In recent years, the legal profession has undergone significant organizational restructuring with the dramatic growth of firms and a rapid increase in the number of female lawyers. We argue that big firms actively recruited female lawyers during a period when women were needed to fill roles of cultivating and serving increasing numbers of institutional or corporate clients. Yet despite women's contribution of legal talent to the development of clientele, a glass ceiling has restricted their opportunities to advance in law firm hierarchies. We examine two approaches to gender inequities in law firm hierarchy: disparity as economic efficiency and disparity as structural discrimination. Both approaches neglect aspects of social relations within law firms as well as social resources lawyers bring to their work. We therefore introduce a social capital perspective to unpack how human capital is enhanced and how exclusionary practices are reinforced in law firms. Using a longitudinal study of male and female lawyers conducted from 1990 to 1996, we specify several different forms of social capital. The findings from our study reveal that female lawyers participate fully in the accumulation of social capital in law firms, through service to valued institutional clientele and high billings, yet their efforts result in reduced probabilities of partnership.

This article reports data that contrast with an extended tradition of viewing litigation as incompatible with ongoing relationships. Within the regulatory process at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), nongovernmental actors having the most sustained relationships with EPA are the ones most likely to engage in litigation against the agency. Litigation within regulatory relationships is not explained by existing theory, which treats litigation largely as a function of relationships. A disturbance theory of disputing, which focuses on how litigation interacts with existing relationships, provides a more robust account of litigation generally and of its compatibility with ongoing regulatory relationships.

In this article, we use a Bourdieusian framework to theorize the relationship between cultural capital and legal consciousness, and in turn to consider how variation in legal consciousness contributes to the creation and maintenance of legal hegemony. We investigate how cultural capital shapes the ways people navigate situations that force them to mediate between state-conferred rights, on one hand, and requests from state authority, on the other. Specifically, we analyze open-ended responses to a series of vignettes about constitutional rights in the criminal procedure context. We find that high cultural capital gives rise to a greater sense of self-efficacy in police–citizen interactions. This finding parallels the literature on the influence of cultural capital in the education context and may point to a more general pattern of self-advocacy within the juridical field. People with high cultural capital also evince a more salient sense of entitlement, understanding their own needs and desires as paramount. The social processes we identify may make people with limited cultural capital more vulnerable to investigative authority, and thus more susceptible to arrest and prosecution. Even if knowledge of a right and the opportunity to assert that right are equally distributed, meaningful access to that right remains inequitable.

Defendants in criminal cases were asked to evaluate the fairness of the treatment they received. Several correlates of defendant evaluations are discussed, including “predisposing” variables (race, past record, and political alienation) and “case-specific” variables (sentence received, disposition by trial or plea, and a defendant's sense of how his sentence compares with those given to others). All are related to a sense of fair treatment, sentence received and comparison level most strongly. The implications of these findings for recent discussions of plea bargaining and greater sentence equity are discussed.

Using some appellate courts' reviews of projects to maintain moral order in the city as the main source of data, this article shows that an analysis of legal knowledge production that (1) is dynamic and (2) refuses to treat people and texts as totally different entities, one studied by social scientists and the other studied by lawyers, can tell us much about such familiar but seldom theorized legal maneuvers as judicial review and constitutional challenges. Choosing to analyze the dynamics of knowledge processes is inspired by Actor Network Theory (ANT), Bruno Latour's work in particular. This methodological choice is particularly appropriate because judicial review tends to avoid making judgments about the content of impugned laws or ordinances, focusing instead, as Latour does, on form and process. But insofar as legal processes in general privilege form and process to a greater or lesser degree, a more general argument is made about the appropriateness of using tools from ANT to study legal and quasi-legal knowledge networks.

Although more than 60,000 workers formally charge their employers with unlawful sex or race employment discrimination annually, fewer than one in five charges results in outcomes favorable to the complainant. Building on sociolegal and organizational theory, this study examines how employing organizations avoid unfavorable discrimination-charge outcomes. Using EEO-1 establishment reports matched to discrimination charge data provided by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I assess the effect of employers' legal experience, resources, and indicators of legal compliance on the likelihood that complainants receive favorable charge outcomes, benefits, monetary settlements, and policy change mandates. In general, I find that legal experience, establishment size, and indicators of legal compliance insulate employers from unfavorable charge outcomes. However, in situations where employers are willing to settle claims, legally experienced establishments are more likely to pay monetary damages and receive mandates to change their workplace policies.

