Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top-down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.

Donald Black's theory of law states that the quantity of law can be explained in terms of stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and social control. Empirical tests of this theory have produced disparate findings. For the most part, previous tests have focused on criminal law and on the use of law to deal with personal problems. In the present study, survey data are used to test the effect of stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and social control on the willingness of people to mobilize law in response to various neighborhood problems. The only strong and consistent finding is that other social control is positively associated with mobilization of law while Black's theory predicts a negative association. We suggest a distinction between societal and personal social control to explain the pattern of results.

This article develops an agenda setting framework for studying the role of American courts in protecting and promoting the interests of the politically disadvantaged. Drawing from work on agenda setting processes in local political systems, the author presents a framework that examines the ways in which varying configurations of organizational power influence the types of issues that reach lower court agendas. The framework and its implications are illustrated with findings from empirical research on legal mobilization on behalf of the poor by federally funded legal services lawyers. The article shows the variety of mechanisms employed by powerful local interests to constrain poverty lawyers who wish to mobilize issues of social reform. The findings suggest that judicial agendas may reflect prevailing distributions of power to a much greater extent than is implied by conventional views of the legal system's utility in effecting social reform.

In an era of supposed judicial imperialism, the decline of judicial involvement in an important policy area raises questions about the dynamics of legal change. In the past thirty-five years, despite large increases in the volume of loans and delinquent debts, there has been a sharp decline in contested debt cases in state supreme courts and an apparent decline in trial courts as well. In seeking an explanation, this article concludes that for both creditors and debtors, litigation has become more costly in relation to alternative courses of action such as renegotiating payment terms, declaring bankruptcy, or writing off unpaid debts. The attractiveness of nonlitigational alternatives is attributed to (a) the “legal rationalization” of credit transactions by institutional lenders, (b) increased litigation costs stemming from enhanced debtors' rights, and most importantly, (c) “systemic stabilization”—welfare state measures, economic regulation, insurance arrangements, and market diversification that facilitates the attenuation and spreading of financial losses.

While the normative debate over originalism continues unabated (e.g., Scalia 1997; Whittington 1999), the systematic empirical validity of originalism lies relatively unexamined. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over eight years, we developed an initial systematic test of the influence of arguments about text and intent on the decisions of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Typically, we find that Justices support textual or intentional arguments when they are made by liberal parties or when they are made by conservative parties, but not across the board. Multivariate analyses show that legal arguments as to text, and particularly intent, have little impact on the votes of even those Justices alleged to be originalists. Instead, ideology continues to explain their decisions.

How do managers make decisions that affect human rights of other people? The article examines one such case: the decision-making process of Israeli school principals in installing Closed Circuit TV (CCTV) systems in schools. One unexpected source that principals relied on was that of imagined law: they wrongly assumed that there was a law that guided them in the matter. The deployment of CCTV systems in Israeli schools is relatively new and takes place at an accelerated pace. School principals are the ones that make the decision about introducing such systems into their schools. The study traced and explored this process. Based on semi-structured interviews, the findings portray a picture of partial isomorphism among schools. We frame the findings within institutional theory, which differentiates between exogenous and endogenous sources of decision-making. Most school principals relied on endogenous sources that were shaped by practical considerations and their own perceptions as to security, privacy, and education. Yet, the interviews indicate an additional and surprising source of organizational decision-making: imagined law. Some of the principals assumed the existence of specific legal rules. The principals did not search for professional guidance, and did not consult others. Instead, they filled the imagined law with endogenous sources, namely, their own perceptions.

People and organizations make demands on the civil courts to settle their disputes, enforce the performance of obligations, and direct the redistribution of resources. Although the potential number of users of civil court proceedings would seem to be as numerous as individuals and organizations in a society, only some individuals and some groups use the civil courts. Furthermore, from the entire catalogue of remedies provided by law, users differentially present matters for litigation. Not all types of legal actions are demanded. Nor are the most frequent plaintiffs the most frequent defendants; some litigants predominate as plaintiffs, while others appear most often as defendants. Because of this nonrandom appearance of litigants and subjects of litigation, civil courts of first instance are daily exposed to claims of some, but not all of the people. The object of this paper is to locate and describe the principal users of the civil court system and the matters these users want adjudicated.

