Recent decades have seen the rise of both community partnerships and the carceral state. Community policing in Los Angeles arose after the 1992 uprisings and was built on two conceptual building blocks—the territorial imperative and community partnership—which remain central more than 20 years later. At the same time, LA has undergone a significant black-to-Latino demographic shift linked with its restructured economy. This article discusses these changes using archival analysis and 5 years of participant observation in one South LA precinct. Police help to reshape the demography of South LA in ways conducive to post-Fordist economic shifts. The “community” concept appropriated by urban governance initiatives is composed against an unwanted “anticommunity,” which serves to heighten territorial control over black and Latino residents. Rather than encourage community cogovernance over the institution of policing, community rhetoric facilitates racial preference in neighborhood transition under the auspices of an increasingly bifurcated labor market.

Niklas Luhmann is a troublemaker: he writes a great deal, and on very many subjects, and he is still expanding his theory. As a jurist, he started with studies on law and administration, but soon he reached the level of general sociology and published a wealth of books and articles on power, love, religion, morality, education, art, the economy, and the like. With his supertheory he is now on his way to inheriting the philosophical tradition of the Occident (cf. Habermas, 1985: 426–45). Luhmann has developed his own terminology, which sounds familiar, but in which the meaning of customary expressions such as “legitimacy,” “ideology,” “institution,” and “meaning” is intentionally distorted. He also uses new concepts like “autopoiesis” and has created models for a fashionable semantic: “reduction of complexity,” “legitimation by procedure”—now clichés for a social scientist. His compact-hermetic supertheory, his nicely constructed conceptual framework does not derive from a single source or principle only; rather, Luhmann has combined various theories and approaches in his super-mega-world view. Not only does he use cybernetics, formal systems theory (input-output models), sociological systems theory à la Parsons, Husserl's phenomenological epistemology, Gehlen's anthropology, and symbolic interactionism, but he has also recently borrowed from thermodynamics, biology, neurophysiology, theory of cells, and computer theory (cf. Luhmann, 1984: 27). Luhmann claims to have established a general systems theory, for which law and sociology of law are only a single field of application.

Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search-and-seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.

Along with the trend toward “New Public Management” (NPM) and replacing the legal culture of public bureaucracies with market logic through privatization, we are also witnessing instances of “publicization,” the application of public law norms and mechanisms to privatized services. The article explores the role of government lawyers and economists in the dynamics of these administrative reforms. Using a detailed case study of welfare-to-work reform in Israel, it shows that the reconstruction of decision making and accountability patterns under NPM was the result of competing efforts by these professional groups to appropriate the “privatized state” to accord with their own institutional logics and interests. While economists advanced a “market” logic, lawyers tried to reproduce the logic of “law” in the post-bureaucratic setting. The study demonstrates how eventually public law norms were re-infused into privatized welfare as a result of the increasing institutional power of the lawyers in the regulatory space, along with wider political and social support for the entrenched legalistic mechanisms of the administrative state. However, in addition to the “battle of norms” between lawyers and economists, there were also concessions that led to the redrawing of the boundaries of public law along more functional, rather than formal, lines.

This article examines the behavior of civil litigants in a state general jurisdiction trial court over an extended period of time, 1820 to 1970. It focuses on whether the dispute resolution function of courts has diminished with social and economic development and rising litigation costs. The data consist of case records sampled at fifteen-year intervals. The samples are broken down into five case issues (domestic relations, torts, debts, nondebt contracts, and property) to determine the degree of change in the legal agenda. The rate of litigation (cases filed per 1000 population) is compared across issues, and disposition patterns over time are analyzed. The findings indicate that trial court processes have not totally converted to “rubber stamp” administration of routine petitions. Although the degree of judicial intervention into cases has changed, the court continues to play a significant role in the resolution of private conflicts.

In settler colonial states such as Canada, tax is central to political ideas that circulate about Indigenous nations and people. The stories that are told about Indigenous peoples by ‘taxpayers’ often involve complaints about budgets, welfare, and ‘unfair’ tax arrangements. The paper theorizes how informal ‘tax imaginaries’ and ‘taxpayer’ subjectivities are forged through state policy and how ostensibly fiscal concerns are imbricated with white political entitlement that erodes Indigenous legal and political sovereignty. By tracing the construction of taxpayer concerns and tax myths as forms of fiscalized racism, the paper demonstrates the importance of tax to settler colonialism and the shape of Indigenous-settler relations. Taxpayer subjects are not just legal or material positionings in relation to tax and the state, but powerful subjects that refigure political problems as ‘fiscal’ and construct Indigenous people and nations through racialized repertoires of property and possession.

