In this exploratory study, we ask whether perceptions of and responses to violence in dating relationships are gendered and whether the factors that affect male perceptions also influence females. Using the social control and feminist literatures as a guide, we explore gender differences in perception of sanction risk and attitudes toward resolution of violence when it occurs. Our data reveal several differences in male and female perceptions of formal and informal sanctions (attachment to significant others and stigmatic costs)—although not always in the expected direction—and show that different factors influence male and female perceptions of sanction likelihood and costs. We also find that females are more likely than males to seek relationship termination, informal controls, or formal justice outcomes if assaulted by their partner. However, the conditions that stimulate victims to consider these decisions vary by gender. These findings are discussed, along with implications for further research.

How are violence and pain put into legal discourse? How does law distinguish its violence—capital punishment—from other kinds of violence? Do the strategies used to differentiate legal and extralegal violence alleviate anxiety about law and the uses to which law's violence is put? This article addresses these questions through an analysis of a capital trial in which an African-American man is being retried for the murder of a young white woman. It examines the social and cultural resources used to speak about violence and to differentiate legal and extralegal violence, and it suggests that the juxtaposition of narratives about violence in capital trials arouses rather than alleviates anxiety.

Over the past decade, inter- and intra-movement coalitions composed of organizations within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) and immigrant rights movements have formed at the local level. These coalitions speak to a massive organizing effort that has achieved some rights campaign successes. However, coalition unity that culminated in “wins” like marriage equality came at a cost. While both movements expanded and unified, they simultaneously ossified around goals that matter to the most privileged segments of their respective communities. The result is a paradox: coalitions do sometimes form within and across movements, promote enduring unity across seemingly divergent movements, and facilitate rights campaign “wins.” However, coalitions simultaneously reinforce hierarchical exclusions through the continued marginalization of issues that uproot conventional power dynamics, like police violence, economic inequality, and gender justice. This essay argues that the construction of a common “civil rights past” identity within coalitions can help to explain this paradox. The development of this collective identity expands movements, occasionally thwarting the power dynamics responsible for the centering of the interests of the most privileged constituencies within social movements. However, the episodic nature of rights-based campaigns simultaneously contains and undermines the formation of this collective identity, reinforcing movement divisions based on race, gender, and class.

Research concerning racial discrimination within the criminal justice system has focused largely upon the police and the courts. There is reason to believe, however, that differential treatment may be more common in less visible proceedings. This research addresses that possibility through an examination of the cases of 243 prisoners who appeared before a parole board from October 1, 1970, through September 30, 1971. There is no evidence of direct racial discrimination. There is evidence, however, that the board differentiated between black and white prisoners in selecting and weighting information when deciding parole. Compared to white prisoners, black prisoners had an additional criterion to meet in order to be paroled—participation in institutional treatment programs. The imposition of this additional criterion indirectly resulted in racial inequities. Black parolees who were treatment participants served a significantly longer portion of their sentence than did white treatment participants. The few black prisoners who were paroled without participating in treatment served a shorter proportion of their sentence than other prisoners. These few black prisoners were older, more likely to be property offenders and had slightly more prior convictions than black treatment participants. These findings are interpreted as indicating a bias against racial militancy.

Despite the criminalization of abuses inflicted upon women, laws are still considered major sources of women's oppression. This article discusses how Palestinian society and its criminal justice system, during a politically formative period of state building, relates to “femicide.” Femicide in this study pertains to the murder of girls or women for allegedly committing “crimes of family honor.” Official statistics, Cassation Court rulings, and six documented cases were analyzed in depth to determine the role played by the penal code, the legal system, and the external sociocultural context in exonerating the perpetrator of femicide and placing the victim on trial. The data reflect a silent masculine conspiracy that empowers sexist and gender-biased legal policies. The article concludes by challenging Palestinian legislators to fight legal discrimination against women. It argues that state-building periods can be a “window of hope,” offering societies such as Palestine's the unique opportunity to reexamine and reconstruct their laws from a gender-sensitive position.