Scholars have devoted attention to “cause lawyers” on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies—business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents—and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between “insider politics” and “populism,” which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential “mediators”—prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests.

Rights in American society present a paradox—critics increasingly assert that proliferation of rights is undermining Americans' sense of community, yet scholars continue to document Americans' reluctance to assert formal legal rights. We explore the meaning of rights in American society by describing the intersection between the evolving civil rights of a previously excluded minority, culminating in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the personal histories of two individuals who might potentially invoke or benefit from such rights. Tracing the life stories of “Sara Lane” and “Jill Golding” from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and employment, we relate the everyday relevance or irrelevance of law to important elements of the reconstructed past—the development of self-concept and of one's place in relation to the social mainstream. The article, which is part of a larger project involving a more broadly based interview sample of adults with disabilities, analyzes life stories to critique familiar assumptions about the perceived conflict between rights and social relationships and about the mobilization of law. It also offers an innovative approach to the study of law and legal consciousness by involving Sara Lane and Jill Golding in the analysis of successive drafts and by including their reactions to what the authors have written.

The essays in this volume offer a wealth of suggestions for new directions in sociolegal research, not only about the particular subjects they themselves address but also, by analogy, about many others. Here I want to approach the task of theoretical reorientation in a different way. While these essays were in progress I had occasion to attempt a critical overview of recent American scholarship in order to identify the questions posed and assess their strengths and weaknesses. This was in no sense a systematic research effort but merely a reflection upon my experience as editor of this Review from 1976 to 1978, based upon the approximately 500 manuscripts submitted, the nearly 200 books sent for review, the proposals offered for this project, and the papers presented at the second national meeting of the Law and Society Association in Minneapolis in 1978. I would modify these views somewhat in light of work disseminated in other ways or produced during the subsequent two years, but I would not greatly alter them. I offer them here in the hope of stimulating debate on the level of metatheory, for I sense that our field is running so smoothly along familiar tracks that the questions and answers have begun to sound a comfortable, but rather boring, “clackety-clack.”

Despite the great varieties of imperial relationships, most scholarship has focused on law as an instrument of imperial domination. This article invites greater attention to the motives and actions of the subject population. In the Middle East, the pattern of legal change suggests that imperial control affected the outcome of elite efforts but did not supplant them. In Egypt, legal reform was largely the fruit of efforts undertaken by a centralizing elite that sought to circumscribe foreign influence even when it collaborated with it. This elite used law to preempt imperial penetration and strengthen the administrative capacity of the Egyptian state. The Egyptian population subject to the new legal system shaped its development still further.

This article examines how activists build a movement for sexual orientation and gender identity minorities in Myanmar, a country that is known for violent suppression of protests and is undergoing political reform. Based on original fieldwork, it finds that activists deploy a strategy of “vernacular mobilization of human rights” to persuade others to join their cause despite the risks to personal safety and to get around political constraints on collective organizing. Conceptualized at the intersection of the cultural study of human rights and social movements scholarship, “vernacular mobilization of human rights” theorizes the relationship between vernacularization—the translation and local adaptation of human rights—and movement micromobilization, specifying how the former unfolds as collective action framing processes. Through vernacularization activities, such as human rights workshops, movement leaders reframe grievances and shift the attribution of blame to empower and recruit new activists. Furthermore, with these framing processes, they generate a political community with a collective identity and social networks that they use to continue expanding the movement. The article enriches debates about the implications of implementing human rights and understandings of the relationship between human rights and movement mobilization, especially under repressive or uncertain political conditions.

Research examining the relative effectiveness of mediation and adjudication has raised questions about whether the apparent benefits of mediation can be attributed to differences in the two dispute resolution procedures or, instead, are due to differences in the characteristics of the disputes or disputants. Litigants in four small claims courts provided multiple comparison groups that enabled us to examine case and process effects. Disputes and disputants in mediation and adjudication differed on few attributes. The process, outcomes, and impact of mediation and adjudication differed in ways generally consistent with their theoretical differences. Although the degree of liability admitted by the defendant played a role, overall, differences in the effectiveness of mediation and adjudication were due more to differences in the processes themselves than to differences in the disputes and disputants using each procedure.

