In order to understand patterns of police behavior in American cities at the turn of the century, it is important to grasp a crucial fact: the police, although they were formally engaged in law enforcement, were little oriented toward legal norms. As late as 1900, when Chicago's police department numbered 3,225 men, there was no organized training. New policemen heard a brief speech from a high-ranking officer, received a hickory club, a whistle, and a key to the call box, and were sent out on the street to work with an experienced officer. Not only were policemen untrained in law, but they operated within a criminal justice system that generally placed little emphasis upon legal procedure. Most of those arrested by the police were tried before local police justices, who rarely had legal training. Those arrested seldom had attorneys, so that no legal defense was made. Thus, there were few mechanisms for introducing legal norms into the street experiences and crime control activities of policemen.

Although the number of racial and ethnic minority lawyers in the legal profession has greatly increased, concern remains about their low percentage among partners in elite law firms. Using a nationally representative sample of young American lawyers, we compare a human capital–based theory, which emphasizes measures of merit, and an institutional discrimination–based theory, which focuses on differences in partner contact and mentoring. The results indicate that institutional discrimination theory is the better way of understanding racial and ethnic differences in lawyer retention. Future affirmative action programs need to focus not just on access but also the processes within large firms if minority presence is to be increased.

The federal sentencing guidelines have lost some authoritative force since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a series of recent cases that the guidelines are advisory, rather than presumptive, in determining criminal sentences. While these court decisions represent a dramatic legal intervention, sociolegal scholarship suggests that organizational norms are likely to change slowly and less dramatically than the formal law itself. The research reported here looks specifically at the consequences of such legal transformations over time and across locale, using multilevel analysis of U.S. Sentencing Commission sentence outcome data from 1993 to 2009. Our findings suggest that districts vary considerably from each other in sentencing practices over the time period studied, and that there is relative within-district stability of outcomes within districts over time, including in response to the Supreme Court's mandates. We also find that policy change appears to influence the mechanisms by which cases are adjudicated in order to reach normative outcomes. Finally, we find that the relative district-level reliance upon mandatory minimums, which were not directly impacted by the guidelines changes, is an important factor in how drug trafficking cases are adjudicated. We conclude that local legal practices not only diverge in important ways across place, but also become entrenched over time such that top-down legal reform is largely reappropriated and absorbed into locally established practices.

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.

Although the meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries, one thread of thought unifies almost all of the many diverging perspectives: a largely unquestioned belief that race is self-evident and visually obvious, defined largely by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. This suggests that “seeing race” is an experience largely unmediated by broader social forces; we simply know it when we see it. It also suggests that those who cannot see are likely to have a diminished understanding of race. But is this empirically accurate?

I examine these questions by interviewing people who have been totally blind since birth about race and compare their responses to sighted individuals. I not only find that blind people have as significant an understanding of race as anyone else and that they understand race visually, but that this visual understanding of race stems from interpersonal and institutional socializations that profoundly shape their racial perceptions. These findings highlight how race and racial thinking are encoded into individuals through iterative social practices that train people to think a certain way about the world around them. In short, these practices are so strong that even blind people, in a conceptual sense, “see” race. Rather than being self-evident, these interviews draw attention to how race becomes visually salient through constitutive social practices that give rise to visual understandings of racial difference for blind and sighted people alike. This article concludes with a discussion of these findings' significance for understanding the role of race in law and society.

Indigenous people in the Philippine Cordillera Region maintain legal pluralism by invoking several legal orders—customary laws, conflicting national laws, international law, and principles of human rights—to assert claims to ancestral lands. Although the U.S. Supreme Court in 1909 held that Philippine lands that had been occupied from time immemorial are presumed never to have been public, the Spanish colonial Regalian doctrine, derived from the explorer Magellan's claim of all lands in the Archipelago for the Spanish crown, remains the theoretical bedrock on which Philippine national land laws rest. Land not covered by official documentation, such as the highland areas occupied by indigenous groups who have not acquired legal titles, is considered part of the public domain. Recently, dam-building projects, logging concessions, and commercial farming in highland areas have spurred renewed efforts by indigenous groups to assert rights to ancestral lands threatened with flooding, deforestation, and dispossession.

Largely as a result of the feminist movement, most states have passed some form of rape reform legislation. Most rape law research has attempted to ascertain whether the reformed laws have achieved specific instrumental goals. In contrast, this paper emphasizes rape law reform as a symbolic indicator of women's contemporary social status. We believe there is a need for a greater appreciation of the diversity of rape law reform across the country and of the coexistence of traditional and feminist elements in contemporary law. Through a comprehensive empirical assessment of state rape statutes, we identify the different dimensions of rape legislation and provide insight into the degree to which feminist conceptualizations of rape have achieved social legitimacy.

