This paper reports on an attempt by an interdisciplinary team to observe and record on tape lawyer-client interaction in the metropolitan Boston area in 1975-77. Current pressure for greater accountability to the public on the part of the legal profession makes the empirical, observational study of lawyer-client relations a timely, important topic. Despite the investment of much time and energy in creating conditions suitable for such a study, the project team failed to gain access to private lawyer-client encounters. The goal of the paper is to try to account for this failure, to analyze the nature of the obstacles encountered, and to stimulate speculation on how these obstacles might be overcome in the future. It is suggested that the doctrine of attorney-client privilege is the major obstacle which researchers must overcome. The idea of paying attorneys for their cooperation is also considered.

The paper identifies five presumptions of dispute theorizing: universality, ideological functionalism, settlement by courts, qualitative identity of the parties, and comparability. It is argued that these presumptions derive from or are related to the methodology of dispute theorizing, which is idealist either in the form of abstracted empiricism or logical deduction. Reasons for the sudden upsurge in dispute theorizing are discussed. Concluding, the authors evaluate attempts by dispute theorists to break away from the presumptions identified, and indicate some empirically limited but theoretically useful possibilities for futher work.

Immigration detention is formally not a punishment, but governments do use it to deter illegal residence. This study examines whether and how immigration detention affects detainees’ decision-making processes regarding departure, thereby possibly resulting in de facto “specific deterrence.” Semistructured face-to-face interviews were conducted in the Netherlands with 81 immigration detainees, and their case files were examined. Evidence is found for a limited, selective deterrence effect at the level of detainee's attitudes: most respondents considered immigration detention a painful and distressing experience, but only a minority—mostly labor migrants without family ties in the Netherlands—developed a preference to return to their country of citizenship in hopes of ending their exposure, including repeated exposure, to the detention. In line with defiance theory, we find that eventual deterrent effects mostly occurred among detainees who also attributed some measure of legitimacy to their detention. Among some detainees, the detention experience resulted in a preference to migrate to a neighboring European country.

Plea bargaining is finally coming to be recognized for the important institution it is. There is a rapidly growing body of research that describes its variations, reports on its impact, and discusses its implications. Despite these advances, however, much of this literature is fragmented, anchored in separate disciplines, and often lacking in broad context and historical perspective. And although much of the empirical research on plea bargaining has a distinct reform orientation or offers important implications for reform, this is often implicit or presented in a way that is neither convincing nor useful to practitioners.

During the twenty years since the founding of the Law and Society Association, a distinctive “law and society” discourse has emerged and been institutionalized in a multidisciplinary scholarly community, which has been instrumental in producing a tremendous increase in systematic knowledge about the law in action. The growth of law and society research has accompanied other changes in the distribution of information about the legal process, including a new legal journalism and greater media coverage that make the law in action more visible to a wider audience. Current distress of legal elites about the hypertrophy of legal institutions is viewed as a reaction to the increased currency of information that discredits the received picture of the legal world. The coincidence of structural changes in law with changes in the social institutions of knowledge about law creates the possibility of a more responsive and inquiring legal process.

Since 1980, District Court Judges, designated pursuant to federal statute, have helped decide over 75,000 court of appeals cases—nearly one of every five merits decisions. Although scholars and judges have warned that the presence of these visitors on appellate panels may undermine consistency, legitimacy, or collegiality, little empirical evidence exists related to such concerns. Working with an especially complete data set of labor law opinions, the authors found that district court visitors perform in a much more diffident fashion than their appellate colleagues. They contribute notably fewer majority opinions and dissents. In addition, their participations do not reflect their professional or personal backgrounds to nearly the same degree as their appellate colleagues do when voting on labor law matters. The authors' findings and analyses regarding the behavior of designated district judges should be of interest to appellate courts considering the challenges of caseload management and to scholars studying processes and outcomes in the courts of appeal.

Certain recent technological developments may soon make possible new alternatives to the incarceration of offenders. These alternatives clearly present some hazards as well as benefits. The purpose of this paper is to discuss briefly a few of the difficult and complex issues that may soon arise as a result of these new alternatives.

