American scholarship has lavished most of its attention on appellate courts, paying little attention to courts on the bottom rungs of the ladder. This is true of studies of both past and present courts. But the trial court is the court with the most direct contact with the man in the street, for both civil and criminal matters. Here he meets the law face-to-face. And, although federal courts are certainly important, state trial courts handle by far the larger volume of work.

This paper is an attempt to review the body of social science writings of the last four and one-half decades on the petit jury. The major portion of this presentation will be limited to organizing the findings on the jury around the two major themes—competence and representation—which are most often discussed in empirical literature. A concluding section will offer some evaluative comments and present some tentative proposals for a new perspective on the sociological study of the jury.

This article focuses attention on “official graffiti” or regulatory signs typified by highway signs and the most invasive and emblematic piece of official graffiti, the prohibition circle with its diagonal red slash used in the iconic representation No Smoking. Establishing the range and pervasiveness of official graffiti in everyday life (as prohibitions, warnings, advisories, instructions, etc.), the authors approach these visual manifestations from the standpoint of the sociology of governance and analyze them as important instances of government at a distance. They explore the varieties and forms of such regulation and trace their expansion from public space to quasi-public space and to the private realm. Locating the texts and icons of official graffiti within implied or express discursive frameworks, the authors point to the construction of objects and subjects of regulation and to regulatory agents as “absent experts” and address the key role of the construction of danger and the link to insurance principles in a “risk society.” They also examine resistance through actions of defacement and avoidance that result in the complex order and disorder of surfaces and spaces. Official graffiti manifests a distinctive form of hegemony that is exercised through the small, daily acts of everyday governance.

At first sight, the vastly different litigation frequencies in West Germany and The Netherlands present a riddle, as both countries have a legal system tradition in common and their baseline of potentially litigious conflicts is very much alike. This study tries to find an explanation by disaggregating various kinds of civil procedures. The distinguishing variables are found in the presence or absence of institutions filtering disputes at the pretrial stage. While in The Netherlands plaintiffs are offered a bigger set of alternatives for dispute resolution, the German court system, being very cost efficient, attracts masses of petty claims. Thus, it is unnecessary to look for attitudinal differences or even different “litigation mentalities” in the neighboring cultures. The institutional infrastructure is sufficient to explain why it is rational for Germans to use the courts and for the Dutch to avoid them.

The demography of the legal profession has changed rather dramatically in recent decades, yet the consequences of a more racially and ethnically diverse pool of lawyers for the administration of justice have not received significant attention. The present research examines how the racial composition of the local legal profession affects one facet of criminal law: the sentencing of convicted defendants. Building on prior work in the fields of law, stratification, and mobility, we hypothesize that racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing are mitigated where the legal profession is more diverse. In line with this hypothesis, analysis of data from a sample of large urban counties taken between 1990 and 2002 shows that the black-white racial disparity in sentencing attenuates as the number of black attorneys in the county increases, net of the percent black in the county and other possible confounding variables. Comparable results are found for Hispanics. The findings are discussed in the context of a demographically changing legal profession and prior work on racial disparities in the justice system.

The avoidance of the stigma accompanying court appearance was one of the reasons for the development of a specialized court for children. Treatment-oriented reformers had been concerned for many years about the potentially harmful effects upon individuals of arrest, court appearance, and incarceration. As a result, they made efforts in the juvenile court to minimize stigmatization by having informal procedures, hearings closed to the public and press, and limited access to court records. More recently the avoidance of stigma has been used to rationalize the diversion of youths away from the juvenile justice system before they have any contact with it. This heightened concern about stigmatization through juvenile court exeprience flows in part from a growing interest in labeling theory among social scientists.

This article analyzes why the Chinese government turned to international adoption in the 1990s as a means to deal with increasing numbers of abandoned children in Chinese orphanages. Although many people involved in international adoption assume that Chinese families are unwilling to adopt the kinds of children who fill most Chinese orphanages, primarily abandoned girls, research indicates that many families in China are willing to adopt abandoned children, including girls. Yet legal requirements that adopters be over 35 and childless severely limited the number of families who could legally adopt children in the 1990s. While this did not prevent unofficial adoption in violation of the restrictions, it did keep adopters away from government orphanages, thus increasing the burden on those institutions. Restrictions on adoption are the result of birth planning efforts to prevent adoption from being used as a loophole whereby birth parents adopt out daughters in order to be able to try again for a son. The result of this policy has been to increase abandonment while decreasing the number of legally eligible adoptive families in China. International adoption has helped enlarge the pool of potential adopters without disturbing birth planning priorities. It has also helped provide needed funds for improving conditions in state orphanages. Although legal changes in 1999 eased restrictions on the adoption of abandoned children living in orphanages, a number of factors have limited actual change, while restrictions on adoptions outside of orphanages have been largely maintained. Birth planning authorities remain wary of liberalizing domestic adoption, and a decade of international adoption has institutionalized powerful interests that orient adoption from orphanages toward the outside rather than inside China. Nonetheless, China is slowly moving toward an adoption policy more in line with the Hague Convention's injunction to prioritize domestic adoption over international placement, turning to international adoption only when it is impossible to find domestic adoptive families.