Drawing on C. Wright Mills' analysis of vocabularies of motive, this paper examines the ways lawyers and clients interpret and give meaning to the social behavior involved in the legal process of divorce. Based on observation of 115 law office conferences, the paper describes discussions between lawyers and clients concerning marriage failure, problems in the legal process, and planning strategy. It shows how lawyers and clients bring different agendas and views of the social world to these conversations. Those differences are considered part of the context for understanding the way professional authority is exercised and resisted. Clients reconstruct the past and explain their own behavior as well as the actions of their spouses. Lawyers avoid being drawn into that reconstruction. Their interpretive work explains the way the divorce process works and how it shapes the actions of divorcing spouses. The paper analyzes the predicaments created by these interpretations of reality and the consequences that flow from them.

The sociological study of deviant behavior has begun to focus less on the deviant and more on society's response to him. One of several implications of this perspective is that a major concern of the sociology of deviance should be the identification and analysis of different kinds of systems of social control. Particularly important is the analysis of the impact of different kinds of control systems on the way deviant behavior is perceived and expressed in societies.

By playing down the importance of intrinsic differences between deviants and conventional people, and between the social situation of deviants and that of nondeviants, the focus on social response implies much more than the commonplace idea that society defines the kinds of behavior that will be considered odd, disgusting, or criminal. It implies that many elements of the behavior system of a given kind of deviance, including such things as the rate of deviance and the kinds of people who are identified as a deviant, will be significantly affected by the kind of control system through which the behavior is defined and managed.

Restorative justice is a form of informal justice growing rapidly among criminal justice practitioners. It decenters the focus of criminal justice from the offender breaking a law of the state to the harm caused the victim and community. Resolution is said to come from offenders taking responsibility and making amends for the harm done and from communities supporting the victim and providing offenders with opportunities and skills to reintegrate as contributing members.

Restorative justice theory largely ignores the role of professionals in the criminal justice process, and yet professionals have played a dominant part in initiating many restorative justice programs. Several theoretical traditions recognize professionals as being important intermediaries between citizens and the state. The theory of democratic professionalism argues that professionals can play crucial roles in increasing and improving democratic participation in public affairs. This article examines two functioning restorative justice programs to flesh out what democratic professionalism might look like in operation—what tasks professionals perform and what citizen involvement means to the professionals. We argue that restorative justice cannot get along without professionals and that democratic professionalism may help restorative justice to avoid some of the problems associated with other approaches to informal justice by increasing true community participation but balancing it with concern for individuals' rights.

A conception of corporate behavior as criminal has entered the scientific and popular vocabulary. This has been accompanied by an expansion of common law to include the activities of corporations. The definitional change is exemplified by the indictment and trial of Ford Motor Company on charges of reckless homicide. The present work focuses on the history of events surrounding this precedent action. Using information from media accounts, it explores the definitional processes by which the world's second largest automobile manufacturer was indicted as criminal. Content analysis of these reports suggests that the expansion of legal parameters to include formerly exempt behavior was preceded by the development of a vocabulary of deviance, personalization of harm, and attributions of nonrepentance to the offender. Public reevaluation of corporate actors and actions in terms of a vocabulary previously reserved for conventional criminality, the transformation of the definition from one of product defect and diffuse consumer cost to one of personal injury, and depiction of the corporation as refusing to recognize the harms associated with its acts, it is argued, opened the way to the application of criminal statutes.

Past research indicates that front-line criminal justice workers are the critical players in determining whether innovations in penal policy are realized. Recent attempts to understand the diversity in the application of the penal harm movement have, however, sidestepped the primary audience of these policies, the population of convicted offenders. This article uses data from two prisons to examine the effects of correctional officers on women prisoners' adjustment to prison life. Using regression models and interview data, we find that correctional officer behavior has a profound impact on women's ability to adjust to prison, and this effect is largely independent of the prisoners' characteristics and the institutions in which they are housed. On a theoretical level, the findings speak to recent calls to examine the background and foreground of penal culture. On a practical level, they highlight the need to understand the environments from which women are emerging, not just the communities into which they are released.

How do people living in a refugee camp engage with legal practices, discourses, and institutions? Critics argue that refugee camps leave people in “legal limbo” depriving them of the “right to have rights” despite the presence of international humanitarian actors and the entitlements enshrined in international law. For that reason, refugee camps have become a highly visible symbol of failed human rights campaigns. In contrast, I found in an ethnography of the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa, that although people living as refugees faced chronic insecurity and injustice, they engaged extensively with several different facets of the law. I illuminate three interrelated dimensions of their experiences: (1) their development as international legal subjects; (2) their alienation from domestic legal institutions; and (3) their agency within the legal field. The article contributes to the research agenda on law in humanitarian settings an empirically grounded account of the subjective dimensions of legal alienation and mobilization in a refugee camp. More broadly, it contributes to international human rights debates by theorizing a mixed outcome of international human rights campaigns: the emergence of wards of international law, people deeply embedded in the international legal system, but alienated from local law.

