Through the lens of the French law prohibiting Muslim headscarves in schools, this article examines the way in which societal tensions that arise in the context of religious and cultural pluralism are translated into legal discourses relating to human rights and equality. It explores the way in which the law is rooted in France's broader sociopolitical structure and history and contrasts it to the United Kingdom and Turkey. It proposes that the law is based on an anachronistic, formal interpretation of equality that is inappropriate for addressing the inevitable cultural diversity of modern French society, and through its permeation into law and policymaking more widely, it is a primary cause of the heightened social tensions involving the Muslim minority. An assessment of the legitimacy of a law that restricts minority groups' cultural practices in this way in any society should be based on a substantive interpretation of equality and should necessarily involve an active endeavor to understand the meanings of those cultural practices for those groups within their distinct context. Upon this foundation, law and policy can be developed in a way that better reconciles the pluralism of modern society with the common objectives of social harmony, stability, and tolerance.

Injury is common in all societies. Americans are perceived as quick to respond to injury by turning to the legal system. This article compares compensation seeking by Americans and Canadians, examining the degree to which cultural factors shape the response of injured parties in the two countries and the extent to which resources and experience influence individual action. Drawing on two large-scale telephone surveys, one conducted in five federal judicial districts around the United States and one conducted in the Canadian province of Ontario, the article looks at the factors that influence claiming and seeking legal assistance. The overall patterns indicate that residents of Ontario are somewhat less likely to claim but more likely to seek legal assistance than are residents of the United States. Moreover, while cultural variations (e.g., religion, type of residence) are good predictors of claiming in Ontario, these factors have little influence on claiming in the United States. As for seeking legal assistance, few predictors are found to influence behavior in the United States while a variety of factors (community size, type of problem, stakes, gender, and education) influence behavior in Ontario.

Colonial legal histories of indigeneity and British-Indian migration have not often been placed in conversation with one another. This article pursues such a project by tracing indigeneity as a spectral presence that emerged with uneven regularity in juridico-political conflicts over British-Indian migration. Specifically, I focus on the 1914 journey of the Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship carrying 376 Punjabi migrants that sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai, Moji to Yokohama, and across the Pacific, eventually arriving in Vancouver, Canada. Crisscrossing continents and approaching law in its broadest sense, I explore three struggles over the ship and its passengers: a satirical cartoon published in the Hindi Punch (Bombay), a legal test case heard by the British Columbia Court of Appeal (Vancouver), and a public debate on the racial meanings of Imperial subjecthood that ensued among Indian middle-class supporters of the ship and unfolded in English newspapers in various Indian cities. In each moment of struggle, I examine the changing conceptions of indigeneity that were strategically appropriated, never by indigenous peoples themselves or on their own terms, but by the Dominion of Canada and by British Indians, each deploying indigeneity to its own advantage and to achieve particular effects. Ultimately, this article considers the political and legal work that the spectral figure of indigeneity performed, the conceptions of time that underwrote its recurrence, and the temporalities that it sustained and called into question.

Plea bargaining was banned by Alaska's Attorney General in August of 1975. The ban extended to all crimes, and forbade both charge and sentence negotiations. Its effects, evaluated by the Alaska Judicial Council in a two-year study, were to increase some sentences, increase trials modestly, and—surprisingly—increase the productivity of the criminal justice system. Explicit plea bargaining appears to have been substantially reduced, without any noticeable commensurate increase in implicit bargaining. The Alaska experience strongly suggests the need to reexamine contemporary thinking about plea bargaining.

We report here the results of two empirical studies of laws mandating a jail term of forty-eight consecutive hours for repeat-offender drunk drivers. In both cases, noncompliance by judges, abetted by other criminal justice system actors, was extensive, and substantial proportions of offenders were not imprisoned as mandated. We explain these findings as evidence of both a disjunction between formal and operative definitions of the behavior in question—drunk driving—and the great difficulty of controlling the discretion of actors in the criminal justice system.

Scholars from across disciplinary lines are interested in understanding legal development. One impediment to the quest for a systematic explanation has been measures of legal change. Indicators like whether a court overturns an earlier ruling capture one facet of legal change but fail to capture the full range of courts' actions to develop legal doctrine. I introduce an alternative measure of legal change here—one based on Levi's (1949) focus on whether factual circumstances are or are not encompassed by the law. I use the U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions on the federal common law of public nuisance to illustrate this measure. Utilizing a multinomial logit model to explore the appellate judiciary's decisions to develop this legal doctrine, I find that the judges' decisions to develop the federal common law are explained by the judges' policy preferences; the litigation environment consisting of party resources, attorney experience, and amicus support; as well as the broader political context of public opinion and Supreme Court rulings.

