There has recently been a growing concern within political science with the public's support for governmental institutions. To date, the research in the judicial realm — focusing extensively on the United States Supreme Court — has measured support primarily in terms of the public's evaluation of court outputs and has attempted to explain support through variables believed to function as important bases or references for these evaluations, e.g., policy orientations, political party identification, and race (Murphy and Tanenhaus, 1968a and 1968b; Dolbeare and Hammond, 1968; Dolbeare, 1967; Hirsh and Donohew, 1968). Yet the public is not especially cognizant of court decisions and the low “visibility” of judicial bodies (Dolbeare, 1967; 198-201; Barth, 1968; Jacob, 1966) would suggest that the basis of support might well be more diffuse than specific. An analysis of diffuse support might be concerned primarily with the public's general willingness to comply with judicial decrees or with its willingness to maintain judicial institutions as bodies appropriate for resolving conflicts, and only secondarily with outputs.

In 1983, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were modified to mandate sanctions against attorneys who filed frivolous pleadings or motions or who failed to make reasonable efforts to verify facts or statements of law made in pleadings or motions. There is substantial variation among federal judicial districts in the use of this Rule 11 provision. To what degree can these variations be explained by situational or legal factors? Does one need to use a concept such as local legal culture to account for at least some of the variation? These are the questions addressed by this article. We find that variations in most Rule 11-related activities can be explained by structural and situational factors. We conclude that beyond the expectations created by specific structural and legal factors, one does not need to resort to local legal culture to explain Rule 11-related phenomena. We suggest that the conditions that make local legal culture a useful construct in the context of the criminal courts may not apply in the civil justice system.

Rural land registration has frequently been recommended as a step forward for developing countries. Registration is conceived not only as a means of clarifying property rights and promoting land markets, but also as a way to protect the rights of women and other vulnerable groups and prevent environmental degradation. This package of advantages was once associated with the land rights of individuals. However, more recently, customary interests have been recognized as important for social peace and as serving local conceptions of justice. In recognition of these objectives, Ethiopia and some other countries of sub-Saharan Africa have formally recognized what are often called “customary land rights.” Ethiopia is cited as a model of this approach in a multicultural setting. This paper shows, however, that serious problems associated with rural land registration have not disappeared. Fieldwork evidence from parts of Ethiopia suggests that customary property interests often go unrecognized. It also shows that the bargaining power of smallholder farmers who rent land to commercial farmers is being reduced. Simultaneously, there is an evident shift in decision-making power from households and communities to the state and officials. The complexity of these matters in practice raises questions about the interpretation of Ethiopian land policy.

In the early 1980s, Sebba (1980) explored the victimological and criminological dimensions of German Holocaust reparations, utilizing a broad definition of victimization similar to Mendelsohn's (1976) earlier framing of this notion, which included victims of genocide and mass violence. Since this time, scant attention has been paid to the victimology of state crime, and even less to the victimological implications of genocide and mass violence. This is unfortunate since critical victimological lessons can be drawn from the study of the victims of genocide and mass violence. In this article, we focus on the post–World War II monetary reparations, or “compensation,” demands made against the West German state by Jewish and “Gypsy” survivors of Nazi state-sponsored violence. Through a comparative analysis of these two cases, we seek to illustrate the organizational, social, and discursive conditions that either enabled or obstructed victim mobilization and, in so doing, to develop critical tools for better understanding “victim movements” and the trauma narratives they construct.

Legal authorities’ second-order legal consciousness—their perceptions of others’ understandings of law—shapes the social realization of legal power. Analysis of interviews with welfare fraud enforcement workers from five US states reveals their perceptions of how clients view law, policy, and enforcement practices, and shows these perceptions’ consequences. Enforcement workers’ perceptions influence the discretionary work of policy implementation, as fraud workers attempt to circumvent what they see as clients’ evasive maneuvers and act in ways they believe will influence clients’ thinking and behavior. Fraud workers’ second-order legal consciousness can also influence welfare law, when their perceptions of clients’ understandings and behaviors drive changes in written rules. Together, these effects demonstrate the power of authorities’ second-order legal consciousness to affect both law in action and law in books. Through documenting the impact of authorities’ second-order legal consciousness, this study fills an important gap in social scientific knowledge of how ongoing, dynamic processes of assessing others’ thinking and responding accordingly shape law-infused environments.