Some of the most relevant advances in technology are occurring in areas other than that of corrections. For example, an electronic rescue and rehabilitation system now being developed will permit the monitoring of the heart rate and geographical location of cardiac patients in an urban environment as they move through the prescribed monitored area. In the event of acute cardiac infarction, the patient could transmit an emergency signal to the base station and help could be sent immediately. Even if the patient were unconscious, the base station might automatically be alerted to his condition and location. The location would not need to be determined unless an emergency occurred. A similar system might also be used to help rescue persons subject to other types of medical emergencies, to protect mentally ill or retarded persons who might easily become lost or confused in the city, and to help safeguard persons with suicidal tendencies.

The studies reported in this issue stem from a concerted, well-coordinated attempt to deal with the “hidden” dimension of disputing in the United States. The Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP) was prompted by conclusions which have emerged in recent years from a variety of research traditions, all focused on issues of dispute settlement, or “dispute processing” as it has been relabeled. The hidden dimension of disputing was one of many issues which emerged from these disparate research traditions. Given the definition of the problem produced by earlier analyses, the decisions made by the CLRP investigators seem reasonable, and the results to date give some answers.

This article describes how disrupting the activities of suspected violent extremists has become an increasingly significant construct in the policy and practice of the Prevent strand of UK Counter-Terrorism. Informed by empirical data collected during semi-structured interviews with police officers involved in conducting disruptions and members of the communities where these occurred, blended with a limited amount of field observation, the analysis documents how and why a logic of disruption has assumed increasing prominence in counter terrorism work. In respect of police interventions in particular, implementing disruptions, rather than pursuing fully-fledged prosecutions, represents a pragmatic way of reconciling increasing demand with limited resources, as well as managing some of the difficulties of translating intelligence into legal evidence. Conceptualized in this way, the analysis positions disruption as a distinctive mode of crime prevention; one premised upon logics of near-event interdiction. As such, it is understood as rather different in its operations and functions to other forms of “early intervention” that are increasingly prominent in much contemporary crime prevention policy. By focusing upon how specific Prevent interventions are implemented and performed this analysis makes a particular contribution to our knowledge of counter terrorism work. This reflects the fact that most previous studies of Prevent and other countering violent extremism programs have provided analyses of community perceptions and reactions to policing and the policy frame, rather than the configuration of the interventions themselves.

The author argues that in Thai society, woman- and family-related issues fall outside the direct domain of law. The family as a subsistence unit has been challenged by opportunities for wage labor in cities and towns. These opportunities, which have dispersed the family unit and eroded the authority of parents, have been particularly advantageous for women, who are seen as good workers, obedient and undemanding. Yet the power of the family as a psychological unit in Thailand has not altered. Likewise, although women have made gains in the market and the workplace, the possibility of achieving greater parity with men is hindered by the continued psychological force of the traditional “beauty culture,” their historical place as appendages to men, the cultural devaluation of manual work, and the religious definition of women as polluting. While the law is not irrelevant to these issues, they are neither determined by law nor are they likely to be altered by legal change.

This article examines the ability of modern systems theory to provide a foundation for understanding the problematic notion of legal pluralism, and to the ability of scholars to apply that understanding to engage in the study of pluralistic legal orders. In particular, it develops the observations of systems theory of the relationship between state law and violence by adopting one of its linked ideas, that of structural coupling. It also considers the role played by translation when law is identified by reference to the application of the legal code: legal/illegal. The whole analysis is underpinned by systems theory's account of the differences between studying premodern and modern societies.

This article tests the equal status contact hypothesis in the aftermath of desegregation in the Texas prison system. This study uses ten years of inmate-on-inmate assault data and compares the rates of violence among inmates racially integrated in a double cell versus inmates racially segregated in a double cell. The analysis revealed that violence between integrated inmates was not disproportionate to the level of violence between segregated inmates—in fact, it was lower. This article addresses the conditions under which positive racial group contact will likely be found in a prison setting and concludes with a discussion of implications.

This article focuses on the Community Protection Act (CPA), the State of Washington's legislative effort to control sexual violence, and on the victim advocacy groups that played a prominent role in this effort. It is argued by some, most recently by republican criminologists, that victim advocates serve democratic ideals and introduce into criminal process important values and interests that are neglected by professionals. Others argue that victim advocacy tends to promote punitive policies that empower the state, jeopardize constitutional rights, and divert attention from causes to symptoms. The evidence gathered in this research lends credence to the critics of republican criminology. Victim advocates were not reliable carriers of republican values in their strenuous support of the CPA, the central provisions of which reduce civil liberties and promote exclusion rather than reintegration.

