During the past few years there has been a refreshing wave of studies of the relationship between policy inputs and outputs in American urban and state politics. These studies have attempted to go beyond the analysis of the political processes of a unit of government, to analyze its relationship and that of other factors such as socio-economic characteristics to the policy outputs of that unit. They have gone beyond the analysis of “who governs?” to the analysis of “what difference does it make who governs?” and “what difference do certain socioeconomic characteristics make?” (Wilson, 1964: 133). In other words, what are the consequences of these inputs for the life of the average citizen? These consequences have been analyzed in terms of the policy outputs and services of these governments in areas such as education, welfare, criminal justice, planning programs, and general social welfare measures.

This study reanalyzes data collected by David Chambers on the enforcement of child support orders in Michigan. It finds that organizational factors interact with sanction factors to determine levels of general deterrence. Where the agency charged with enforcing child support orders, the Friend of the Court, is proactive and jail is a relatively common punishment for those who persist in not paying, overall collection rates are markedly higher than where neither or only one of these factors exist. The study also examines special deterrence and finds a special deterrent effect apparently associated with the experience of being jailed for failing to pay support. In the course of the investigation a number of contingencies important to deterrence theory are identified, and a behavioral response to threat—the avoidance response—is defined.

Jury service in the United States is both compulsory and yet distributed to some but not others in a nonsystematic way. Concerns about unfairness in this distribution system have led to legal changes; however, there is still little empirical information on how jurors view the jury selection process. This study considers jury selection in terms of participants' perceptions of procedural and distributive justice. I argue that justice in this setting is related to areas of conflict between the decision maker and the prospective jurors, especially over privacy protection, despite strong rhetoric that jurors minimize their own preferences and rights in this setting. Data from interviews of 194 formerly excused and selected jurors support this contention.

Criticism of Supreme Court confirmation hearings has intensified considerably over the past two decades. In particular, there is a growing sense that nominees are now less forthcoming and that the hearings have suffered as a result. In this article, we challenge that conventional wisdom. Based on a comprehensive content analysis of every question and answer in all of the modern confirmation hearings—nearly 11,000 in total—we find only a mild decline in the candor of recent nominees. Moreover, we find that senators ask more probing questions than in the past, and that nominees are now more explicit about their reasons when they choose not to respond—two factors that may be fueling the perception that evasiveness has increased in recent years. We close with a discussion of the normative implications of our findings as well as an outline for future research into this issue.

This research tests the simulated impact of Supreme Court decisions which allow for smaller than twelve-member juries. It identifies variation in judicial output that results from competing operating structures of jury decision making. The research employed a quasi-experimental design to address important problems of simulation, such as structural and functional verisimilitude. The sample consisted of 110 juries composed of nearly 1000 jurors. The findings indicate that a jury's size affects its behavior. Larger juries hang more often than smaller ones do. The degree to which this avoids the committing of a Type I or Type II judicial error remains to be seen; nevertheless, the Court was wrong in assuming that there are no differences in the behavior of twelve- and six-member juries.

An important intersection of the disciplines of law and social science is the social setting of law enforcement. The point of application of the law is almost completely social, with the exception of the totally automated justice of parking violations (Skolnick, 1966). The social factors in the enforcement encounter which produce the official definition of crime have been discussed in studies of police discretion (Skolnick, 1966; Cicourel, 1968), police/suspect interaction (Piliavin and Briar, 1964; Wertham and Piliavin, 1967; Black and Reiss, 1970), and the influence of complainants' wishes and demeanor on police action (Black, 1970). A second social setting that greatly influences the extent of law enforcement and the resultant official crime rate is the setting of victimization. This setting occurs prior to the enforcement encounter and is quite distinct from it except in cases of police observation of crime. The setting of victimization has received relatively little research attention. Questions pertaining to the perception of victimization and the subsequent decision by the victim on ways to handle the situation have not been systematically addressed. The goal of this study is to decribe why, and under what conditions, victims decide to invoke formal sanctioning procedures in response to criminal victimization.

On July 10, 2015, a young African American woman named Sandra Bland was stopped by State Trooper Officer Brian Encinia for failing to signal a lane change. What began as a routine traffic stop quickly devolved into shouting, a physical confrontation, and Bland's subsequent arrest. We use discourse analysis to examine the rapid escalation of this encounter with a focus on procedural justice (Sunshine & Tyler 2003) and the dialogic approach to legitimacy (Bottoms & Tankebe 2012). In analyzing the transcript of Sandra Bland's traffic stop, we address several key questions: How is procedural justice manifested linguistically? Can the dialogic legitimacy framework be used to understand the dynamics of individual police-citizen interactions? The conclusions of this analysis provide an interdisciplinary view of how procedural justice and legitimacy are manifested and negotiated in a police-citizen interaction.