The conventional model of the practice of law views lawyers as those who apply legal rules in the service of client interests, checked only by the constraints of the adversary system. A study of the impact of consumer protection laws on the practice of Wisconsin lawyers shows this to be an oversimplification. Lawyers for individuals tend to know little of the precise contours of consumer protection law. They most often serve as mediators between buyer and seller, relying on general norms of fairness and good faith. Lawyers for businesses are more likely to make use of the law, but they are seldom called on to deal with particular disputes. Lawyers' own values and interests are reflected in the way in which they represent clients. As a result, reform laws which create individual rights are likely to have only symbolic effect unless incentives are devised to make their vindication in the long-range interest of members of the bar. Moreover, an understanding of the many roles played by lawyers also requires a more expanded picture of practice. The picture of the lawyer as litigator in the adversary system may itself serve largely symbolic functions.

During the past decade there has been a resurgence of interest in the problem of law and social control. Indicative of this interest, a rekindling of an earlier tradition, is the founding of the Law and Society Association and its journal the Law & Society Review, the growth of course offerings both in law schools and social science departments, and the emergence of a rapidly growing body of literature. Research interests in this area, often captured by such terms as impact, compliance, legal effectiveness, and law and social change, have diverged from the traditional preoccupation with the development and meaning of formal legal doctrine and from the more recent behavioral concerns with judicial decisionmaking, to address the broader questions of the effects of law on society at large. While varying in breadth, depth, and precise focus, most of this research treats law as an independent variable and its consequences as the dependent variables, the events caused by the law. In the language of systems theory, the formal legal rules are the “policy outputs” while changes—of whatever scope—are the “policy outcomes.” Although these studies vary from one-shot case histories to projects involving multiple controls and multiple time series analyses, they all tend to conform to this general design.

This study departs from mainstream criminology to approach youth conflict and violence from a youth-centered perspective drawn from cultural studies of young people and sociolegal research. To access youth orientations, we analyze experiential stories of peer conflict written by students at a multiethnic, low-income high school situated in an urban core of the western United States. We argue that youth narratives of conflict offer glimpses into how young people make sense of conflict in their everyday lives, as well as insights as to how the images and decisional bases embedded in their storytelling connect to adult-centered discourses found in popular media and formal education. Our analyses identify a range of story types (“tales”), each marked by a different narrative style, that students fashion as they write about peer conflict: “action tales,” “moral tales,” “expressive tales,” and “rational tales.” In our study, students wrote a majority of stories in the action-tale narrative style. We propose three alternative explanations for this pattern using class code, moral development, and institutional resistance perspectives. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and policy implications of our work and raise questions for future research.

In this paper, we examine factors that affect whether the police are summoned to incidents of spousal violence. The actions of bystanders are distinguished from the actions of victims, and we find that victims and bystanders are moved by somewhat different influences. We also find that the immediate features of the situation dominate the decision to call the police and that many legitimate concerns are salient (e.g., whether there are injuries). In addition, however, some extralegal influences are important so that different offenders engaged in the same crime do not necessarily face the same risks of apprehension. For example, other things equal, bystanders are less likely to call the police if the offender and victim are living together.

Although tensions between substantive and formal rationality in the adult criminal justice system have received a great deal of attention, the existence of these tensions in the juvenile justice system has received little scholarly consideration. I seek to remedy this gap by exploring how punitive policies associated with the war on crime impact the formal and informal process of justice, the court community and work group, and the exercise of discretion in the juvenile courts. Drawing on qualitative data collected in three juvenile courts in Southern California, I identify the mechanisms by which prosecutors divert judicial discretion from the traditional rehabilitation-oriented bench officers to bench officers who are more accepting of the criminalization of juveniles. In addition, I investigate how and why rehabilitation-oriented bench officers at times abdicate their decisionmaking authority and make rulings that contradict their own assessments. My findings suggest that as the war on crime is extended to youth, the juvenile courts increasingly share the criminal courts' emphasis on offense rather than offender, enhanced prosecutorial power, and adversarial relationships within the court.

Since 1978, all countries in Latin America have either replaced or amended their constitutions. What explains the choice between these two substantively different means of constitutional transformation? This article argues that constitutions are replaced when they fail to work as governance structures or when their design prevents competing political interests from accommodating to changing environments. According to this perspective, constitutions are likely to be replaced when constitutional crises are frequent, when political actors lack the capacity to implement changes by means of amendments or judicial interpretation, or when the constitutional regime has a power-concentrating design. It is further argued that the frequency of amendments depends both on the length and detail of the constitution and on the interaction between the rigidity of the amendment procedure and the fragmentation of the party system. The article provides statistical evidence to support these arguments and discusses the normative implications of the analysis.