thesis of tactical balancing. Building on existing models of judicial decision making, the thesis posits that high court justices balance a discrete set of considerations—justices' ideologies, their institutional interests, the potential consequences of their rulings, public opinion, elected leaders' preferences, and law—as they decide important cases. Variation in a high court's balancing of those considerations as it decides different cases leads it to alternate between challenging and endorsing the exercise of government power. The way in which high courts carry out this “tactical balancing” reflects their broader strategy for prioritizing the different roles they can play in a polity, and thus has significant implications for the rule of law and regime stability in developing democracies. The thesis is illustrated through a detailed analysis of the Brazilian high court's rulings on cases concerning crucial economic policies (1985–2004).

Drawing on interviews with birth and adoptive parents who have remained in contact with each other following placement of an adopted child, this article examines the dynamic of motherhood that emerges in these relationships. Moving back and forth from legal and social event to women's subjective experiences of these events, it argues that open adoption constitutes a “potential space” where two familiar “truths” about motherhood—as an experience of identity and of connection, and as an experience of contingency and separation—converge in powerful ways. Focusing on the double vision of mothers who feel both “real” and “not real” at the same time, it explores the tendency of open adoption to resolve into familiar dichotomies of nature and law and its potential to produce new subjectivities that defy legal categories. The article suggests that analysis of the sociolegal world and of the possibilities for its transformation must work along the unstable boundary of different subjective worlds, moving between them to expose the exclusions and injustices upon which each is premised.

The process-based model dominates contemporary American research on police-community relations and perceptions of police. A sizable literature has examined the linkages between procedural justice, legitimacy, compliance with the law, and cooperation with police. Less examined is the relationship between legitimacy and public empowerment of police. This study examines this relationship, focusing on police militarization. We first examine the direct effect of legitimacy on public willingness to allow police to become more militarized. Drawing from cognitive psychology and rational choice theories, we then consider indirect paths between legitimacy and empowerment, concentrating on two anticipated consequences of militarization—an increase in police effectiveness and possible harm to civil liberties. Using a national sample of over 700 American adults, and structural equation modeling, results indicate legitimacy has both direct and indirect effects on police empowerment, in part by shaping assessments of the possible consequences of empowerment. Implications for theory and policy are discussed.

This article examines the consequences of prison overcrowding litigation for U.S. prisons. We use insights derived from the endogeneity of law perspective to develop expectations about the likely impact of overcrowding litigation on five outcomes: prison admissions, prison releases, spending on prison capacity, prison crowding, and incarceration rates. Using newly available data on prison overcrowding litigation cases joined with panel data on U.S. states from 1971 to 1996, we offer a novel and comprehensive analysis of the impact that overcrowding litigation has had on U.S. prisons. We find that it had no impact on admissions or release rates and did not lead to any reduction in prison crowding. Litigation did, however, lead to an increase in spending on prison capacity and incarceration rates. We discuss the implications of these results for endogeneity of law theory, attempts to achieve reform through litigation, and the politics of prison construction.

This article addresses the question of how states can best promote citizens' compliance with laws that regulate livelihoods. Based on ethnographic data from fishing communities in three countries—Norway, Canada, and South Africa—the article compares compliance motivations that exist under different socioeconomic and political conditions. The comparisons give rise to a typology of three compliance motivations: deterrence, moral support for the law's content, and the legislator's authority. This article then identifies three governable preconditions—enforcement, empowerment of citizens, and civic identity—that respectively explain these motivations. The article argues that the compliance discourse in a given type of state must be framed such that it includes at least the governable preconditions for compliance that have not been met in that state. Consequently, a functional compliance strategy would vary between different state types. The article thus questions the transferability of the developed world's compliance discourses to the developing world.

While undergoing training in professional school, students are assumed to experience attitude change, internalizing the norms of their future profession. In law school this change is thought to be particularly conservative, reflecting a business orientation and a minimal concern with pro bono and social reform work. This paper examines these assumptions by presenting data from a panel study of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. Although some changes in attitudes are found, they are much smaller than suggested by recent critical literature on legal education. These findings lead to the proposal of a research agenda that stresses the contribution of the job market as well as that of education in fostering a traditional orientation toward the role of lawyers and the law.

