Diversion has emerged as one of the most popular reform tactics in the juvenile justice system. An analysis of a two-year diversion program for status offenders revealed significant conceptual and operational ambiguity. The notion of a progression of a delinquent career from status to criminal offenses was not supported. The utilization of community-based programs in place of the juvenile court resulted in agency competition for clients and lengthy treatment programs for status offenders. Finally, the impact of specialized treatment for status offenders on behavioral and attitudinal measures was not significant. It was concluded that diversion programs developed exclusively for status offenders may be predicated on faulty assumptions.

This article explores the ramifications of the intersections of gender, race, and class ideologies for the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Laws in the years immediately following their passage. Drawing from government documents and archival data, I argue that the notions of gender, race, and class that permeated the legislative debate contained significant incoherences and self-contradictions, and that many of the dilemmas surrounding the enforcement of the exclusion laws against Chinese women resulted from these collisions. Faced with conflicting mandates derived from, for example, racism and patriarchy, enforcement officers had to choose between equally powerful discourses. Their ad hoc and often pragmatic approach to such dilemmas contrasted sharply with a policy process that otherwise appeared to be driven by unquestioned—and unquestionable—moral mandates. In concluding, I note the implications for our understanding of the contingencies and instabilities of ideology and the legal practices of which it is part.

A survey of child custody cases and commentary yields the following, most depressing conclusions: everyone agrees that awarding custody is one of the trial judge's most delicate responsibilities; almost everyone is unhappy with prevailing substantive and procedural doctrines; yet no one seems to believe that the situation can be improved substantially. Too many appellate opinions begin, or end, with a plaintive plea for the reader's sympathy.

In its 5–4 decision in Tison v. Arizona (1987), the Supreme Court put forth disputable empirical assertions about where community sentiment stood on the death penalty for felony-murder accessories. The Tison majority claimed that the community would support the death sentence for an accessory where (1) major participation and (2) reckless indifference to human life were shown. Two experiments were run to test these empirical assertions, and the results indicate quite the opposite. By a wide majority, community sentiment rejects the death penalty for such an accessory and rejects equal treatment of principal and accessory. Even beyond the death penalty question, to the issue of conviction under the felony-murder rule per se, attributions of causal and moral responsibility showed the principle of proportionality reigning supreme. Implications for how the Supreme Court goes about doing social science are discussed.

Legal scholars have recently been extolling the explanatory potential of behavioral law and economics. This new scholarship seeks to marry insights from traditional microeconomics with findings from the behavioral sciences to produce a descriptively accurate and predictively powerful account of human motivation and decisionmaking to put in the service of legal policy. I examine the claims being made on behalf of this new approach. I argue that legal scholars cannot simply use behavioral science in the place of standard microeconomics. More specifically, I argue that once empirical findings are incorporated into legal policy analysis, it becomes necessary to forsake aspirations of broad generalizability and predictive determinacy. I conclude that legal policies and initiatives need to be informed by a modest conception of social science. Such a conception acknowledges the limitation of social science knowledge and recognizes that strong causal explanations of human behavior cannot be permitted to supplant normative debate.

This article evaluates how the social structure of American legal institutions influenced the diffusion of wrongful-discharge laws over the period 1978–1999, and it assesses whether economic or political variables influenced the diffusion process. The results are surprising and quite striking. Precedents by other courts within the same federal circuit region were generally more influential in the diffusion process than precedents by courts in neighboring states or by courts within the same census or West legal reporting region, even though the precedents were on matters of state law rather than federal law and the decisions were usually made by state courts rather than federal courts. There is some limited evidence that political variables may also have been a factor, but economic variables were not statistically significant, even though the new employment laws may have had important economic consequences.

Who do violence preventers target to achieve violence prevention? This fundamental question of selection is typically associated with law enforcement, yet gang labeling is critical in another context: nonprofit violence prevention. Eighteen months of fieldwork in a gang outreach organization find that (a) workers operationalize gang violence prevention as social service provision, but (b) services are only offered to those deemed “ready” for life changes. Readiness is an unwritten eligibility criteria leveraged as a rhetorical tool to focus recruitment on clients who demonstrate complicity. It is reaffirmed through external pressures to document program effectiveness; organizational-level concerns for efficient resource allocation; the subpopulation of clients who actually want services; and workers’ own fears of “getting played”—losing face from free-riding clients interested in street worker perks, but not formal services. While core gang members may be most at-risk, their very centrality may deter, rather than justify, providing them services.