Since the 1990s, legal consciousness has been amply used by sociolegal scholars to better understand the everyday lives of ordinary people, with a strong focus on vulnerable or impoverished people. This article argues that legal consciousness, with some methodological adjustments, could lend itself to the study of the rich and powerful by investigating both the technical work of their lawyers and how that work shapes our broader legal culture. To illustrate this point, this article takes tax avoidance as a case study. Drawing on materials revealed by a recent tax scandal, it suggests that current difficulty in tackling the problem of tax avoidance rests on uneven access to the cultural repertoires related to legal technique and legal innovation, which fosters the tax-avoidance narrative's ambiguity.

Through a case study of the early American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), this article examines the empirical ramifications of constitutional scholars' recent exhortations to “take the Constitution away from the courts” in order to promote democratic deliberation about constitutional meaning. While it is now one of the most prominent examples of a litigation-based interest group, the ACLU began its existence demonstrating a commitment to constitutionalism outside the courts. Through coding a decade's worth of meeting minutes and examining archival sources, I demonstrate that the ACLU's mounting unpopularity rendered extrajudicial politics impossible, precipitating the ACLU's shift toward litigation. The ACLU's move toward litigation, despite its early devotion to political activism outside the courts, suggests that it is not always possible for political actors to make constitutional arguments without courts. Furthermore, the ACLU's use of courts to publicize and dramatize its constitutional arguments demonstrates that litigation may actually promote popular deliberation about constitutional meaning. These political realities both highlight and contradict two empirical assumptions underlying arguments about the normative desirability of restricting courts' involvement in constitutional politics. First, the state is not a neutral arena in which all political actors are equally free to pursue their constitutional visions through majoritarian processes. Second, courts may facilitate (rather than hinder) popular deliberation about constitutional questions.

This essay identifies social conditions associated with the compensatory style of conflict management, addresses variable aspects of compensation itself, and examines the modern trend toward a greater degree of compensatory liability of organizations for the misfortunes of individuals. Several propositions are discussed: Compensation is a direct function of groups and a curvilinear function of relational distance, and is greater in upward and group-directed cases than in downward and individual-directed cases. In addition, liability varies directly with social distance and is greater in group-directed than in individual-directed cases. The modern trend toward greater organizational liability appears to be a devolution toward a pattern of collective dependency characteristic of earlier societies before the decline of kinship.

The suppression of Islamic family law and the introduction of secular family law to govern family life in Turkey created a legal and regulatory environment that supported more egalitarian relationships within the rural household. Despite the lack of an organized political movement, by 1950 rural Muslim women had begun to use the courts in divorce and other conflicts, suggesting that Ataturk's reforms had diffused to the Anatolian provinces by this time. Female-initiated cases, in conjunction with other behavior such as reducing family size and pushing husbands to leave the extended patriarchal households of their fathers, indicate that rural Islamic women were striving toward more autonomy in their lives. This picture offers a sharp contrast to the image of the passive, submissive rural Islamic woman described in much of the social science literature on Turkey. It suggests instead that rural women were active participants in changing their life situations.

The subject of the police is a neglected issue among political scientists. The police are rarely viewed from perspectives natural to political science, nor are they studied comparativly among countries. The few studies that have been done are written largely from the point of view of public administration; they tend to be wholly descriptive and to deal largely with matters of formal organization and management. The neglect of the police is not unique to political scientists; the record of other social sciences is hardly better. Even in sociology there has been surprisingly little. Historical monographs on countries rarely refer to the police at all; inspection of indexes of basic histories of most foreign countries will reveal very few references to the police. Unrest in American cities and violence between police and minorities, as well as between police and students, is beginning to convince the scholarly community that the police are crucial social actors. The impetus so far for empirical study has come largely from government, in the form of various national study commissions (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Criminal Justice, 1967; National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1967; National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1969). The kindling of interest in the police is new; it may be dated from 1965.

In a recent study of small claims mediation and adjudication in an Ontario court, Vidmar introduced the concept of “admitted liability” (1984). He argued that it is this case characteristic and not the forum type that accounts for the greater likelihood of accommodative settlements in mediation than in adjudication, as well as the higher rates of compliance with mediated outcomes. This article reanalyzes some of Vidmar's data in conjunction with both previously reported and new data about small claims cases in Maine. We conclude that the forum type remains a stronger predictor of case outcome and compliance than any case characteristic. However, the data do support Vidmar's alternative hypothesis that case characteristics help specify the relationships between forum type, on the one hand, and outcome and levels of compliance on the other.

The place of law in the state is largely the result of political struggle, which can be understood better by looking at social and political rather than cultural variables. Informed by Weberian models of legitimacy and political structure and by Marxist concepts of class conflict, the article analyzes efforts to establish an Indonesian “law state” in the context of middle-class assaults on patrimonial assumptions of political order. It concentrates primarily on issues that arose in the consideration of a new law on judicial organization and authority. Groups that favored fundamental political and legal change focused on the judiciary as a means of gaining access to and influence in the state and of imposing limits on the exercise of political power. They failed, but the struggle goes on, complicated by strains within the growing middle stratum of the population.