This study considers whether U.S. Supreme Court justices use opinion content strategically, to enhance the legitimacy of case outcomes. This hypothesis is tested by examining the Court's use of rhetorical sources, which are references to esteemed figures and texts that corroborate the justices' views. The data are consistent with the position that justices use rhetorical sources strategically, citing them when the legitimacy of their actions is lowest, such as when they are overturning precedent, invalidating state or federal law, or issuing directives from a divided bench. The study also tests several other explanations for the use of these sources, such as legal considerations, the justices' ideologies, and efficiency concerns.

Focusing on the issues of rape and honor killings in the Arab world, particularly Jordan, this article investigates the use of criminal laws as an element in political legitimation. These laws are an arena for contestation not merely over policy choices, but over the nature of the sociopolitical order as well. Recent debates over the alteration or preservation of such laws have highlighted the use of legal codes as an expression of dominant values in a political system. I argue that the use of gendered legal systems to serve legitimation claims has important implications for the prospects of democratization.

In Latin American cities, around a third of the urban population lives in tenure situations that can be designated as informal, yet variation in the ways and extent to which these arrangements do not comply with law is extensive. Furthermore, informal dwellers often employ a variety of strategies to legitimize and ultimately legalize their tenure, implying a dynamic rather than a static relationship between illegality and legality. Conceiving of land tenure in dichotomous terms, as simply being either legal or illegal, therefore, fails to reflect this diversity, nor does it capture the evolving nature of the relationship between informal settlements and the state system. Drawing from the development of squatter settlements in Buenos Aires, this article proposes an alternative perspective and shows how settlements alternate strategies of noncompliance with adaptation to the state legal system to gradually increase their legality.

One of the more interesting questions that political scientists are likely to overlook in their analyses of public policy, the delivery of services, etc., is the continually changing mix of public and private provision of such policies and services. Present concern with the criminal justice system, in general, and the police in particular, is no exception. Political scientists are interested in questions of police organization, public accountability of police activity, implications of greater involvement in local police activity by state and federal agencies, professionalization of local police officers, etc. But we have tended to concentrate on the political-governmental provision of police services and to ignore both the traditional and the contemporary role of private police as a very important part of the total panoply of police activities in American society.

This article explores why, throughout the 1990s, some Russian regions created their own constitutional courts and others did not. Contrary to current theories that assert that politicians create a strong and independent judiciary to protect them from the tyranny of election-winners in the context of political uncertainty, my analysis finds that constitutional courts emerged only in those regions where governors virtually guaranteed their re-election by consolidating their political power vis-à-vis federal and local governments. The article argues that both federal and regional politicians used the process of creating subnational constitutional courts to legitimize their federalism and judicial reforms. The changes in the balance of power between those governors, who aspired to have their own judicial system, and the federal government that insisted on a single federal judicial system, determined the variation in the process of court-building across Russian regions.

National debate over the predominance of plea bargaining in the administration of criminal justice in America has become increasingly strident over the past several years. Positions range from the almost unqualified endorsement of plea bargaining practices by no less an authority than the Chief Justice of the United States, through the American Bar Association's (1963) typically moderate proposal for improving procedural safeguards, to the recommendation of total abolition of the practice by the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals (1973). Because of a dearth of hard data concerning the effects of plea bargaining on the criminal justice system, debate over the proposals has tended to produce more heat than light. In the trenchant understatement of one surveyer of the subject, “[s]uch recommendations suffer from insufficient empirical grounding and could benefit from further research on plea bargaining” (Mulkey, 1974: 54).

