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 history of law and society studies in Korea is rather short. Although there were some precursors like Chong Yag-yong (1762–1836), who conducted pioneering legal studies on the basis of empirical methodology, the sociological perspective he pioneered unfortunately failed to flourish. As the momentum of spontaneous modernization, including the law in the late Yi dynasty (1392–1910), was frustrated by Japanese colonial rule, it was only after the liberation of the nation in 1945 that jurisprudence emerged as a subject of academic interest.

Lawyers in the federally funded Legal Services program for the poor have distinguished themselves from their predecessors in privately funded Legal Aid societies by discounting long-range career perspectives while expecting work to be involving. In the first part of this paper I analyze how the social status of poor people creates pressures toward routine treatment, and how reform litigation contributes to the Legal Services lawyer's involvement. In the second part I use this career analysis to understand the dilemmas currently confronting Legal Services leadership as it addresses problems of staff turnover. Recalling the social movement origins of the Legal Services program, I treat the turnover problem as a challenge to the institution to define its historical role. The dilemmas confronting institutional leadership in responding to turnover reflect tensions experienced by all reform organizations as the social movements initially supporting them deteriorate.

Despite the general recognition of its importance, it has been noted that there is a paucity of theoretical treatment of the problems of compliance to law (Krislov, 1966). While there is a vast literature dealing with rule-specified behavior, a direct focus on the peculiarities of legal rules and compliance to them seems to have been skirted in favor of more general treatments of social norms, less-structured rule and compliance systems, and basic or constitutional rules. And when law and the problems of compliance have received specific attention, it has usually been in terms of a broad, societal level, relating legal norms to cultural norms or focusing on “trouble cases” and instances of noncompliance. Detailed empirical studies in sociology have tended to focus on deviant behavior and its correlates, while in political science the approach has tended towards even less-general descriptions and case studies of the impact and consequences of legislative and judicial policy-making.

This article studies the decline of a long-standing mafia known as thieves-in-law in the post-Soviet republic of Georgia. In 2005 an anti-mafia campaign began which employed laws directly targeting the thieves-in-law. Within a year, all Georgia's thieves-in-law were in prison or had fled the country. This article looks at the success of the policy by investigating how Georgia's volatile socio-economic environment in the 1990s affected the resilience of the thieves-in-law to state attack. The article presents data showing that the chaos of this period impacted on the ability of thieves-in-law to coordinate activities, regulate recruitment, and protect their main collective resource—their elite criminal status. Due to this, the reputation of the thieves-in-law as a mafia drastically declined creating vulnerability. The article adds to the literature on resilience in criminal networks and the study of organized crime in the post-Soviet space.

Pakistan state law and Taliban rule of Sharia law are at different ends of a politico-legal spectrum. They share advocacy of one system of law and attraction to eradication of alternatives. Muslahathi Committees in Pakistan are used to explore legal pluralism, hybrid institutions that allow deliberative democracy to seek workable responses to injustice. Formal and traditional systems can show mutual respect and check each other. On the basis of purely qualitative evidence, it is argued that Muslahathi Committees are restorative justice programs that sustainably reduce revenge violence, make a contribution to preventing Pakistan from spiraling into civil war, and assist a police force with low legitimacy to become somewhat more accountable to local civil society. These contributions are limited, but could be more significant with modest investment in human rights and gender awareness training to control abuses and increase accountability. The ruthless, murderous, divisive politics of policing and restorative justice in Pakistan seems a least likely case for deliberative democracy to work. In limited ways it does.

With increasing incidences of deviance exemplified by campus disorders, community crime, civil disobedience, and interpersonal aggression, demands for law and order emanate from various segments of the general population. Concurrently, the search for effective means of assuring compliance to law becomes more fervent. Some policy-planners, legislators, policemen, judges, and educators seek new insights and greater understanding about obedience, but society's response is primarily expressed in terms of increased surveillance, detection, and punishment (which ironically may function to complicate compliance problems). In coping with disobedience, whether individual or collective, violent or nonviolent, little serious attention is paid to the origins of deviance and particularly to the antecedents of compliance. Yet it is from knowledge about the origins of obedience and the related ideas of normal populations about the legal process that the problems of deviance can best be understood and stratagems for social change most effectively realized.

