The existence of a dispute has typically been the starting point for inquiries into dispute processing and resolution. This paper explores the origins of disputes in grievances and claims. It reports on a survey of households estimating the rates of grievances, claims, and disputes which could have been processed by a civil court of general jurisdiction. The paper also explores multivariate models of the probabilities that households experience substantial grievances, that claims for redress are made, and that disputes result. The models assess the contributions of household and problem characteristics to these transitions. By treating disputes as problematic outcomes of injurious experiences, the paper contributes to an assessment of the adversariness of American society.

Studies of urban governance, as well as the overlapping literature on law and space, have been heavily influenced by critical analyses of how spatial techniques helped constitute modern disciplinary powers and knowledges. The rise of land-use control and land-use planning seem at first sight to be perfect examples of the disciplining of populations through space by the kind of governmental gaze dubbed by Scott (1998) as “seeing like a state.” But a detailed genealogical study that puts the emergence of the notion of “land use” in the broader context of urban governance technologies reveals that modernist techniques of land use planning, such as North American zoning, are more flexible, contradictory, and fragile than critical urbanists assume. Legal tools of premodern origin that target nonquantifiable offensiveness and thus construct an embodied and relational form of urban subjectivity keep reappearing in the present day. When cities attempt to govern conflicts about the use of space through objective rules, these rules often undermine themselves in a dialectical process that results in the return to older notions of offensiveness. This article argues that the dialectical process by which modernist “seeing like a state” techniques give way to older ways of seeing (e.g., the logic of nuisance) plays a central role in the epistemologically hybrid approach to governing space that is here called “seeing like a city.”

The social disorganization model of crime and delinquency generally has argued that the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods is related to rates of illegal behavior only to the extent that it increases the likelihood of residential turnover and racial/ethnic heterogeneity. Such an orientation reflects the traditional assumption of human ecology that urban areas are characterized by continual processes of residential upgrading as groups become progressively assimilated into the economic structure of the community and have more economic resources at their disposal. However, the validity of the indirect effect hypothesis may have become questionable in the many cities that have experienced a significant economic decline during the last few decades, thereby leading to the creation of an immobile underclass population. We examine here the relative validity of the indirect effect hypothesis in Chicago's neighborhoods during 1960 and 1980. While the findings generally support the traditional indirect effect assumption of social disorganization, they also emphasize the need to consider the economic and political contexts in which these communities are embedded.

Social research frequently encounters the task of evaluating change produced in nonrandomly selected groups by events which are beyond the researcher's control. The social scientist must verify that there has in fact been a change, and that the indicated event is its cause. Illustrations are manifold: a state terminates capital punishment, and proponents of this type of punishment predict an increase in the murder rate; a school is integrated, and supporters of the reform expect to find an increase in the positive self-evaluation of Negro pupils; a natural disaster occurs in a community, and altruistic behavior is expected to increase. Because in these situations the investigator has no control over the assignment of individuals or groups to “experimental” and “control” situations, the logic of the classical experiment must be reexamined in a search for optimal interpretative procedures.

Despite increasing interest in understanding patterns of criminal behavior over the life course and, especially, desistance from crime, evidence about the predictors of these experiences has been derived only from samples of male offenders. We evaluate whether there are gender differences in the predictors of both self-reported illegal earnings and arrest among samples of recently released male and female offenders. Our analysis of gender differences illustrates how both the behavior of the offender and the behavior of law shape our understanding of the transition out of crime. We analyze event history data from a large-scale social experiment that provided employment to male and female offenders. The results indicate that (1) gender differences in the predictors of desistance largely depend on the domain of behavior under consideration; (2) indicators of normative status, as opposed to the perceived risks of crime or age-graded informal controls, are particularly important determinants of women's risks of rearrest.

Over the last century there has been significant growth within our society of practices that distribute costs and benefits to individuals based on statistical knowledge about the population. These actuarial practices like insurance premium setting and standardized testing in educational admissions are successful largely because they allow power to be exercised more effectively and at lower political cost. At the same time they generate ideological effects which have the potential to transform the way individuals understand themselves and their groups. In a 1977 case, Los Angeles Water and Power v. Manhart (435 U.S. 702), the United States Supreme Court considered a challenge to the actuarial use of gender in setting employee benefits. The case and the debates it generated illuminate the danger posed by the ideological effects of actuarial practices to our political culture in general, and to traditionally disempowered classes such as women in particular. At the same time it illustrates the limitation of traditional legal rights discourse as a means of resisting these dangers.

This ethnographic research, conducted in a parole field office in central California, looks at how Feeley and Simon's (1992) “new penology” paradigm plays out at the level of implementation, given competing pressures on agents to be tough on crime as well as successful danger “risk managers.” Findings suggest that agents embrace a traditional law enforcement role for themselves that primarily takes an individualistic approach to the clientele and an intuitive approach to their management, rather than taking on the new penological role of actuarial risk managers defined by upper management. The agents were influenced by the popular discourse on crime in defining their priorities and actively subverted directives management issued to reorder those priorities. As Simon (1993) foreshadowed in his work on parole, the agents in this setting did not appear poised to become mere human “waste managers.”