The landmarks of California resource law were laid down within the turbulent context of “the stampede of 1849 and subsequent years.” From all over the world men came to seek fortune in that “glorious country,” fully expecting government “to use its resources positively to enlarge their opportunities.” But federal policy was in a state of flux when gold was discovered on the public domain. Before 1846 mineral lands had been reserved from sale or pre-emption; federal authorities had attempted simultaneously to expedite development and to raise revenue through a complex set of leasing and regulatory arrangements with private firms. Several factors had impeded effective administration of the program, however, and in 1846 lead, copper, and iron lands had become subject to public sale. The discovery of gold in California, then, found the federal government without an applicable policy and “at a loss for knowledge as how to act.” Public sale of gold-bearing tracts was impossible, given the time necessary for survey and classification. A handful of federal officials did submit—and even tried to secretly impose— various plans for reviving some form of federal intervention. But Californians made it clear that they would stubbornly resist any program likely to forestall rapid exploitation of the public domain, and widespread recognition of the difficulties inherent in administering any policy that would conflict with local interests led to congressional unwillingness to take any action until 1866. In the interim, the State of California deemed it advantageous to take the situation “precisely as it finds it…. It looks to the fact that the General Government permits [miners] to trespass on the public domain without complaint … [and] the State is not the steward, nor bailiff, of the General Government, having in charge the protection of the public property.?

This piece comments on Galanter's article “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead” and on articles in this symposium that extend Galanter's thesis or put it to an empirical test. It suggests, first, that none of this work goes very far in explaining why the “haves” do better than the “have nots” in social or even legal life; second, that it has yet to be shown that repeat playing is important to litigation; and third, that despite the passage of 25 years, it is still not clear that in litigation the “haves” come out ahead.

Traditional views hold that citizens' attitudes toward the police are driven by local concerns. We contend that public attitudes toward the police are responsive to systematic and periodic national-level political factors. In particular, we show that national elections as a focusing event alter periodically the determinants of attitudes toward the police. Using a logistic regression model and diachronic data from Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States, we find that attitudes toward the police and the national government are linked, and this linkage is responsive to the influence of national election campaigns in varying degrees. In addition, we find that attitudes toward the Mexican police are sensitive to partisan changes in the composition of the national political government. We find no such sensitivity in the police attitudes of Costa Rican and U.S. citizens. This suggests that police attitudes are not only affected by the performance of the national political government but also by the character (consolidated versus unconsolidated) of the national political government. In short, police attitudes in new democracies are an indication of the unconsolidated nature of the state apparatus.

American dynastic business families as descent groups constitute a category of social organization with which anthropologists have been traditionally familiar, but in the unlikely setting of a complex, bureaucratized society. This paper examines aspects of such groups and argues that law has been a critical organizational resource in their development. Law does not merely impinge at times on family concerns, but becomes an integral dimension of extended family relations in the arrangements for perpetuating collective wealth as business capital, and in distributing individual entitlements to that wealth among descendants. A general model of family/business formations is presented, supported by a comparative discussion of two dynastic families of Galveston, Texas.

There has been a timely shift in the focus of the sociology of law from an emphasis upon the characteristics, operations, and impact of the distinctively legal institutions and agents in modern societies, to an exploration of a more complex set of interrelationships between those institutions and agents and other social phenomena. Kidder (1975: 385ff) outlined the significance of this shift in focus for students of litigation. The Civil Litigation Research Project is itself an embodiment of the change. The early products of the Project which are presented in this issue of the Review are a testimony to the importance of the change. Indeed, it is hard to imagine an empirical research project in the sociology of law which could be of more theoretical significance and at the same time offer so many practical policy implications. By the same token, the articles contained in the Review provide the opportunity for appreciating some of the difficulties of, and dilemmas in, producing theoretically integrated and methodologically satisfactory studies in the sociology of law with the new focus. This is not to direct criticism particularly at the Project or at the authors of the articles in this issue of the Review. Rather, it is to point to a more general set of difficulties and dilemmas facing many who are currently striving to produce an empirically based sociology of law which attempts to place law in its more general social context.

We examine consensual and coercive police–citizen relations in São Paulo, Brazil. According to procedural justice theory, popular legitimacy operates as part of a virtuous circle, whereby normatively appropriate police behavior encourages people to self-regulate, which then reduces the need for coercive forms of social control. But can consensual and coercive police–citizen relations be so easily disentangled in a city in which many people fear crime, where the ability to use force can often be palpable in even mundane police–citizen interactions, where some people fear police but also tolerate extreme police violence, and where the image of the military police as “just another (violent) gang” has significant cultural currency? Legitimacy has two components—assent (ascribed right to power) and consent (conferred right to govern)—and consistent with prior work from the US, UK, and Australia, we find that procedural justice is key to the legitimation of the police. Yet, the empirical link between legitimacy and legal compliance is complicated by ambivalent authority relations, rooted in part in heightened cultural expectations about police use of force to exercise power. We finish the paper with a discussion of the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.