In my contribution to the first part of this collection I suggested that the character and impact of litigation might be best understood if, rather than starting from consideration of rules or of institutional processes, we began by looking at the parties and their relation to dispute institutions. I introduced a simple distinction between those actors in society who have many occasions to utilize the courts (in the broad sense) to make (or defend) claims and those parties who do so only rarely. Parties who have only occasional recourse to the courts I called one-shotters (henceforth, OS) and parties engaged in a large number of similar litigations over time repeat-players (RPs). I then argued that an RP might be expected to play the litigation game differently from an OS and that the RP would enjoy a number of advantages in the litigation process. Briefly, these advantages include: ability to structure the transaction; expertise, economies of scale, low start-up costs; informal relations with institutional incumbents; bargaining credibility; ability to adopt optimal strategies; ability to play for rules in both political forums and in litigation itself by litigation strategy and settlement policy; and ability to invest to secure penetration of favorable rules.

In this article, I show how the term lawfare is being deployed as a speech act in order to encode the field of human rights as a national security threat. The objective, I claim, is to hinder the work of human rights organizations that produce and disseminate knowledge about social wrongs perpetrated by military personnel and government officials, particularly evidence of acts emanating from the global war on terrorism—such as torture and extrajudicial executions—that constitute war crimes and can be presented in courts that exercise universal jurisdiction. Using Israel as a case study, I investigate the local and global dimensions of the securitization processes, focusing on how different securitizing actors—academics, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, policy makers, and legislators—mobilize the media, shape public opinion, lobby legislators and policy makers, introduce new laws, and pressure donors to pave the way for a form of exceptional intervention to limit the scope of human rights work.

Professions are granted a form of cartel that enables them to charge more than would arise in a free market on the assumption that they provide better quality and are more trustworthy than free-market actors would be. The theoretical assumption that lawyers are more competent than nonlawyers has given rise to significant formal protections for professions in many jurisdictions. Two testable propositions arise from this theory: (1) lawyers cost more, but (2) they deliver higher quality. It is a testing of these twin propositions that is the subject of this article, with well-triangulated data and a deeper understanding of the theoretical differences between lawyers and nonlawyers.

Sentencing studies have incorporated social context in studying sentencing decisions, but to date the bulk of prior work has focused almost exclusively on county context. An unresolved question is whether there also may be state-level effects on sentencing. Drawing from the minority threat perspective, we examine (1) whether state-level racial and ethnic contexts affect sentencing, (2) whether this effect amplifies the effect of county-level racial and ethnic contexts on sentencing, and (3) whether the interaction of county-level and state-level contextual effects is greater for minorities than for whites. Analysis of State Court Processing Statistics and other data indicates that state-level racial and ethnic contexts are associated with sentencing outcomes and that this effect may differ by outcome (e.g., incarceration versus sentence length) and by type of context (e.g., racial or ethnic). The study's findings and their implications are discussed.

Motorcycles are involved in fatal crashes far in excess of their share of motor vehicle mileage or registrations. Although their annual mileage per vehicle is less than half that of cars (Federal Highway Administration, 1974), and they were only 3.7 percent of registered motor vehicles in the U.S. in 1974, their riders accounted for 6.8 percent of motor vehicle fatalities (National Safety Council, 1975). A study of vehicle sizes in fatal crashes found that motorcycles killed pedestrians at about the same rate per registered motorcycle as small cars per registered small car (Robertson and Baker, in press). (The pedestrian rates were higher per registered vehicle among larger cars and trucks.) A survey of traumatic spinal cord injuries in 18 Northern California counties found that 9 percent of motor vehicle related spinal cord trauma occurred to motorcyclists (Kraus, et al., 1975). In one California county where an attempt was made to find all medically treated motorcyclist injuries, one of every 24 registered motorcycles per year was involved in a crash that resulted in such injuries (Kraus et al., 1975).