In 1997, Canada's youth custodial facilities held 3825 sentenced youths. Eighteen years later, this number was 527—an 86 percent reduction. Overall youth imprisonment (sentenced + pretrial detention) decreased by approximately 73 percent. This paper uses Canada's successful decarceration of youths to understand what might be learned about decarceration more broadly. By examining the reforms that transpired in Canada's treatment of young offenders since the 1960s and the political/cultural shifts that occurred since the 1990s, we demonstrate that the decline resulted from changes occurring in various parts of the system. Finally, we contrast this decarceration with more than 60 years of relative stability of Canadian adult imprisonment rates as well as Canada's failure to substantially decrease youth pretrial detention in order to identify those factors seemingly necessary to reduce imprisonment more generally.

This article examines the lost property regime of Japan, which has one of the most impressive reputations in the world for returning lost property to its rightful owner, and compares it with that of the United States. Folk legend attributes Japanese lost-and-found success to honesty and other-regarding preferences. In this article, I focus on another possible explanation: legal institutions that efficiently and predictably allocate and enforce possessory rights. These recognized, centuries-old rules mesh with norms, institutional structures, and economic incentives to reinforce mutually the message that each sends and yields more lost-property recovery than altruism alone.

Existing explanations for historical changes in punishment in Britain have tended to examine the replacement of disorderly prisons and public executions with national penitentiaries from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Despite their significant contributions to our understanding of how punishments operate in a broader social, political, and economic context, these scholarly accounts have narrowed debate on the mechanisms of penal change to the intentions of penal reformers. This analysis extends this time frame and uses historical data to compare the development of the penitentiary in Britain to its primary, yet less studied, penal substitute, the transportation of felons to America and Australia. In doing so, it provides an alternative explanation for the ascendancy of national penitentiaries. I argue that the development of these penal institutions in Britain was historically made possible by two interdependent sets of changes: (1) changes in the structure and administration of the state's penal apparatus (from decentralized to centralized and patrimonial to bureaucratic); and (2) transformations in popular understandings of the state's power to punish in correspondence with the expansion of a broader and more equal definition of citizenship (democratization). In conclusion, I argue for the value of perspectives on punishment that identify the explicit relationships between state organization and social relations in order to clarify how culture inheres in material conditions to influence specific penal outcomes.

Although the conventional wisdom holds that increasing the number of minorityofficers will enhance residents' perceptions of police and the criminal justicesystem, further systematic investigation of this hypothesis may be needed.Building on the group-position thesis, the representative bureaucracy theory,and prior research, this study investigates whether perceived minority policepresence within residents' neighborhoods affects residents' perceptions ofcriminal injustice, whether this effect is more pronounced for minorityresidents and in minority neighborhoods, and whether perceived minority policepresence has a stronger effect on perceptions of criminal injustice for minorityresidents in more integrated and white neighborhoods than minority residents inminority neighborhoods. Analyses of data collected from Los Angeles, CA, showthat residents perceive a lower level of criminal injustice when they reportthat officers in their neighborhoods are not white-dominated, and this findingis not dependent on the respondent's race/ethnicity or the racial/ethniccomposition of the neighborhood. In addition, perceived minority police presenceseems to have a weak to no effect on residents' perceptions of criminalinjustice for Hispanic communities. We discuss these findings and theirimplications for theory, research, and policy.

Law and society scholars have theorized about the link between capital punishment and the hegemony of individualism, but few offer empirical investigations to illustrate how individualism makes capital punishment possible (and vice versa) in the contemporary United States. In order to fill this gap, we analyze the legal and human service records that were compiled in the construction of one executable subject, Daniel Farnsworth. Using a critical discourse approach, we look at what was said and not said about Daniel in the records created by various helping agencies. In our analysis, we demonstrate how the helping agencies involved in Daniel's life repeatedly relied on an individuating psychological paradigm that led them to produce decontextualized catalogs of his actions and characteristics. Next, we illustrate how these pathologizing accounts were, ironically, later invoked in court in the name of preserving his life. Finally, we explain how “helping” discourses, along with the rules that regulate capital defense practice, straightjacket defense attorneys into reinforcing individualism in this context.

Between the formal law of statute books and appellate courts and the informal law of routine dispositions intervene a variety of actors, exemplified by policemen and insurance adjusters, some of whom have not traditionally been regarded as “legal” actors. However, one of the most important contributions of sociology to the understanding of law has been the demonstration that the attitudes and values of these actors and the pressures embodied in their roles produce a comprehensible divergence between the prescriptions of the formal law and the regularities exhibited in the informal law (Skolnick, 1966; Ross, 1970). This paper discusses some instances of discrepancy between the formal and informal law when formal penalties are suddenly and greatly increased. Its principal hypothesis is that sharp increases in formal penalties tend to be subverted by contrary adjustments in the behavior of those who apply the law. The data to be presented come from four of my studies on the effectiveness of changing traffic laws. As these studies were not designed to test the present hypothesis, their evidence is indirect, and the presentation is exploratory rather than demonstrative.