This review essay analyzes the relation between language and the two basic functions of law, the ordering of social relations and the restoration of social order when it breaks down. One main theme is the linguistic description of legal language and the sociolinguistic and sociolegal limitations on its reform. Drawing on a basic distinction between the nature of discourse in play, ritual, and the “serious” mode of everyday life, the essay goes on to contrast “play” genres of disputing with “fact”-oriented genres. An overview of the forms and functions of play genres of disputing is followed by a discussion of the management of three main aspects of “facf'-oriented disputes: the substance of arguments, linguistic form, and language and silence. Narrative and questioning modes of claim construction are contrasted. The notion of “thickening” in legal language is presented, and five possible explanations for this phenomenon are explored. The essay concludes with a discussion of topics for future debate and research.

In a capitalist society the State legal system is in general an instrument of class domination both at the level of the relations of production, as in the factory, and of the relations of reproduction, as in housing. Housing conditions are particularly illustrative of class domination in the squatter settlements of all major cities throughout the capitalist world. Pasargada is the fictitious name of such a settlement in Rio de Janeiro. In a nonrevolutionary situation, and particularly under the yoke of economic and political repression imposed by the fascist State (as in contemporary Brazil), the struggle against housing and living conditions in these settlements is a very hard one. Because of the structural inaccessibility of the State legal system, and especially because of the illegal character of these communities, the dominated classes living in them devise adaptive strategies aimed at securing the minimal social ordering of community relations. One such strategy involves the creation of an internal legality, parallel to (and sometimes conflicting with) State legality—a kind of popular justice. The article describes Pasargada legality from both the inside (through the sociological analysis of legal rhetoric in dispute prevention and dispute settlement) and in its (unequal) relations with the Brazilian official legal system (from the perspective of legal pluralism).

An ecological model based on evolutionary game theory is developed to analyze the role of egoistic cooperation in regulatory enforcement. The model demonstrates that socially beneficial cooperation depends on 1) a combination of cooperative and deterrence routines in an enforcement strategy that is at once vengeful and forgiving, 2) firms concerned enough about future enforcement encounters to forgo short-term gains from evasion, and 3) institutional arrangements that provide suitable sanctions and cost tradeoffs for existing enforcement and evasion technologies in the particular enforcement arena. Factors limiting the advantage of cooperation are also reviewed, and other applications of the model are suggested.

One of the ironies of police-community relations is that the high visibility via the mass media of public reaction against police has created the impression that public attitudes are predominantly negative. Evidence from field surveys suggests the opposite—that attitudes are predominantly positive and supportive of police (Gourley, 1954; Cleaver, et al., 1966; Preiss and Ehrlich, 1966; Ennis, 1967; McCaghy, et al., 1968; Bayley and Mendelsohn, 1969; Smith, 1969). In a similar vein, police often view citizens as holding more hostile attitudes toward the police than is in fact the case (McNamara, 1967: 221; Wilson, 1968: 28; Bayley and Mendelsohn, 1969). This shared misunderstanding can have self-fulfilling consequences. Police expect a hostile citizen reception and hence take a more authoritarian attitude in order to assure that actions will be seen as legitimate and authority will not be questioned (Westley, 1953; Skolnick, 1966: 62; Werthman and Piliavin, 1967). The public, expecting the worst from the police, may alter their perceptions so that criticisms of police behavior are more likely. This shared misunderstanding produces more conflict between citizen and police. Instances of police brutality are covered by the media, and the cycle continues.

Previous studies of the cost of crime have focused on the out-of-pocket expenses incurred by victims. This approach significantly underestimates the cost of crime to victims by ignoring the pain, suffering, and fear caused by crime. Other studies have attempted to infer the cost of crime by estimating property value differences in high versus low crime areas. However, this approach does not permit one to determine the cost of individual crimes. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the cost of individual crimes by examining the pain, suffering, and fear endured by crime victims. Actual victim injury rates are combined with jury awards in personal injury accident cases to estimate monetary values for pain, suffering, and fear. I combine crime-related death rates with estimates of the value of life to arrive at monetary values for the risk of death. My estimate of the aggregate annual cost of crime to victims of FBI index crimes is $92.6 billion. These estimates are shown to have several direct policy applications.

Many employers create internal procedures for the resolution of discrimination complaints. We examine internal complaint handlers' conceptions of civil rights law and the implications of those conceptions for their approach to dispute resolution. Drawing on interview data, we find that complaint handlers tend to subsume legal rights under managerial interests. They construct civil rights law as a diffuse standard of fairness, consistent with general norms of good management. Although they seek to resolve complaints to restore smooth employment relations, they tend to recast discrimination claims as typical managerial problems. While the assimilation of law into the management realm may extend the reach of law, it may also undermine legal rights by deemphasizing and depoliticizing workplace discrimination.