Based on open-ended interviews with the parties and lawyers in twenty-five informally settled divorce cases, this study finds that the informal process is often contentious, adversarial, and beyond the perceived control of one or both parties. Although settlement in some cases reflects flexibility, party participation, and true agreement, in most cases it reflects unequal financial resources, procedural support, or emotional stamina. Parties report settling issues such as child support according to nonlegal, situational factors—particularly their relative impatience to finalize the divorce—and mutual satisfaction with settlement terms is low. Our findings raise questions about the assumed value of informal settlement. However, we recognize that informal processing of divorce is structurally and institutionally inevitable (with or without evidence of its desirability), and we suggest that reform efforts must ultimately recognize both the inevitability and the limits of informal process.

There is growing interest in the role that individual judgments play in moving people to seek recompense for perceived injuries. Social psychological theory and research may provide valuable clues about the types of judgments that are important in the development of disputes, and the facts that influence these judgments. In this paper, we describe relative deprivation, perceived control, equity, and attribution theories. We also discuss the relevance of these theories to dispute development, differential rates of problem perception, and the making of claims for redress. We conclude with suggestions for future research on the emergence of disputes.

Court proceedings and records were analyzed to evaluate statutory reform of mental commitment procedure in one state with a typical statute. A marked improvement over practice described in previous research was found: court proceedings were not rapid and perfunctory. However, the court still often deferred to psychiatric opinion even when a preponderance of evidence showed it to be unsubstantiated.

Students of the judicial process have focused considerable attention on the relationship between judges' background characteristics and their voting behavior on collegial courts. The argument for such a focus is that background characteristics are usually indicative of particular socialization processes and that these processes produce certain attitudes which are often responsible, directly or indirectly, for the judges' votes. Thus these characteristics can be viewed, in the aggregate, as predictive of judges' behavior — at least in certain types of cases.

Numerous studies have examined the influence of victim race on capital punishment, with a smaller number focused on victim gender. But death penalty scholars have largely ignored victim social status. Drawing on Black's (1976) multidimensional theoretical concept, the current research examines the impact of victim social status on the district attorney's decision to seek the death penalty and the jury's decision to impose a death sentence. The data include the population of cases indicted for capital murder in Harris County (Houston), Texas, from 1992 to 1999 (n=504). The findings suggest that victim social status has a robust influence on the ultimate state sanction: Death was more likely to be sought and imposed on behalf of high-status victims who were integrated, sophisticated, conventional, and respectable. The research also has implications beyond capital punishment. Because victim social status has rarely been investigated in the broader sentencing literature, Black's concept provides a theoretical tool that could be used to address such an important omission.

This article examines legal and political developments in California in the 1970s and early 1980s that led to extreme changes in the state's use of imprisonment. It uses historical research methods to illustrate how institutional and political processes interacted in dynamic ways that continuously unsettled and reshaped the crime policy field. It examines crime policy developments before and after the passage of the state's determinate sentencing law to highlight the law's long-term political implications and to illustrate how it benefited interest groups pushing for harsher punishment. It emphasizes the role executives played in shaping these changes, and how the law's significance was as much political as legal because it transformed the institutional logics that structured criminal lawmaking. These changes, long sought by the law enforcement lobby, facilitated crime's politicization and ushered in a new era of frenetic and punitive changes in criminal law and punishment. This new context benefited politicians who supported extreme responses to crime and exposed the crime policy process to heightened degrees of popular scrutiny. The result was a political obsession with crime that eschewed moderation and prioritized prison expansion above all else.

This article examines litigant narratives in small claims courts from two perspectives: the degree to which relaxed procedures and evidentiary constraints provide greater satisfaction to litigants than more formal courts, and the problems litigants encounter in providing legally adequate accounts without the assistance of attorneys. Data for this study are 55 trials in two states (North Carolina and Colorado). The findings show that narratives in small claims court bear many resemblances to everyday talk about trouble, provide litigants significant opportunities to tell their stories in court, but frequently fail to include critical components of legally adequate claims.

The nationwide growth in specialized or problem-solving courts, including drug courts, community courts, mental health courts, and domestic violence courts, among others, raises questions about the role of the state with respect to social change. According to social control theories of the state, especially theories of technocratic or rationalized justice, law is increasingly about efficiency, speed, and effectiveness. Specialized courts, however, take on a social problem approach to crime, seeking to address crime's “root causes” within the individual, the society, and the larger culture in ways more characteristic of social movements. Are specialized courts about social control or social change? This study examines state action in a specialized court in domestic violence in order to examine this question. I focus on a domestic violence court that arose in February 1997 and four years later employed full-time judges, prosecuting and defense attorneys, and numerous other staff to handle all misdemeanor domestic violence cases in Salt Lake County, Utah. I ask how legal, political, and community officials justify the court and its operation in order to examine some important issues about the role of the state and social change. Ultimately, I suggest that my findings about the complementary roles of social control and social change within domestic violence courts have implications not only for critical theories of technocratic justice and for the battered women's movement but also for democratic theories of the state.