This article examines the Supreme Court's use of social science research evidence in 28 capital punishment cases decided between 1986 and 1989. The study describes the frequency and major correlates of the justices' citation of social science authorities in the 1986–89 sequence of cases. Social science evidence figured significantly in several death penalty cases, although a majority of the justices were more eager to discredit and discount research conclusions than to use them as premises for their decisions, and prevailing case opinions generally promoted principles that had little to do with empirical evidence concerning the administration of capital punishment. Social science citation patterns in majority and dissenting opinions, and in the opinions of “liberal” and “conservative” Supreme Court justices, in significant respects parallel the Court's shifting doctrinal premises in capital punishment decisions.

In 1974, Marc Galanter examined the strategic role of public interest lawyers in helping the “have nots” come out ahead in the legal system. Galanter argued that, to become agents for social change, lawyers must recognize that their role as advocates extends beyond the courtroom into the implementation process (Galanter 1974:151). This article analyzes the efforts of one group of public interest lawyers—those working in Legal Services agencies dedicated to law reform—to influence the implementation of redistributive programs for a particular group of “have nots”: homeless families or those on the brink of losing their housing. Based on my studies, I argue that by skillfully combining adversarial legal tactics with collaboration, poverty lawyers can transform judicial decisions into “symbolic resources” to leverage the implementation of redistributive remedies. When the reform lawyers have the authority to participate in the process of administrative rule making during the implementation process, they can reshape the norms and organizational infrastructures within state agencies.

This paper examines the last 12 years of research on trial courts. It focuses on three shortcomings of that research. The first is a failure to examine distributional questions about what kinds of benefits and sanctions are apportioned to which members of American society as well as the place of adjudication in the course of dispute processing. The second shortcoming is a failure to integrate the various theoretical perspectives which have won widespread acceptance. The third is an undue concentration on comparative designs to the neglect of longitudinal analyses within single jurisdictions.

In an increasingly competitive world marketplace, can cross-national variations in law—in this case, in labor law—produce markedly different economic outcomes? In both The Netherlands and the United States, law has helped rationalize the hiring of port labor and provide dockworkers greater security. However, American longshoremen have captured a larger share of the productivity gains flowing from the mechanization of cargo handling than have Dutch dockworkers. Because of constraints imposed by American longshore unions, container terminals in Rotterdam are more efficient and less costly to users. These differences can in part be explained by American labor law, which encourages a more adversarial, self-seeking union posture than does the labor law structure in The Netherlands. Probably more important, however, are economic factors, which expose Dutch dockworkers (but not West Coast longshoremen) to competition from ports in other nations. Similarly, international competition, intensified by the technological revolution in transportation, seems likely to impel cross-national convergence in many spheres, leveling differences in law and in legally influenced outcomes.

The quest for empirical evidence of strategic judicial behavior has produced mixed results. This study finds such evidence in the decisions made while crafting an opinion. Central to any opinion is which precedents are cited and whether their scope is limited (negative treatment) or expanded (positive treatment). I look for evidence of strategic anticipation of en banc review in these decisions using an original dataset of published search and seizure cases from the U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1953 to 2010. A panel is less likely to negatively treat a precedent with which the full circuit is more closely aligned. Circuit preferences also have an effect on citation itself, but only when the panel is at least moderately aligned with a precedent. Moreover, the panel's own ideology is only a significant predictor of citation when the full circuit is favorably disposed toward a particular precedent.

This paper examines the impact of Turkey's radical introduction of Western law codes and secular courts by analyzing a portion (1950-67) of the docket of a rural district court, located in Bodrum, Turkey. We are particularly interested in whether a transplanted formal legal system can influence the countryside, and we ask: (1) To what extent are rural district law courts being used, and is this use increasing? (2) In what domains are rural courts used, and to what degree do these coincide with domains formerly covered by religious and/or customary law? (3) How is the use of the courts distributed between settling disputes (including disputes between the state and citizens) and processing routine, undisputed formalities, and is this distribution changing? (4) To what extent are women and other non-powerful groups (rural, poor, ethnic minorities) using the courts, and has this use changed over time? (5) To what extent is the government using the courts for social control purposes, and how does this use compare with non-governmental use of the courts? (6) How does the use of the courts relate to abrupt shifts in political power and ideology?