Civil damage awards in wrongful death cases and experimental data from jury simulations reveal that male decedents are typically awarded substantially higher monetary damages than are similarly situated female decedents. These differences in treatment may arise because female decedents are perceived as worth less, female survivors are perceived as more needy, and/or male decedents are perceived to have a longer lost income stream than any female decedents. Mock jurors received written summaries of wrongful death cases stipulating to the liability of the defendant. They were asked to award an appropriate sum in damages and about the factors they considered in making these awards. Male decedents received higher awards in two separate studies. While mock jurors were sensitive to the perceived needs of the surviving spouse, the disparity in awards was primarily attributable to differences in the estimated lost income of the male and female decedents.

Much of the recent literature on customary property relations in sub-Saharan Africa has highlighted underlying characteristics of negotiability and indeterminacy. Custom is prone to reinvention as resource claimants manipulate customary references across multiple forums for property legitimation and authority. This article focuses on the resilience of customary property relations in East Timor. Based on a study of customary authority in the village of Babulo, we conclude that traditional Timorese narratives of first possession, where land authority is claimed by groups that trace descent to a mythic first settler, have acted as adaptive and resilient focal points for the reproduction of customary property relations in historical circumstances of war, colonization, and occupation. While a finding of customary resilience is not new to postcolonial contexts, the relative novelty of our study lies in its structured explanation for resilience in circumstances of war and displacement, based on the social ordering capacity of first possession principles themselves. This explanation, which derives from focal point theories for cooperative property relations, also takes into account a number of limits on the ordering capacity of first possession principles, which support a conclusion of relative or constrained resilience, particularly in terms of contested interpretations of possessory authority in contemporary East Timor.

Sociolegal scholars suggest that regulatory encounters often are occasions for displaying a surface compliance decoupled from day-to-day practice. Yet ethnographic data from five highly regulated HIV clinics show that regulatory encounters open opportunities both for ritualism and—surprisingly—for transcending ritualism. Using a theatrical analogy, we argue that improv performance is the technology that enables regulatory inspectors and clinic staff to transcend ritualism. As regulatory encounters unfold, clinics' carefully prepared performances sometimes change into more cooperative interactions where inspectors and regulatees hash out details about how rules will be applied and even work together on reports for the regulators' supervisors. By “performing together,” regulatory inspectors gain access to the clinic's backstage where they can assess clinic workers' deeper conformity to ethical and scientific norms. But such joint performances are less likely where cultural divides and material scarcity make it difficult for clinic staff to gain inspectors' trust.

The capital city of New York State, situated on the west bank of the Hudson River about 140 miles north of New York City, has a large range of urban, suburban, and rural land uses within its limits. Albany is obviously an old city. While it shared in the common urban experience of rapid growth during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its population in recent decades has remained close to the 127,000 reached in 1930. The 1960 census reported that Albany contained only about 130,000 residents.

The past 15 years have seen a significant attempt by governments in the United Kingdom to restructure the market for legal services. As a part of this program, in 1992 the English bar finally lost its exclusive jurisdiction over advocacy. Although solicitors could qualify to appear as advocates in the higher courts, few have so done. We explore the perceptions of legal professionals, solicitors, and barristers through a qualitative study. By examining the legal profession as a set of connected but differentiated and competing fields of practice, we show how change resonates with the legal market. We find that institutional coherence and client service vie with the desire to become complete lawyers in the rationale for solicitor advocacy. The identification of institutional constraints on the pursuit of professional hegemony leads us to qualify the proposition that professionals are motivated purely by economic returns or market dominance.

This study investigates the effects of being apprehended for shoplifting. The deviance amplification hypothesis derived from labeling theory and the converse deviance termination hypothesis derived from deterrence theory were formulated to structure the analysis. Self-report data on shoplifting were collected from high school students in four communities. Youth who had been apprehended for shoplifting reported more subsequent shoplifting than unapprehended youth. Youth who were exposed to police contact during apprehension reported more subsequent shoplifting than those who were handled by store personnel alone. In addition, apprehended youth reported a stronger deviant self-concept and less fear of store antishoplifting devices. These patterns were not strong but they were consistently in the direction predicted by labeling theory. Although other explanations may also be useful, it appears that labeling theory explains these findings, at least in part.