Law occupies a critical place in a Marxist theory of society. Yet Marx and Engels did not provide a coherent and detailed discussion of law. Subsequent writers in the Marxist tradition have either developed simplistic versions of the unsustainable thesis that the capitalist class dominates the legal apparatus in a capitalist society, or they have virtually abandoned Marxism as a framework for analysis of the law. This paper examines leading texts of Marx and Engels and employs them to provide the outlines of a plausible Marxist theory of law that can embrace the rich complexity of legal activity in a modern capitalist society.

Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the “new” public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be followed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the police in the manner designated by the “law in the books.” Using an “interrupted time-series quasi-experiment” based on a “stratified multiple-group single-I design,” we confirm this hypothesis for Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, through intensive “microanalysis” of these two jurisdictions, we show that Minneapolis, in responding to strong business pressure, developed several alternative means of keeping the streets clear of transient public inebriates while Washington, D.C., treated decriminalization as an opportunity to shift police priorities and relied on informal “safe zones” to handle the inebriate population.

Legal control of aggressive acts within the family must be assessed against a background of other familial controls. This study identifies factors that control male aggression against female partners in intimate relationships. Hirschi's (1969) theory of the social bond, applied almost exclusively to delinquency, is used to test the importance of attachments, commitments, involvement, and beliefs in controlling husband-to-wife assault. By looking at males who do not assault their partners, we gain some insight into the ways in which legal policies might be structured to reduce domestic violence against women.

A substantial body of research shows that people's legal attitudes can have wide-ranging behavioral consequences. In this article, I use original survey data to examine long-term immigrant detainees’ legal attitudes. I find that the majority of detainees express a felt obligation to obey the law, and do so at a significantly higher rate than other U.S. sample populations. I also find that the detainees’ perceived obligation to obey U.S. immigration authorities is significantly related to their evaluations of procedural justice, as measured by their assessments of fair treatment while in detention. This finding remains robust controlling for a variety of instrumental and detainee background factors, including the detainees’ experiences with the legal system and legal authorities in their countries of origin. Finally, I find that vicarious procedural justice evaluations based on detainees’ assessments of how others are treated are as important to detainees’ perceived obligation to obey U.S. immigration authorities as their personal experiences of fair or unfair treatment. I discuss the broader implications of these findings and their contributions to research on procedural justice and legal compliance, and research on legal attitudes of noncitizens.

This article examines how increasingly punitive prison conditions, epitomized by the birth and spread of the supermax prison, developed in the United States. This analysis builds on a growing literature about the “new punitiveness” of U.S. punishment policy and its global proliferation. This article shifts the focus away from the policies that have led to increasing rates of incarceration, however, and toward the policies that have shaped the conditions of incarceration. Drawing on archival research and more than 30 oral history interviews with key informants, I examine the administrative and legislative processes that underwrote the supermax innovation in California in the 1980s. During California's late twentieth-century prison-building spree, prison administrators deployed multiple rhetorics of risk to extend their control over conditions of confinement in state prisons. As the state invested billions of dollars in prison building initiatives, legislators, who were focused primarily on building prisons faster, ceded authority over prison design and conditions to prison administrators. In the end, rather than implementing legislative policy, prison administrators initiated their own policies, institutionalizing a new form of “supermax” confinement, pushing at the limits of constitutionally acceptable practices.

There is an age-old controversy over the relative importance and feasibility of formal and informal controls of human behavior. One body of theory, most notably the Sumner tradition, has held that control by formal laws is unimportant and dependent compared to controls by other means: “Acts of legislation come out of the mores. … Things which have been in the mores are put under police regulation and later under positive law. … The regulations must conform to the mores, so that the public will not think them too lax or too strict.”

While substantial sociolegal research has analyzed the deleterious effects of criminal records on life outcomes, little has examined the records themselves, or their relationship to the people they represent. In this article I take a novel tact, treating criminal records as the material, textual documentations of an individual's past. I then observe expungement seekers—people who encounter their own records—to understand their reactions. From this data, I use inductive theories of symbolic interactionism to theorize another collateral effect of the criminal record: it represents people in ways that depersonalize their social identities, and prevents them from communicating corrective self-understandings to the governing bodies that author the records. I conclude with my main theoretical contribution: “having a criminal record,” literally, means having a textual proxy that the state has authored on its own terms, without input from the people whom it permanently represents, and while concealing from those people the apparatus behind authorship. As a consequence, the criminal records system serves as a barrier to reciprocal communication between ex-arrestees and a legal system that represents them in ways that they may want to contest. This “wrongful representation” is a collateral effect of having a criminal record that impedes the ability of ex-arrestees to manage or repair their relationship with the state that has punished them.