I have suggested (1974) that in societies such as the United States, where non-governmental institutionalized mediation and adjudication of interpersonal disputes are infrequent, some of the slack may be absorbed by avoidance. I implied that avoidance would generally have lower costs in the United States than in societies where such mediation and adjudication are widely available. Danzig and Lowy (1975: 676-682) argue that I have underestimated the costs of avoidance in the United States. They may be right. In any event, avoidance can be analyzed more precisely than it was in my original paper (see 1974: 70, 76, 79-80, 83-84). This response will try to provide such an analysis, including a more complete breakdown of avoidance costs. It will suggest why I appraise avoidance costs differently than do Danzig and Lowy. It will also re-evaluate some of the variance in avoidance costs between different societies. Finally, it will discuss avoidance and Danzig and Lowy's proposed neighborhood mediation.

Research on the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that judges' decisions are influenced by their policy preferences. Moreover, judges behave strategically to facilitate outcomes that conform as close as possible to those preferences. We seek to generalize this assertion to judicial actors in two very diverse social systems: Canada in the post-Charter years and apartheid-era South Africa. Specifically, we analyze the use of panel assignments by the chief justices in both countries. We find that chief justices do behave strategically. Chief justices in both countries do not assign judges to panels randomly but rather are influenced by the tenure and ideology of the sitting judges and the issues presented in the case.

The liberalization of India's economy since 1991 has brought with it considerable development of its financial markets and supporting legal institutions. An influential body of economic scholarship asserts that a country's “legal origin”—as a civilian or common law jurisdiction—plays an important part in determining the development of its investor protection regulations, and consequently its financial development. An alternative theory claims that the determinants of investor protection are political, rather than legal. We use the case of India to test these theories. We find little support for the idea that India's legal heritage as a common law country has been influential in speeding the path of regulatory reforms and financial development. Rather, we suggest there are complementarities between (1) India's relative success in services and software; (2) the relative strength of its financial markets for outside equity, as opposed to outside debt; and (3) the relative success of stock market regulation, as opposed to reforms of creditor rights. We conclude that political economy explanations have more traction in explaining the case of India than do theories based on “legal origins.”

In recent years there has been an accumulation of analyses showing a negative association between crime rates and various measures of criminal sanctions, which have been widely interpreted as evidence of the deterrent effect of sanctions (see Tullock, 1974; Tittle, 1973; van den Haag, 1975). In this paper, results are presented that are in conflict with such an interpretation. For the sanction of imprisonment (time served in prison and the risk of imprisonment given commission of a crime), the analysis indicates that the negative association is more readily interpreted as a negative effect of crime rates on sanction levels rather than its reverse—a deterrent effect.

This paper is a replication of the analysis undertaken in 1978 by James Q. Wilson and Barbara Boland. We use time-series data for nine cities for portions of the period 1948-1978 to test the effect of aggressive policing on the robbery rate. Contrary to Wilson and Boland, we do not find moving violations to be a useful indicator of police aggressiveness. We also conclude that using the arrest/offense ratio introduces artifactual negative correlations. When one examines police expenditures, the size of the police force, the arrest rate, and the concentration of the police on robbery arrests, one generally finds positive relationships rather than negative ones. We interpret these results to indicate that a focus on the problem of robbery by the police leads the police both to make more arrests and to record more offenses, thus producing the positive correlations we found.

This research note calls attention to some basic but rather neglected questions about life in the legal profession: Are lawyers happy in their work? Do patterns of stratification within the profession translate into differences in work satisfaction? Does satisfaction with different components of legal work vary across employment statuses and practice contexts?

Given that job satisfaction is a highly subjective phenomenon, some sociolegal scholars may question its value as an object of social scientific inquiry. I argue, however, that to ignore the question of lawyers' happiness is a mistake. Despite their limitations, studies of lawyers' work satisfaction can be useful in several ways. First, job satisfaction can be viewed as a stratification measure, complementing more traditional measures such as income and hierarchical position. If satisfaction is unevenly distributed within the profession in some systematic way (e.g., if women are less satisfied than men or if minorities less satisfied than whites), we might interpret this uneven distribution as a form of inequality and seek to explain its causes and possible remedies.

