The paper examines the theoretical and empirical adequacy of Donald Black's (1976) The Behavior of Law. The work is found to be logically incoherent and its operationalization of variables problematic. The evidence that bears on its propositions does not consistently support them.

The provision of legal services without regard for the individual's ability to pay has long been a tradition of the American legal profession. It is a basic tenet of a democratic society that the protection of individual rights cannot turn on a matter of income or social class, since justice then becomes a luxury, available to a privileged few. Our society has met this problem largely by relying on the sense of professional responsibility of private practitioners and by developing legal aid societies.

Richard Fenno (1962: 315) has suggested that: “[I] f one considers the main activity of a political system to be decision making, the acid test of its internal integration is its capacity to make collective decisions without flying apart in the process.” In the context of the Congress, Fenno (1962: 310) defined committee integration as: “the degree to which there is a working together or a meshing together or mutual support among its roles and subgroups. Conversely, it is also defined as the degree to which a committee is able to minimize conflict among its roles and its subgroups, by heading off or resolving the conflicts that arise. A concomitant of integration is the existence of a fairly consistent set of norms, widely agreed upon and widely followed by the members.”

Based on the findings of a research project in a Nahua Indian area of central Mexico, this article focuses on the relationship between customary law and state law in the context of the administration of justice by and toward Indians. By showing how customary and state law interact and conflict in the everyday life of Indian people, it questions the idealized vision of customary law that appears to be taken for granted in the current debate over Indian rights in Mexico and Latin America. Thus a paradox is revealed between the intertwining of law and custom in social praxis and the revival of an ethnic discourse which calls for an autonomous indigenous legal system based on customary law.

An influential theory argues that court-ordered school finance equalization undermines support for public schools. Residents of wealthy school districts who cannot keep their tax revenues for their own school districts may vote to limit school funding altogether. Proponents of this theory point to Serrano v. Priest, a 1977 decision of the California Supreme Court that mandated equalization of school financing and was followed almost immediately by Proposition 13, a ballot initiative to limit the local property tax. I test the theory that these two events were causally related by using hierarchical models to analyze voters within school districts. I find no evidence that opposition to school finance equalization contributed to the tax revolt. Claims about the perverse consequences of school finance litigation should be greeted with skepticism.

Two events in the past twelve months have made me think about the law and society field and activism—two events and many years of telling myself that our field is about more than research.

Regression analysis is applied to civil commitment decisions to evaluate the importance of psychiatric opinion, externally visible “facts,” and judges' attitudes. Indices were constructed of evidence of dangerousness, based on information presented at court hearings, and of judges' attitudes toward psychiatrists, mental hospitals, and the mentally ill, based on their responses to Likert type items. Additional variables include respondent's prior commitment status, diagnosis, court behavior, race, sex, age, and family caring. The analysis suggests that “facts” and psychiatric opinion but not judges' attitudes are significant influences on commitment decisions.

Why are liberal rights and Islamic law understood in binary and exclusivist terms at some moments, but not others? In this study, I trace when, why, and how an Islamic law versus liberal rights binary emerged in Malaysian political discourse and popular legal consciousness. I find that Malaysian legal institutions were hardwired to produce vexing legal questions, which competing groups of activists transformed into compelling narratives of injustice. By tracing the development of this spectacle in the courtroom and beyond, I show how the dueling binaries of liberal rights versus Islamic law, individual rights versus collective rights, and secularism versus religion were contingent on institutional design and political agency, rather than irreconcilable tensions between liberal rights and the Islamic legal tradition in some intrinsic sense. More broadly, the research contributes to our understanding of how popular legal consciousness is shaped by legal mobilization and countermobilization beyond the court of law.

Today I would like to speak to you about Organizations, Institutions, and the Story of Shmuel.

Now, I figure everyone here knows what an organization is, and pretty much everyone at least thinks they know what an institution is. But I'm pretty sure you all are wondering, “Who's Shmuel?”

This paper employs data from the United States Census to raise questions about the historical demography of the legal profession in the United States between 1850 and 1980. I describe in turn (1) national lawyer population trends, (2) regional shifts in the number and ratio of lawyers to population, and (3) changes in the gender composition of the profession. The paper then considers issues concerned with demand theories of lawyer population dynamics, monopoly and supply theories, and theories of gender segmentation.

As one approach to prison downsizing and criminal justice reform, scholars recommend altering the nature of policing by reallocating resources toward policing and increasing sentinel patrols and hot spots interventions. Public attitudes toward these reforms are unknown. In the current police crisis, shifting policies in ways disfavored by the public can impact police-community relations, especially among those disproportionately affected. The current study uses survey data from a nationally representative sample of Americans to evaluate whether the public is receptive to the suggested reforms. Our results indicate that the majority of the general public believes policing is more cost-effective than incarceration and supports a focus on sentinel patrols and crime hot spots, although there is less support for hot spots policing among blacks, Hispanics, and lower income individuals. The hot spots policing strategy most preferred is situational prevention, and the least supported is aggressive order-maintenance policing.

In western Europe as well as in the United States, litigation often operates as a means of political contestation. This article draws on a study of land use disputes in similar U.S., French, and west German metropolitan areas to analyze cross-national differences in the way local political actors employ courts. More an extension of pluralist policymaking patterns in the United States, political litigation in the European settings occurs as part of starker challenges to corporatist and statist patterns. The contrast between centralized and federal governmental arrangements helps to explain why the political consequences of litigation in the French and the German settings also differ.