In this article we clarify and modify Marxian and postindustrial predictions about the structural transformation of the legal profession, especially as they relate to gender differences in the law firm. In doing so, we utilize the concept of cultural capital and highlight the changing gender stratification of legal practice. We find that there is a growing centralization and concentration of cultural capital in law firms, so that both men and women are losing their proportionate shares of partnership positions in the profession, but with women losing more than men. The greatest growth in the profession has been at the middle and lower levels of larger firms, and women are especially likely to be represented in these locations. Women experience their worst partnership prospects in smaller firms, which suggests that male-dominated smaller firms are especially resistant to modifying the work roles assumed by men and women in the profession. We conclude that gender stratification is an important part of the structural transformation of legal practice.

In this paper we present results from a study of small claims litigants' expectations about the civil justice system. Interviews with plaintiffs at the time they file their cases reveal that many people come to court with profound misunderstandings about the authority of civil courts as well as the procedural and evidentiary burdens that the civil justice system imposes. These findings, based on the empirical investigation of litigants' beliefs about and understandings of civil justice, complement experimental studies of procedural justice conducted over the past two decades. We find that litigants are at least as concerned with issues of process as they are with the substantive questions that make up their cases. Yet litigants' preconceptions of procedure are frequently at variance with what the law requires and what will happen in the legal process. Such differences suggest that litigants' expectations and understandings deserve attention in the study of their attitudes toward the legal process.

This article examines whether states shirked enforcement responsibilities in their principal-agent relationship with the federal government when implementing a delegated environmental program. It evaluates determinants of environmental enforcement stringency, particularly whether penalties were less when imposed by states than by the federal government. It analyzes 6,048 hazardous waste administrative penalties across 32 states and all U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Regions over 14 years. It finds that state penalties are typically substantially lower than federal penalties, and that penalty amounts are typically also related to the partisan composition of elected officials and the characteristics of enforcement actions, such as the type, seriousness, and number of violations. Factors such as the influence of organized interest groups, agency sensitivity to economic conditions or the economic importance of regulated industries, and environmentalist preferences of elected officials and the public are typically unrelated to enforcement stringency.

This article traces interconnections between folk knowledge—the everyday, taken-for-granted understandings and beliefs that shape people's perceptions, actions, and reactions to events and situations—and legal action. It examines the consciousness of crime and punishment as that consciousness comes to bear when citizens are given the responsibility for the life or death decision made by jurors in capital cases. It seeks to identify the sources of both general and specific folk knowledge about the release of convicted capital murderers not sentenced to death and to elucidate the construction and concentration of such knowledge. One state—Georgia—where folk knowledge of early release is distinctively concentrated and different from other states serves as a strategic site for the analysis. Using Capital Jury Project (CJP) data from 3-4-hour interviews with 916 jurors in 11 states, we show that it is jurors' specific release estimates that influence their capital sentencing decisions, and we explore how folk knowledge figures in jury deliberations, despite court admonitions that such considerations are not to play a role.

What roles do prior expertise and accumulated experience play in shaping ideologically consistent voting on a specialized court? Using a dataset of obviousness patent cases from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spanning 1997–2007, we show that prior expertise enhances the influence of ideology on judicial decisionmaking, but that accumulated experience does not. In addition, we build on previous work and show that ideology is a factor in decisionmaking in technical areas of law, contrary to the received wisdom on patent cases.

In the spring of 1998, the University of Wisconsin Law School sponsored a multidisciplinary conference to assess the impact of perhaps the most visible, widely cited, and influential article ever published in the law and society field: Marc Galanter's (1974) “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change.” In that article Galanter attempts to explain the outcome of trial court litigation in essentially structural terms. He discusses “the way in which the basic architecture of the legal system creates and limits the possibilities of using the system for redistributive change.” Galanter divides parties into “one shotters” and “repeat players.” A one shotter is a person, business, or organizational entity that deals with the legal system infrequently. The one shotter's claims are too large (relative to their size) or too small (relative to the cost of remedies) to be managed routinely and rationally, but a one shotter's interest in winning a particular case is very high.