The practices through which American society regulates the transfer of human gametes (eggs and sperm) reflects and shapes our understanding of our relationship to our genetic materials. The ways in which we think about and justify these practices engages important themes of liberal political theory and law: the understanding of individuals as autonomous or defined (at least in part) by relationships that entail dependence and care; the meaning of reproductive freedom and procreative collaboration; and the extent to which a free market may protect or undercut individual liberty. Two ethical and policy questions reflect these issues: should persons created with third-party gametes be able to learn the identity of the donor(s), and should the sale of eggs and sperm be prohibited, regulated, or left to the open market? This article contends that society should prohibit both anonymous transfer of and payment for human gametes themselves. Abolition of both anonymity and payment in the practice of gamete transfer is necessary to reflect properly the collaborative nature of assisted procreation. Although political reality may lead society to permit payment of a strictly capped “inconvenience allowance” for undergoing the procedures involved in transferring one's gametes, such payment (while preferable to payment for gametes themselves) inappropriately conceptualizes use of one's body as a commodity.

This article addresses the debate about the significance of gender differences by analyzing patterns of interaction between lawyers and clients. It examines features of the language of lawyers and clients associated with the dominance and difference paradigms that are at the center of feminist theory. Talk characterized by dominance includes the control of discourse space, interruptions, topic control, and challenges. Features associated with a particular female “voice” include cooperative responses, affiliative requests, indirection, politeness, and the expression of emotion. Results show that women lawyers' talk is role behavior rather than gendered behavior, with little difference between men and women lawyers. Clients' speech is tempered by gender considerations, with both men and women clients expressing greater deference to men lawyers and women clients expressing cooperation and solidarity with all lawyers. It was mainly in reference to the occasional willingness to grant legitimacy to the clients' emotional concerns, as well as the stress on professional identity, that marked women lawyers' specific style of lawyering.

Involuntary commitment to mental hospitals has been a topic of scholarly interest for the last twenty years. That interest has resulted in dozens of studies which have informed the legal reform of many state commitment statutes. In this paper we analyze the organizational context in which the decision to commit takes place. Relying on observations of the commitment process in an urban setting, we discuss the negotiating among the actors involved in the decision to commit. Our data suggest that formal disposition to involuntarily commit accounts for only a small percentage of those held at the hospital against their will. Court procedures and professional persuasion are used to coerce citizens into “voluntary” stays at the hospital in order to avoid court proceedings. We conclude with some thoughts about the meaning of commitment rates in light of these findings.

This article explores the ways in which law and religion overlap and interact in Thailand. The imaginative-symbolic dimensions of Thai law and religion share many common elements, which have been apparent in the discourse of national politics throughout the 20th century and in the discourse associated with conflict, dissent, and reform in contemporary Thailand. With the emergence of a constitutional monarchy in the 1930s, traditional Buddhist concepts of cosmic law and religion were fused with new concepts of political administration and legal authority. A new “civic religion” emerged, resting on the threefold formula of nation, religion, and kingship. This evolving civic religious tradition has provided a framework for both the imaginative-symbolic and the more practical, action-oriented discourses that characterize modern Thai legal culture.

Questions about the relation of court caseloads to plea bargaining practices generate much controversy but little sophisticated empirical research. Here we examine the effects of a 1975 felony plea bargaining ban in the Texas district courts in El Paso. Relying on a quasi-experimental interrupted time series model with annual data for 1968–83, we test the hypothesis that the discontinuance of plea bargaining negatively affects court caseloads, specifically the proportion of cases going to jury trial and the disposition rate. We also examine conviction rate, exploring whether the existence of plea bargaining encourages prosecutors to accept weak cases. We find a considerable increase in the proportion of cases going to jury trial immediately after the ban's implementation and a substantial but gradual decrease in the disposition rate. The jury trial rate contributed substantially to the disposition rate decline. The conviction rate was generally unaffected by the ban, although it became more consistent after the ban. Overall our findings suggest that the ban on explicit plea bargaining did affect the district courts' ability to move the felony docket efficiently.

Social scientists have long been skeptical of the power of the threat of legal sanctions, as invoked by enacted laws, to control behavior. This skepticism has been supported by the failure of empirical studies, especially those based on official records of crimes and of the apprehension of offenders, to provide convincing evidence of the deterrent effect of legal penalties. The possibility that an experimental design might avoid the defects of other studies of deterrence has been suggested, and for this purpose, traffic law and its enforcement are especially salient. This paper reports on such a field experiment, which resulted in the conclusion that an increased threat of legal punishment, albeit a relatively small fine, reduced by one-half the number of customary offenders.