The growth of state interventionism, especially in the post-war era, has been associated with the proliferation of legal innovations. This paper examines the development of novel hybridizations of civil and criminal forms, developed largely to facilitate state regulation. Such hybrids, referred to here as civil offenses, combine civil proceedings, often referred to as prosecutions, with notions of convictions for which penalties are imposed. The advantages accruing to the state from such “ambiguous” forms include favorable standards of proof, rules of interpretation, extending responsibility, retroactivity, suspension of mens rea, and a wide array of novel sanctions.

This study examines the interim and final dispositions of 379 criminal cases involving mentally disordered defendants. The findings indicate that a history of mental health problems tends to elicit a lenient penal sanction, even in the face of a criminal history. Furthermore, these findings show that the court used its authority to impose mental health treatment on criminal defendants as often as it imposed punishment.

Drawing on the laws and practices of three countries—England, France, and Germany—this article examines the constructions of narratives of abandoned children. Although the three countries share the values of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, having ratified it, their laws and practices with regard to the child's identity rights have little in common. Explaining the different approaches to abandonment, the article argues that these are justified by stories about the birth giver as the “real” mother, stories that vary according to place and culture. This leads to different conceptions of the child's identity and of motherhood, to exclusions and stigma. Focusing on the justifications offered in each country for its laws and practices, the article analyzes discourses of nature (England), juridical constructs (France), and pragmatic concerns for the child's life (Germany). The article concludes that, given the myriad of family forms and of life experiences, it is not surprising to find that countries governed by a shared international convention give very different accounts of the meanings of identity and motherhood.

Because the literature on plea bargaining disagrees about a definition of the concept, many differences in findings and opinions are more semantic than substantive. The concept of plea bargaining should not be restricted to either pleas or bargains. The fundamental phenomenon is the state's use of coercion to obtain the legal grounds for imposing a penalty.

The poor pay more than the non-poor for many consumer products, and this disparity seems to be ignored by such consumer protection regulation as disclosure laws. Indeed, several lines of argument suggest that the poor will not benefit from disclosure regulation either because they lack the ability to use information effectively (“market irrationality”) or because they are restricted to particularly flawed markets and products (“separate markets/products”).

This paper examines income stratification in the used car markets in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. We found that the poor did pay more for used cars, got less redress for defects discovered after purchase, and were less satisfied and more likely to believe something was misrepresented. Differences in product quality did not account for these results because the patterns persisted even after the model, age, and price of the purchased vehicles were held constant. Further, no evidence was found for “market irrationality” among the poor. No income differences were seen in buyers' discovery of defects before or after purchase, and low-income buyers complained at higher rates, albeit with less success, than did higher-income buyers. Furthermore, the adoption of disclosure regulation in Wisconsin did not increase or decrease price discrimination against the poor. These findings point to the need for more research on the causes of price discrimination and more attention to the problems of the poor in the design and implementation of consumer protection regulations.

In analyzing the data from a structured interview survey with Japanese litigants of civil trials, we examined the relationships between their perceptions of outcomes and process of the trials, responses to the trials, and evaluation of the judicial system. The results showed that both favorability of trial outcomes and procedural fairness of trials increased satisfaction with the trial outcomes and evaluation of the judicial system. Satisfaction was largely determined by perceived favorability, while the evaluation of the judicial system was largely determined by perceived procedural fairness, suggesting a justice bond effect that justice fortifies people's societal commitment. Consistent with procedural justice theories, the perception of procedural fairness was increased by the sense of control and the appraisal of relational factors, though both were affected by favorability.

The author discusses the complex ways in which a multiplicity of conflicting laws relevant to marriage and divorce have affected Malaysian women, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Further, it examines efforts to standardize statute and practice in these areas from the 1970s to the present. It focuses in particular on multiple marriage statutes in effect until 1970 for Chinese and Hindu Malays and on the Law Reform Act 1976 that attempted to regulate customary marriage practices for non-Muslims. It also examines the codification of Islamic family law in the 1980s as a way of clarifying the legal rights of Muslim women, focusing on the Kelantan Island Family Law Enactment 1983. It also describes political action by women in Malaysia to raise public awareness about domestic violence, to amend the Penal Code on matters of violence against women, and to establish a training program for police in rape investigation.