This study addresses the issue of rule departures and law-making activity by juries adjudicating guilt in felony cases. Analysis of data from a sample of jury trials suggests considerable conformity to rules. That is, jury verdicts are influenced by evidence of the defendant's guilt and credibility as a witness. Rule departures appear to be limited. They reflect a concern not only with the defendant per se, but also with his choice of a victim and with the seriousness of the prosecution charge against him. The findings suggest that, as actually performed, the jury role is neither clerklike nor discretionary. Rather, it conforms more closely to Kadish and Kadish's (1973) notion of a recourse role, where rule departures occur only under certain circumstances.

In 1992, the National Law Journal (NLJ) published a study claiming that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discriminated against minorities in its civil judicial enforcement actions by penalizing environmental law violators in minority areas far less than in white areas. NLJ claimed that this differential showed a lack of commitment to protecting the environment and public health in minority areas. This article augments, reexamines, and analyzes in a more sophisticated manner the available data. My empirical analyses demonstrate the unreliability of NLJ's methods and conclusions and indicate that minorities have not been discriminated against in these enforcement actions.

On May 15, 1967 the United States Supreme Court rendered, in In re Gault, its first decision in the area of juvenile delinquency procedure. Commentators have repeatedly construed the rulings in Gault as requiring juvenile courts to adopt new and more liberal practices. The privilege against self-incrimination, and the rights to notice of charges, counsel, confrontation, and cross-examination were heretofore primarily regarded as the cornerstones of an adversary system of justice. The extension of these rights to juvenile courts would have seemed to require an overnight transformation of the court procedures.

Whereas most sociolegal studies concerned with hegemony and resistance focus on the resistances of ordinary citizens in everyday life, this article focuses on the development of a particular social movement—the alternative birth movement—and analyzes the process by which this movement emerged and has achieved significant legislative victories. The analysis makes several contributions to the literatures on hegemony, resistance, and the law. First, by demonstrating the importance of medicine's assertion of its authority for the expansion and mobilization of the alternative birth movement, we show that the mobilization of the law by a dominant group may trigger the emergence of social movements seeking to resist hegemonic understandings and arrangements. At the same time, by examining how birth activists' organizational resources developed over time and were rendered meaningful in legislative debates, our study demonstrates the importance of avoiding dichotomous conceptions of structure and culture. In addition, by analyzing culture as a process of meaning-making rather than an independent and hierarchical set of values, the analysis shows how cultural and legal hegemony—even that of modern medicine—may be destabilized, even as it sets the terms of the effort to destabilize it and shapes the nature of the hegemony that will replace it.

How well do conventional perspectives on homicide account for the social distribution of femicide, or the killing of females? An analysis of 670 cases of femicide in Toronto and Vancouver from 1921 to 1988 provides stronger support for an alternative perspective that acknowledges both the intimate, domestic character of femicide and the historically contingent nature of opportunities and motivations for femicide. Rather than coming to resemble male homicide, femicide remains as concentrated in private, domestic locations and relationships as it was seventy years ago. However, the relationships between femicide and some social statuses, such as women's employment, have changed over time.

Digitization and open access to governmental data have made criminal justice information incredibly easy to access and disseminate. This study asks how law should govern access to criminal histories on the Internet. Drawing upon interviews with crime website publishers and subjects who have appeared on websites, I use legal consciousness theory to show how social actors interpret, construct, and invoke law in a nascent and unregulated area. The analysis reveals how both parties construct legality in the absence of positive legal restrictions: Website publishers use legal justifications, while those appealing to have their online record cleared resort to personal pleas, as opposed to legal remedy. Ultimately, I show how current data practices reinforce structural inequalities already present in criminal justice institutions in a profoundly public manner, leaving website subjects with little recourse and an inescapable digital trail.

We examine whether public opinion leads Supreme Court justices to alter the content of their opinions. We argue that when justices anticipate public opposition to their decisions, they write clearer opinions. We develop a novel measure of opinion clarity based on multifaceted textual readability scores, which we validate using human raters. We examine an aggregate time series analysis of the influence of public mood on opinion clarity and an individual-level sample of Supreme Court cases paired with issue-specific public opinion polls. The empirical results from both models show that justices write clearer opinions when their rulings contradict popular sentiment. These results suggest public opinion influences the Court, and suggest that future scholarship should analyze how public opinion influences the written content of decision makers’ policies.