A survey of consumer reactions to common purchases was conducted in 1975. Consumers perceive problems with many products and services, and voice complaints concerning about one-third of those problems. Third-party complaint processors play a very small role in buyer-seller disputes. Household status and type of problem influence perception of problems and choice of action or inaction. Satisfactory resolutions occur in somewhat more than half of voiced complaint cases. To increase voicing and fair handling of complaints, procedural changes at the buyer-seller level are suggested; to improve treatment of complaints that are not resolved at the buyer-seller level, improvements in community small claims courts are suggested.

The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence was an erosion of the waqf system's legitimacy. In any case, legally questionable adaptations proved no substitute for the legitimate options available to corporations. As it became increasingly clear that the waqf system lacked the flexibility necessary for efficient resource utilization, governments found it ever easier to confiscate their resources. In the 19th century, the founding of European-inspired municipalities marked a formal repudiation of the waqf system in favor of government-coordinated systems for delivering public goods.

The effect of police practices on the rate of robbery in 35 large American cities is estimated by a set of simultaneous equations. The measures of police resources (patrol units on the street) and police activity on the street (moving citations issued) are more precise than anything thus far available in studies of this kind and permit the use of identification restrictions that allow stronger inferences about the causal effect of arrests on crime rates than has heretofore been possible. Police resources and police activity independently affect the robbery rate after controlling for various socioeconomic factors. The political arrangements that lead to the use of aggressive patrol strategies are discussed and their effect estimated. The implications for, and limitations upon, policy are also discussed.

This article develops an analytic framework for comparing dispute processing within a single institution and across different cultures, by focusing on the transformation of disputes. Case studies from diverse nonwestern and western settings are examined to show how disputes change as they are processed in response to the interests of various participants. Disputants, supporters, third parties, and relevant publics seek to rephrase and thus transform a dispute by imposing established categories for classifying events and relationships (narrowing), or by developing a framework which challenges established categories (expansion). Disputes may be expanded by adding new issues, by enlarging the arena of discussion, or by increasing the number and type of active participants. Thus, how the dispute is defined (language) and the roles played by various participants are critical features of the dispute. We focus on the agent of transformation, with special attention to the degree of audience participation, particularly in dispute expansion. We suggest the importance of expansion as a mechanism through which new rules emerge in the legal process, and through which social change is linked to legal change.

This study replicates and then extends Wilson and Boland's (1978) theory of the deterrent effect of policing on crime rates in American cities by linking it to recent thinking on control of urban disorder and incivilities (Sherman, 1986; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981). The theory posits that police departments with a legalistic style tend to generate policies of proactive patrol (e.g., high traffic citation rate and frequent stops of suspicious or disorderly persons), which in turn may decrease crime rates either (1) indirectly, by increasing the probability of arrest, or (2) directly, by decreasing the crime rate through a deterrent effect regarding perceived threat of social control. We test both these propositions in an examination of robbery rates in 171 American cities in 1980. Overall, the major results suggest that proactive policing has direct inverse effects on aggregate robbery rates, independent of known determinants of crime (e.g., poverty, inequality, region, and family disruption). Moreover, when we demographically disaggregate the robbery rate the direct inverse effect of aggressive policing on robbery is largest for adult offenders and black offenders. We examine the reasons for these findings and discuss their theoretical and policy implications.

This research examines the linkages among institutional legitimacy, perceptions of procedural justice, and voluntary compliance with unpopular institutional decisions within the context of political intolerance and repression. Several questions are addressed, including: To what degree do judicial decisions contribute to the acceptance of unpopular political decisions? Do court decisions have a greater power to legitimize than the decisions of other political institutions? Are courts perceived as more procedurally fair than other political institutions? Do perceptions of procedural fairness—be it in a court or legislative institution—contribute to the efficacy of institutional decisions? The basic hypothesis of this research is that to the extent that an institution employs fair decisionmaking procedures, it is viewed as legitimate and citizens are more likely to comply with its decisions, even when they are unpopular. Based on an analysis of national survey data, I conclude that, although perceptions of institutional procedure have little impact on compliance, institutional legitimacy does seem to have some effect. The United States Supreme Court in particular seems to have some ability to elicit acceptance of public policies that are unpopular with the mass public. This effect is greatest among opinion leaders. I conclude with some observations about how these findings fit with the growing literature on procedural justice and with some thoughts about the implications of the findings for the protection of democratic liberty.

The legal and administrative apparatus responsible for the social control of organizations relies extensively on the deterrent effects of punishment. This strategy presumes a rational choice model of organizational misconduct that decontextualizes decisionmaking, emphasizing consequences while ignoring how preferences are formed. I raise three challenges to the rational choice/deterrence model of social control: (1) research and theory on decisionmaking, (2) a sociological paradigm that situates individual action in a structure/culture/agency nexus that influences interpretation, meaning, and action at the local level, and (3) an analysis of the Challenger launch decision at NASA as situated action, showing how structure, culture, and history shaped preferences and choice. These challenges suggest a need to reorient regulatory activity toward the social context of decisionmaking. I conclude with a research agenda to explore the relationship between situated action, preference formation, and rational choice.