It is an intriguing puzzle that women lawyers, despite less desirable working conditions and blocked career advancement, report similar satisfaction as men lawyers with their legal careers. The paradoxical work satisfaction reported by women and men lawyers obscures a more notable difference in their depressed or despondent feelings. Using a panel study of women and men lawyers practicing in Toronto since the mid-1980s, we find at least three causal pathways through which gender indirectly is connected to job dissatisfaction and feelings of despondency. The first path is through gender differences in occupational power, which lead to differential despondency. The second path is through differences in perceived powerlessness, which directly influence job dissatisfaction. The third path is through feelings of despondency that result from concerns about the career consequences of having children. The combined picture that results illustrates the necessity to include measures of depressed affect in studies of dissatisfaction with legal practice. Explicit measurement and modeling of concerns about the consequences of having children and depressed feelings reveal a highly gendered response of women to legal practice that is otherwise much less apparent. Women are more likely to respond to their professional grievances with internalized feelings of despondency than with externalized expressions of job dissatisfaction. That is, they are more likely to privatize than publicize their professional troubles.

This article examines the impact of lawyer capability on the decisionmaking of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). Extending prior attorney capability studies of U.S. judicial decisionmaking, we test three lawyer variables: prior litigation experience, litigation team size, and Queen's Counsel designation. We find that the first two variables have a statistically significant and positive relationship with the SCC's decisions in non-reference-question cases from 1988 to 2000. Moreover, this relationship persists even after controlling for party capability, issue area, and judicial policy preferences.

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the “ex ante” function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states (Wisconsin, Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that had adopted a minority position on some aspect of criminal law reported the relevant law of their state to be no different than did citizens of “majoritarian” states. Path analyses using structural equation modeling suggest that people make guesses about what their state law holds by extrapolating from their personal view of whether or not the act in question ought to be criminalized.

How can we make sense of the use of legal claims and tactics under conditions of internal displacement and armed conflict? This article argues that in violent contexts mobilization frames are unstable and constantly shifting, resources tend to vanish, and political opportunities often imply considerable physical danger. It is grounded on a three-year, multimethod study that followed internally displaced women's organizations as they demanded government assistance and protection in Colombia. Through detailed examples of specific cases, this article illustrates the constraints of legal mobilization in violent contexts, as well as different social movement strategies of resistance. It, thus, contributes to decentering theories of social movement uses of law that tend to be based on the legal cultures and institutions of industrialized liberal democracies, rather than on those of the Global South, and hence, tend to exclude violence.

This article analyzes the social origins of evidence. Applying Black's theory of partisan behavior to a variety of empirical materials indicates that the ability to attract supporting evidence is differentially distributed across social life. Thus, the amount of investigative effort legal officials put into a case, the willingness of people to testify, and the supportiveness of witness testimony all increase with the social status of the principal parties and the number of intimate ties they have. In addition, the quality, or credibility, of the evidence parties attract varies directly with their social status and the number of distant ties they have. Far from creating a factual component divorced from the social dimension of the case as is often believed, the evidentiary process helps to transform the attributes of high status and social ties into successful legal claims.

Based on in-depth interview materials, this article examines why most rural-urban migrant entrepreneurs in Beijing do not fully comply with a discriminatory license requirement, and in particular, why they prefer license-renting from the locals. This article suggests that the law's lack of legitimacy adds weight to instrumental considerations. But more important, this license-renting practice seems to be reinforced and sustained institutionally by local businesses, law enforcement officers, and the local authorities, because their interests are inextricably intertwined with it. The whole situation constitutes a general equilibrium through which various interests are balanced. This case study thus paints a far more complicated picture of the law's impact on people's behavior than usually assumed. Instrumental concerns, or coercive action and sanctions alone, do not adequately explain people's interaction with the law in a “lawless” circumstance; a whole range of instrumental concerns must be considered, and they, together with sanctions, must be understood in the context of a larger institutional environment in which the interactions of various players unfold.

Despite concerns over racial disparities in imprisonment across the United States, little empirical attention has been paid to how changing the structure of sentencing might affect levels of disparity. This article examines whether Ohio's shift to determinate sentencing corresponded with significant changes in legal and extralegal effects on case outcomes, both generally and differentially for African American and white defendants. Bilevel analyses of felony defendants from 24 jurisdictions reveal relatively few substantive changes in these effects over time. Some changes involved reductions in race-related disparities (e.g., in the severity of charges convicted on), with others reflecting increased disparity (e.g., higher imprisonment likelihoods for African Americans). Findings underscore a modest link between restructured sentencing and actual case outcomes overall, with some relatively mixed effects on levels of disparity.