Illegal behavior responding to subjective probabilities of arrest and consequent costs is modeled within a framework of individual choice under uncertainty. The model is formulated for the case of driving while intoxicated and tested with data that include all arrests for drunken driving in Sweden from 1976-1979. Results indicate that an arrest experience reduces the probability that a person will drive while drunk. The results suggest that an arrest increases a person's perceived probability of arrest and/or the unpleasantness of an arrest and thus leads to a reduced chance of acting illegally.

Social science research on civil litigation has concentrated either on explaining variations in aggregate litigation levels or on explaining individual-level mobilization of the law. This article attempts to connect the two approaches by analyzing variations in state-level employment civil rights litigation within a framework based on individual-legal decisionmaking. Because the structure of our court system forces individuals to consider the costs and benefits of pursuing litigation, the model developed here incorporates factors that would affect individuals' cost/benefit decisionmaking with regard to civil rights litigation. The multivariate regression model based on this framework explains, with increasing strength, much of the state-level variation in civil rights litigation levels for the years 1970, 1975, and 1980. Although the framework has certain limitations, it may serve to enhance our understanding of aggregate litigation levels.

Two important perspectives on courts highlight fundamentally different elements of adjudication and yield distinct predictions about judicial outcomes. The Attitudinal Model of judicial voting posits judge ideology as a strong predictor of court outcomes. Alternatively, the Law and Economics perspective focuses on the settlement behavior of litigants and reasons that while judges may vote ideologically, litigants adapt to these ideological proclivities, nullifying the effect of judge ideology. This analysis focuses on reconciling expectations about the effects of judge ideology and litigant strategies by examining their contingent nature and the conditioning effects of institutional design. The analysis examines state supreme courts from 1995–1998 to identify empirical evidence supporting both perspectives. While some state supreme courts have discretionary dockets allowing judges greater opportunities to exercise their ideology, others lack discretionary docket control, making dockets and outcomes largely litigant driven. Support for each perspective largely hinges on this fundamental feature of institutional design.

Clemency in capital cases today has become quite rare. Capital clemency has been a victim of the rejection of rehabilitation as the guiding philosophy of criminal sentencing and of the increasing politicization of issues of crime and punishment since the 1960s. Yet despite the reluctance of governors to grant clemency, despite the difficulty of rectifying miscarriages of justice through the clemency process, petitions seeking commutation or pardon in death cases still are regularly presented to chief executives. With so little chance of success, filing them may seem to be nothing more than an empty ritual. In this article, I examine clemency petitions from Texas and Virginia, and I argue that those petitions may serve another function, and take on meaning in another way. This function I label “memorialization.” These pleas provide an archive of stories of law's failures, of alleged breakdowns in the legal process, of a legal process in disrepair, as well as of racial prejudice, of lives shattered by violence and neglect, of remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption. They are cultural artifacts, documents that address both governors and an indeterminate audience beyond them and that memorialize miscarriages of justice. While they reveal the importance of religion, family, and good works in American thinking about remorse, redemption, and mercy, they also should be seen as histories of the present, documenting the breakdowns and inequities in the death penalty system as well as the tragic circumstances of lives shaped and shattered by poverty, abuse, and neglect.

This study analyzes Chicago lawyers' networks of relationships with a selected set of prominent practitioners, drawing on 1994–95 interviews with 788 randomly selected respondents. Since the same technique was used 20 years earlier, the research sheds light on the extent to which the constituencies of elite Chicago lawyers have changed. The network is organized in three principal sectors—liberals, trial lawyers, and corporate lawyers. The structure implies a lack of integration within the bar. Minorities and women are now more widely dispersed across the segments of the network than they were in 1975, but they still have relatively few connections in the corporate sector of the bar.

Law has influenced the shape of Indian group life by providing economic or political incentives for groups to organize along particular lines, by forcing groups into closer proximity with one another or separating them, and by creating an official vocabulary for the discussion of group life. The most striking effect of law has been to focus the expression of Indian political identity at the level of the “tribe.” Although largely a construct of non-Indian legal forces, the tribe has become a powerful vehicle for assertions of Indian autonomy, even when it has not always been the traditional locus of political legitimacy. Modern Indian identity and community thus reflect conflicts over and distinctive ways of appropriating the institution of the tribe. A second effect of law has been the developing support among tribal members for a supratribal Native American political community. Significantly, however, most tribal members view their support for such a community as a means of strengthening tribal units.