Why have women in eastern DR Congo increasingly turned to domestic courts in the aftermath of sexual violence, despite the fact that the state has consistently failed to provide basic goods and services to its citizens? Moreover, how do victims of violence interpret their first encounters with state law in an environment characterized by institutional fragility and humanitarian governance? This article analyzes the experiences and reflections of 50 self-reported victims of sexual violence in eastern DR Congo. We find that human rights NGOs have served as critical mediators in persuading victims of violence to pursue legal remedy for sexual crimes. However, rather than being socialized to prioritize formal accountability mechanisms in precisely the ways that the architects of legal outreach programs intended, we find that victims of violence have turned to the law for a combination of material and ideational factors. Some appear to have internalized emerging norms of punitive criminal justice, while others have adopted the language of law instrumentally, in order to access crucial socio-material benefits. We identify a paradox of opportunity and disempowerment, therefore, that characterizes our interviewees' experiences with the law.

Numerous commentaries and empirical studies have suggested that while a substantial proportion of incoming law students are interested in careers in “public interest law,” by the time they graduate only a small minority take jobs in that sector. However, none of these studies have been based on a panel study having data on both job preference before students began their studies and information about the actual first job taken. This Research Note fills that gap by updating an earlier study of the University of Wisconsin Law School class of 1976. We find that while over half the respondents expressed some interest in public interest law before beginning law study, only 13% actually took a job in legal aid, as a public defender, or in a nonprofit organization. Analysis of respondents who initially expressed an interest in nontraditional jobs shows that political orientation and participation in a social action law program during law school are the strongest predictors of who in fact took a nontraditional job.

One of the most prominent explanations of the creation and maintenance of independent judiciary is the “insurance theory” that proposes a positive relationship between political competition and judicial independence. But, does intense political competition inevitably lead to higher levels of judicial independence across all types of democracies? Conducting a large-N cross-country analysis over 97 democratic countries, this study shows that as democratic quality across countries changes, the impact of political competition on judicial independence changes as well. The empirical findings reveal that while in advanced democracies high levels of political competition enhances judicial independence, in developing democracies political competition significantly hampers the independence of the courts.

For the past two decades, land in Yajouz has been the locus of fierce contestation between the government of Jordan, the Bani Hasan tribe, and new settlers. Today, Yajouz is a peripheral urban settlement deemed illegal by the government. Three main factors have contributed to the making of Yajouz in its present form: (1) the contested nature of claims to land; (2) the plurality of control mechanisms and ordering of the social and the geographical space, allowing the land market to develop as a semi-autonomous social field; (3) the process of mutual adjustment between state organs and the Yajouz social field, defining the security of tenure among settlers and the social functioning of law. I argue that the Yajouz market does not manifest a traditional phenomenon giving way to modernity; it is rather a modern phenomenon itself shaping and being shaped by the daily functioning of law. In this case, conflicting claims to resources have been catalysts for the development of a semi-autonomous social field, which in turn has engaged state organs in a process of mutual adjustment.

Excessive drinking is involved in over one-half of the motor vehicle associated fatalities in the United States (Department of Transportation, 1968). Various means have been suggested, and some tried, to curb these losses. In only a few cases have countermeasures against driving while intoxicated been subjected to scientifically acceptable evaluation as to effectiveness.

In one such study, Barmack and Payne (1964b) used an information program with administrative review and psychiatric referral in an attempt to reduce alcohol-related crashes by airmen at an Air Force base. Based on their earlier studies (1964a) showing various types of stress-related and deviant behavior associated with driving while intoxicated, the image of the intoxicated driver as "sick" was communicated in meetings, on bulletin boards, and in the base newspaper. Airmen who lost time because of injury in a privately-owned vehicle had their service records reviewed, and evidence of "ineffective behavior" could result in discharge or psychiatric referral. The psychiatrist could then recommend a medical discharge, suggest psychiatric therapy, or take no action.

This article investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination.

This article explores the way that a set of cases arising from a specific event, product, or claim form a congregation of cases that displays common features and that traces a discernable career over time. Such a career is related to, but not uniquely determined by, the course of the social activity that underlies the type of case. The relation of activity and case congregation is mediated by a complex structure of disputing activity (including norms, cognitive dispositions, institutions of access, stakes and resources, social support, legal services, and more). In addition to these external influences, such litigation itself influences its future course by various effects on the underlying activity, on the organization of disputing about it, and on the legal setting. Such endogenous effects include holistic effects associated with the size and distribution of the congregation and career effects associated with the way that the congregation unfolds over time. Delineation of these various effects suggests that litigation lives “a life of its own,” partly independent of underlying events in the outside world, but that the regularities in the litigation process are not reducible to a comprehensive pattern since the activity is interactive and strategic.