Identifying the U.S. Supreme Court's most influential precedents is integral to understanding its impact on society. To make these identifications, scholars often analyze the network of citations in Supreme Court opinions. I contend that the broader jurisprudential significance of precedent can be better captured by considering how frequently a precedent is followed across the federal judicial hierarchy. In support of this contention, I present an analysis of original data on the treatment of every Court precedent 1946–2010 in all three levels of the federal judicial hierarchy. I show that a class of complex and ambiguous precedents are followed significantly less at all levels of the hierarchy. Yet these same fractious precedents exhibit high citation rates in Supreme Court opinions. The results show that different methodological choices capture strikingly different theoretical concepts, ones that are easily conflated in the study of legal precedent.

Classical Islamic law apparently constitutes an exception to the finding that legal systems in complex societies invariably possess hierarchical appellate structures. The prevailing wisdom among Islamicists for over a half-century has asserted that there are no appellate structures in Islamic law, that the decision of a judge is final and irrevocable, and that a judgment may not be reversed under any circumstances. The exceptional nature of Islamic law has been explained by Martin Shapiro as a function of the absence of hierarchy in the Islamic religious community. In this article, I argue that Shapiro has been poorly served by Islamicist scholarship. On the basis of a reexamination of Islamic legal theory and an analysis of 14th-century Islamic court practice, I demonstrate that a judicial decision was reversible by the issuing judge himself, albeit under limited and precisely defined conditions; that hierarchical organization was a regular feature of Muslim polities; that the court of the chief judge of the capital city served as a court of review for the decisions of local judges; and that Islamic law also developed a unique, nonhierarchical system of successor review. My conclusions will be of interest both to Islamicists and to social scientists who study the relationship between judicial institutions and social organization.

This article examines the impact of state-level school finance litigation conducted in the wake of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. State supreme courts have handed down decisions in 36 states since the Rodriguez decision in 1973. The article looks at how these decisions have affected the distribution of educational resources in eight states—five states in which school finance activists have won and three in which they lost. The author shows that state supreme courts can have a significant impact on both the equity of school finance systems and their adequacy. This finding rebuts scholars who have recently argued that courts, acting alone, cannot achieve significant social or political change in the face of public opposition. The article also explores why some state supreme courts are more successful than others, putting forward a policy-centered model of judicial efficacy that takes into account the peculiarities of school finance as a policy issue.

This commentary responds to the essays by Espeland and Gooding as ethnographic studies of the cultural construction of identity with a discussion of the concept of “cultural construction.” Sophocles' Antigone provides an extended illustrative example of how the poetics of identity are tied to the materiality of power. In the world of events, the concept of cultural construction is useful—as Espeland's and Gooding's essays show—as an alternative (and remedy) for the overuse of the concept of “choice.” To refer to identities as “cultural constructions” focuses attention on how powerful institutions and subjectivities are mutually implicated, without implying that people's needs and world-views are commensurable—or that the outcomes of their contests are fated.

Many routine criminal cases in central Europe are concluded by an abbreviated process known as the penal order. The penal order is a written proposal by the state to a defendant stipulating the crime committed and the penalty to be levied if the defendant does not object. This paper describes the West German version of the penal order and argues that it avoids some of the negative practices allegedly inherent in American plea bargaining.

Models of judicial decisionmaking have traditionally relied on legal, political, and contextual variables, emphasizing judges' background, litigants' rights claims, and the relative social status of the parties involved. A recent scholarly expansion has brought cultural variables into the equation, indicating that judicial scholarship might usefully include narrative and rhetoric as measures of legal consciousness. This project examines AIDS-related litigation from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals between 1983 and 1995, emphasizing the social construction of sexuality. It uses content-based coding and stepwise probit analysis to evaluate the importance of controlling for language that depicts AIDS as a “gay disease” and its association with death and plague metaphors.

This paper analyzes the role of local political leaders in channeling the impact of national development programs on the processes of dispute handling in Zinacantan, a Maya Indian community in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. Although the development programs have caused individual Zinacantecos to become more aware of the benefits they might obtain by appealing to remedy agents outside of the Indian community, few cases are taken to Mexican authorities because Indian leaders, who have a vested interest in handling the disputes of constituents, have sought to preserve the popularity of traditional conciliatory procedures by altering the types of settlements they suggest to disputants. As a result, traditional conciliatory procedures are flourishing, but the substance of the settlements reached through such procedures has begun to change toward conformity with codified state and national laws where those laws conflict with traditional Indian custom.