This paper examines the sentencing behavior of judges in a context characterized by significant legislative and social change. Data from Georgia are used to explore the ways in which judges accommodated their sentencing practices to a general crusade against drug use and to specific legislation that identified trafficking as criminal, set harsh penalties, and limited judicial discretion. The results suggest that judges selectively mitigated the harshness embodied in legislative pronouncements. The extent of mitigation depended on when sentencing occurred, the offense under consideration, and the offender's race. The impact of legislative changes appeared to be shortlived for the initial incarceration decision and more sustained for outcomes involving imprisonment, but modest for both. The target of symbolic policies, the trafficker, bore the brunt of increased punitiveness, but some spillover severity affected less serious drug offenders. Finally, the effect of race on sentences was influenced by legislative changes. During the height of legislative activity, differential treatment by race increased, further disadvantaging blacks, particularly black traffickers.

Voters rarely take time to inform themselves about the candidates and issues in judicial elections. Uninformed, voters must rely upon some kind of voting cue, such as political party affiliation, incumbency, name familiarity, or the like, to help them cast their ballots in these low-salience elections. This article examines the effects these cues have in determining voter behavior in partisan and nonpartisan elections for state supreme court justices. The results show that party labels structure voter behavior along partisan lines. Without a party cue, however, voting decisions are relatively unstructured and, as examples show, often produce idiosyncratic results. The implications of these findings for the continuing debate over judicial selection are then explored.

Today, few would deny that some relation exists between firearms and violent death and crime:

Newton and Zimring of the Task Force on Firearms point out that 63% of all homicides, 37% of all robberies, and 21% of all aggravated assaults involve the use of a gun (Newton and Zimring, 1970: 39). In turn, 76%) of gun homicides are committed by handguns; similarly, 86% of aggravated assaults involving guns and 96% of robberies involving guns are committed by handguns (Newton and Zimring, 1970: 49). In short, although approximately 27% of all firearms in the United States are handguns, they are the predominant firearm used in crime (Newton and Zimring, 1970: 49).

At least one-quarter of covered workplaces violated the parental leave requirements of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 (FMLA) when surveyed in 1997. What explains this noncompliance? Using a survey of 389 U.S. workplaces and qualitative interviews with managers in 40 organizations, I demonstrate that noncompliance comes in distinct forms. Some forms of noncompliance result from a failure to update institutionalized—and gendered—policies, practices, and norms. This form of noncompliance (indicated by illegally short leaves) is better explained by the institutional perspective, while outright noncompliance (as evidenced by a lack of leaves) is best explained by rational choice and deviant culture theories.

This article calls attention to “honor” and “dignity” as two fundamental, antithetical bases of unique value systems, both highly significant to social orders and legal systems in the contemporary Western world. The article argues that in this comparative context, the relatively new dignity-based value system may be better defined and articulated; at the same time, the overlooked, traditional honor-based value system, which underlies much of contemporary reality, can be better identified and replaced or at least modified by a dignity-based one. Rather than look to specific sociolegal realities, the article presents this line of thought from a “law-and-film” perspective, i.e., through the close reading of a single feature film: Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. This contemporary, widely familiar, and immensely popular Western exposes the ugly face of the honor-based value system at the heart of the Western film genre; further, it subversively undermines this value system, replacing it with a dignity-based one. In so doing, the film expresses deep faith in the human capacity to transform, calling on real-world social and legal systems to follow in its footsteps and apply the same critical analysis and reformative activism to Western law and society at large.

Under what circumstances do courts act in ways that challenge the political hegemony of the military in countries with weak democratic institutions? This article addresses this question by focusing on a critical case of judicial activism in Turkey. It argues that lower courts unexpectedly can be centers of judicial activism that contributes to expansion of civil liberties and restrictions on arbitrary state power when the high judiciary supports the political status quo. This is because lower courts provide greater access to legal mobilization pursued by civil society actors. At the same time, judicial activism in lower courts is sustainable only when political power is distributed among elites with conflicting interests, and the civilian government offers support and protection to activist members of the judiciary.