Though the details of face-to-face talk and interaction have been studied in Anglo American and British courtrooms, few attempts have been made to extend similar analyses to the study of contemporary indigenous and (post)colonial legal institutions that continue to employ legal processes informed by both Anglo-style adversarial notions of law and “local” notions of law, culture, and tradition. Using methods of legal discourse analysis and language ideology studies, this article investigates how interlocutors in a hearing before the courts of the Hopi Indian Nation construct discourses of tradition and Anglo American jurisprudence in multiple and competing ways, and for significant sociopolitical effect. An argument is thus made for attending to the microdetails of sociolegal interactions as an important site for exploring the complex articulations between the contemporary lives of indigenous peoples and the laws with which they are imbricated.

This study is an exploratory social history of litigation about public education. Using West digests as an index of appellate cases, it first examines the changing volume and character of litigation from the earliest recorded cases until 1981. It then relates trends in litigation to two broad phases of educational history: the system-building era, when courts helped to clarify the lines of authority in an ambiguously decentralized system; and the new functions of litigation in the twentieth century, when administrative progressives sought to use legislation to reshape schooling. It turns then to the relation between school law and social conflict over basic dividing lines of religion, race, and ethnicity and suggests that courts played a relatively small role in adjudicating such issues until recent times. Finally, it contrasts the recent history of litigation—by some called a “legal revolution”—when excluded groups sought to reshape schooling.

Parole officials have traditionally been afforded considerable discretion when making sanctioning decisions to be able to tailor sanctions according to substantively rational concerns such as individuals' unique needs and situations. However, the application of substantive rationality in sanctioning can also generate unwanted disparities because sanctioning decisions may be based on extralegal factors that parole officials consider relevant. Concerns regarding disparate treatment of offender groups have prompted a number of states to consider adopting administrative violation response policies that emphasize formal rationality and uniformity by restricting parole officers' discretion and structuring sanctioning decisions according to legally relevant criteria. By emphasizing formal rationality in sanctioning, structured sanction policies present a dilemma for parole officers—uniformity versus individualized treatment. In 2005, the state of Ohio implemented an administrative violation response policy designed to reduce parole officers' reliance on revocation hearings and promote uniformity in sanctioning decisions. This study involved an examination of whether Ohio's shift to structured sanctioning coincided with differences in legal and extralegal effects on parole officers' decisions to pursue revocation hearings. Analyses of data collected before and after the implementation of the policy revealed a reduction in the number of revocation hearings officers pursued. Only modest increases in uniformity were observed, however, because there was little disparity resulting from officers' hearing decisions before the policy was put in place. These findings are discussed within perspectives on justice system actors' decision making.

The mobilization of law may be thought of as the process by which legal norms are invoked to regulate behavior. In the area of private law, mobilization has two distinct aspects. The first is the process by which existing disputes become engaged in the legal system. In theory this means that disputes are transferred from an arena where their resolution and the enforcement of resolutions depends on the relative power of the parties as enhanced or constrained by nongovernmental normative systems to an arena where disputes are resolved by reference to governmental (legal) norms and resolutions are enforced by the power of the state. In practice the separation between the governmental and nongovernmental spheres is rarely complete. Legal norms may influence the way in which parties resolve their disputes even when there is no threat that the matter will be taken to law, and both the parties' resources (Galanter, 1974, 1976) and nongovernmental norms“ clearly affect the way disputes are resolved in the legal system.

The strength of research designs is relative. Compared with true experiments, quasi-experimental designs are weak. Compared with cross-sectional designs, they are strong. One can further strengthen inferences from quasi-experiments by examining a broader pattern of data. We agree with Britt, Kleck, and Bordua when they recommend that researchers expand the range of inquiry. We disagree with them when they recommend that researchers restrict it. The District of Columbia study is largely consistent with the available evidence, but it does not prove that restrictive handgun licensing will always reduce firearm deaths.

The metaphors Santos (1995) affords us for orienting a postmodern subject no doubt emerge from a substantial body of empirical research and theoretical deliberation. Having only been provided with a very brief summary of his remarks upon which to base my own, I risk an insistence upon sociohistorical contextualization that may well be more appropriately attended to in Santos's aggregated agenda. So be it. My point, in any case, is simply to suggest that rather than privilege any formulation of the subject, postmodern or otherwise, in a progressive reimagining of the law, we put the subject at risk by continuously interrogating its privileges. I might begin by disputing Santos's claim that “we” are in a period of “paradigmatic transition” by virtue of having to acknowledge other knowledges and “rival epistemologies” by asking for whom the exhaustion of modernity's certainties is a “deep and irresolvable crisis.” Similarly, one could argue that, far from being exhausted, modernity's categories continue to provide many of the conceptual resources for a truly profound expansion of democratic politics—one that is only now realizing its potential by virtue of the failure of Enlightenment universal-isms and the proliferation of identities, epistemologies, and new social movements (Botwinick 1993; Laclau 1993, 1994; Lefort 1988; McClure 1992; Mouffe 1992a, 1993, 1995). Such politics, of course, are very likely to be enacted in struggles to expand the inclusiveness of common law and legislative categories—in courts, legislatures, and administrative tribunals, at local, national, and international levels. I will briefly return to the potential politics of postmodernity in my conclusion, for it is there, perhaps, that we might find more promising resources for a new conception of law.