Turnpikes promised a solution to the problem of bad roads, but private management of highways was a startling innovation. Some people opposed the idea of turnpikes as exemplifying two bêtes noires of the post-Revolutionary period, the “private corporation” and “aristocracy.” Much of the controversy, however, was rooted in local disputes over legislative concessions to turnpike protesters. The legislature both expressed and responded to turnpike protest by writing laws favorable to local users and injurious to the financial viability of the companies. Partly in consequence, the turnpikes were unprofitable. Landowners, merchants, and farmers struggled to finance turnpikes, not so much in hopes of company dividends but in hopes of improved transportation, stimulated commerce, and higher land values. Many turnpike projects failed to be constructed, and those that were constructed carried on in a condition that reflected their precarious financial state.

This essay argues that the history of the American welfare state is inextricably bound up with disaster relief. It focuses on the New Deal, which was justified using numerous precedents drawn from the previous 150 years of federal disaster relief. After sketching this early history, including the development of a compelling moral narrative of fault and blame, I examine congressional speeches, briefs filed in the central legal cases of the New Deal by the Roosevelt administration and its opponents, Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, and photographs taken by New Deal employees to trace how the Depression was narrated as a “disaster” whose victims were entitled to federal relief.

The “drug wave” of the late 1960s was widely perceived as a threat to the legitimacy of normative expectations in Dutch and German society. Although the overwhelming reaction of public opinion to drug users in both countries was hostile and punitive, the German legislature passed even more repressive laws whereas the Dutch legislature adapted the normative system to the use of both “soft” and “hard” drugs. Although in each instance the initiative for legal change came from the political and moral “progressives,” the conservative “moral center” retained a veto power. Why it used this veto power in Germany but actively supported the reform bill in Holland is explained in terms of the macrostructure of each society.

E. Adamson Hoebel is justly honoured for the contribution he made to the study of tribal law by insisting on the recording and study of what he, with the late Karl N. Llewellyn, called “trouble-cases” in their innovative book, The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence (1941). The fruitfulness of this method was demonstrated also by Hoebel in another book, published at virtually the same time, on The Political Organization and Law-Ways of the Comanche Indians (1940), and argued further in his The Law of Primitive Man (1954). We may see the form of these studies as emerging partially from the method of case-law in Anglo-American jurisprudence, and here the influence of Llewellyn was probably important. But concentration on specific “cases”, “situations”, “incidents”, et alia, was also part of a general tendency in social science from the 1920's onwards: the increasing focus of analysis on untangling the structure of specific situations against the general social background was marked in political science and economics (see e.g., Devons, 1960, 1970) and sociology (see e.g., Gouldner, 1954). I have discussed the general development in social anthropology (Gluckman, 1959, 1965b, 1967).

Generally, studies in legal anthropology have tended to focus on the codes, written or unwritten, by which behavior is regulated in human societies and on the regularized processes by which conflicts are resolved in accordance with these codes. Thus, in considering a cross-cultural operational definition of law, Nader (1965: 6) notes that all societies have rules governing behavior, some preferential and some prescribed.

Cuban popular courts have been a subject of widespread interest among Western scholars. This paper analyzes the factors which led to the development of this judicial experiment as well as the reasons for its demise. The success or failure of this experiment was closely tied to long-term economic and political goals of the Cuban government, which eventually came to require an institutionalized bureaucratic cadre to operate its judicial system. This shift doomed the popular courts and led to the emergence of the legal profession as one of the most influential groups within Cuban society.

While Max Weber is revered as one of the patron saints of the law and society movement, his views on the nature and limits of sociological studies in law are not fully understood. Using recent analyses of Weber's legal thought (Kronman, 1983) and overall social theory (Alexander, 1983a), the author argues that while Weber set forth the standard, positivist understanding of the sociology of law that influences research to this day, at the same time he critiqued this understanding and in the end despaired that social science could contribute significantly to human emancipation. Arguing that Weber's tragic modernism is an inappropriate guide for law and society studies today, the author suggests an alternative vision in which the sociology of law is seen as part of a pragmatic enterprise of social transformation.