Almost 40 years ago, the Supreme Court, in the landmark case Goldberg v. Kelly (1970), provided welfare participants with a potentially potent tool for challenging the government welfare bureaucracy by requiring pre-termination hearings before welfare benefits were discontinued or reduced. In 1996, with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the rights talk of Kelly was officially replaced with the discourse of individual responsibility. Using observational data of administrative hearings and interviews with administrative law judges and appellants, this study explores how fair hearings have been affected by this official reconceptualization of rights. I find that hearings are not a panacea for challenging the more punitive aspects of welfare reform, but nor are they devoid of the possibility of justice. While hearings can replicate in style and substance the inequities, rigid adherence to rules, and moral judgments that characterize welfare relationships under the PRWORA, they can also be used as a mechanism for creating counternarratives to the dominant discourse about welfare. This study identifies two types of judges—moralist judges and reformer judges—and examines how their differing approaches determine which narrative emerges in the hearing room.

At the end of the 1980s in an effort to increase the effectiveness of its development loans, the World Bank's legal staff began to address what it calls governance issues in borrowing countries. Concerned that the way power is exercised in Third World countries may contribute to the inefficient use of World Bank funds but constrained by its Articles of Agreement from considering “political” criteria in its lending, the General Counsel of the Bank, Ibrahim F. I. Shihata, drafted a memorandum that distinguished “governance” from “politics” and identified the former as a legitimate consideration in the award of Bank loans. At his most general, Shihata equates governance to “good order”; in more specific terms, he calls it “the rule of law,” which he defines at one point as a “system based on abstract rules which are actually applied and on functioning institutions which ensure the appropriate application of such rules” (emphasis in original).

This paper takes as an example of Anglo-American legal ideology the work of legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart, analyzing it in light of current linguistic theories. Linguists have proposed that ideological reflection can be affected in particular ways by the structure of the language used to convey it. We find that Hart's theory, with its emphasis on decontextualized rules and prerequisite conditions, fits the linguistic predictions. The paper concludes with the suggestion that the effect of language structure on cultural and/or legal ideologies is, however, socially and culturally circumscribed.

Over the past decade crowded prison conditions became the subject for lawsuits across the country, resulting in restrictions on the “capacity” of prison systems in a number of states. These restrictions produced pressures throughout the criminal justice system, from arrest to release on parole. The question addressed in this research is whether these restrictions and pressures affected the probability and pattern of return to prison among parolees. Data were collected at yearly intervals from four successive cohorts of parolees in Texas. Each cohort was followed for thirty-six months to determine the pattern and probability of returning to prison. Four alternative explanations for shifts in recidivism probabilities are explored using “survival analysis” techniques. Evidence is found for reduced deterrence in addition to effects from cohort composition and administrative discretion.

The imposition of penalities for violation of criminal laws has been traditionally justified for such reasons as social justice and retribution. Today, perhaps the main justification for imposing severe penalties on those who violate the law is that such punishments serve as a specific deterrent to future violations by the offender and as a general deterrent to violations by others who might be tempted to follow his lead.

A considerable amount of conflict has been generated over the selection of legal standards for legislative apportionment. Prior to 1962, seats in state legislatures were generally assigned to counties. In some houses of some state legislatures, a limited number of additional seats were given to the most populated districts. Population (size) was seldom used, however, either as the sole basis for designing districts or as the sole basis for determining the number of seats for given districts. With the development of the social force of urbanization, a limited number of counties became the residence for a majority of the citizens. Since state legislatures continued to operate with counties as the fundamental unit of legislative apportionment, significant differences in the population of districts were created.

Connecticut presents a perfect case study of differential correctional treatment for young male and female offenders. The state controls two juvenile correctional institutions: the Long Lane School (LLS) in Middletown for girls and the Connecticut School for Boys (CSB) in Meriden. Both facilities have existed practically side-by-side for over a century under state management, yet they have evolved in markedly different ways. The boys' school has been in the throes of constant turmoil and consequently under severe public scrutiny throughout most of its operation. The administrators of the “farm for girls,” on the other hand, have run a very tight ship and take pride in their undisrupted tradition. As a result, the Connecticut School for Boys has bungled its way (albeit ineptly) into the twentieth century while the Long Lane School still prepares women to re-enter the community as nineteenth century domestics.