This ethnographic study of criminal sexual assault adjudication shows how prosecutors, defense attorneys, and witnesses animate text message evidence. In contrast to other forms of courtroom testimony, text messages function as multiauthored representations of recorded correspondence in the past. Attorneys and witnesses animate texts authored by or said to characterize persons represented at trial. By whom and how the texts are animated shapes trial processes. Through a detailed comparative case analysis of two Milwaukee, WI, sexual assault trials, this article attends to the process by which text messages are said to personify or characterize authors’ meaning and intent. This animation of electronically transmitted text speaks to credibility and variably emphasizes a witness's place within gendered and racialized cultural norms. Rather than unsettling the trope of “he said, she said,” text messages become contested evidence animated by court actors within contexts of long-standing cultural narratives of sexual victimization and offending.

Despite the advances made in the study of appellate courts in the past several decades, little attention has been devoted to evaluating the role of appellate courts cross-nationally. This article examines appellate courts in England and in America, particularly the English Court of Appeal and the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals. The American and English systems are proposed as alternative models of the relationship between courts and their respective political systems in Western common law regimes. Focusing on the intervention behavior of the intermediate appellate courts and their interaction with their respective courts of last resort, the data presented reveal more commonality than divergence in the behavior of the two judicial hierarchies.

What happens to legal and rights consciousness when rights previously protected are taken away? In this article, I investigate the process of contesting urban housing nationalization in Romania in the early 1950s in order to understand how the loss of property rights led to new hybrid types of legal consciousness. I find that the construction of socialist legal consciousness was grounded in the interaction between the legally constituted selves of former owners and state bureaucrats who drew from distinct legal and property rights ideologies. This process underscores continuities in legal consciousness even under drastic regime changes, which in turn has implications for the construction of new hegemonic legalities and power regimes. The article is based on extensive document and archival research.

In the early and mid-1920's Soviet courts were overwhelmed with new criminal business, prompting Bolshevik leaders to transfer most cases of petty crime away from the courts either to administrative proceedings or to lay bodies (comrades' courts and village social courts). This article examines the Bolshevik experiment in decriminalization and diversion—its causes, its politics, and its consequences both for the courts and for the alternatives to them. The crisis of congestion in early Soviet courts resulted neither from a growth in actual criminal behavior nor from prosecution of new crimes devised by the Bolsheviks. It owed its origin to the elimination after the Revolution of various extrajudicial mechanisms used by the Tsars for handling infractions, thereby producing a criminalization of traditional misdeeds. The subsequent adoption by Soviet leaders of a policy of decriminalization followed careful study, and despite the turbulent times bore the mark of rational decision making. And the policy was implemented; a large number of cases were shifted first to administrative processing by police officials and then to lay tribunals, especially to the village social courts, which proved more viable than the comrades' courts which were established in factories. But the waves of diversion did not relieve court congestion, as in each instance new sorts of cases replaced those moved away. The experience tended to confirm the thesis that the amount of crime prosecuted in a society is a function of the capacity of its criminal justice institutions.

The traditional emphasis on individual legal problems and their solution through “access” to legal services is seen here as being inadequate to produce general change in economic and political institutions. The concept of access is explored in the forms of freedom of information, prepaid legal services, and extralegal group action; examples of each are given.

Institutional reform, it is suggested, can be brought about by creating a balance of power between consumers and large institutions. A “checkoff” system is described and put forward as a means of organizing consumers to use the evidence of individual complaints to advocate institutional change, something that legal services, as presently structured, do not do. Monopolies such as the utilities and the post office would be required by state law to solicit voluntary contributions from their customers to support a consumer action movement—“a piggyback ride so they can organize themselves.”

The interrelationships between group legal services and these piggyback consumer groups are pointed out: the accumulation of individual case evidence and the promotion of cooperative institutions that would provide legal representation as one of their satellite services. These lawyers could press for government reform of procedural restraints on consumer class actions.

Possible conflicting interests between conservative sponsoring consumer groups and their progressive legal service staff are recognized and ways to avoid them are discussed. One solution offered is to permit lawyers a broader range of activities by relaxing the legal profession's self-restrictions. Law schools are urged to reevaluate what they should teach and to require more analysis and investigation of government and corporate structures in their clinical education. This would ensure a starting point for the continuation of reform in the legal system.

What variables lead judicial and nonjudicial decision-making bodies to introduce policy change? In the theoretical framework proposed, the path-dependent nature of law has a differential impact on courts and legislatures. Likewise, certain political institutions including elections and political accountability lead those bodies to introduce policy change under dissimilar circumstances. Global trends, however, affect both institutional paths equally. We test this theory with data for the repeal of sodomy laws in all countries from 1972–2002. Results from two disparate multivariate models overwhelmingly confirm our predictions. The unique institutional position of courts of last resort allows them to be less constrained than legislatures by either legal status quo or political accountability. Globalization, on the other hand, has a comparable effect on both. This work is path breaking in offering a theoretical framework explaining policy change via different institutional paths, systematically testing the framework comparatively and with respect to a policy issue still on the agenda in many countries.

This article investigates possible ideological differences between circuits of the U.S. Courts of Appeals. It looks at the distribution of three-judge panel ideologies on the circuits and at differences in decisionmaking patterns, testing several theoretical approaches to circuit differences: the attitudinalist approach, arguing that different judicial ideologies account for intercircuit differences; historical-institutionalist approaches that argue that circuit norms lead to differences in the proportion of conservative decisions and in the effects of judicial ideologies; and the rational-choice institutionalist argument that overall circuit preferences constrain three-judge panel decisions through the en banc process. Using a multilevel logit model, the study finds some support for the attitudinalist and historical-institutionalist accounts of circuit differences. It also finds that intercircuit ideological differences contribute comparatively little to the prediction of appeals court outcomes.

The author traces the changing social and legal status of the Filipina by examining the shifting Filipino colonial and legal heritage from the immigration of Muslim Malays in the 14th century to the present. She argues that women enjoyed high social standing in what is now the Philippine Republic until colonization by Spain in the 17th century, when Spanish customs, religion, and law imposed many restraints on women. Only with the establishment of the Philippine Republic in 1946 were efforts begun to reverse these restrictive policies. The author focuses particularly on the 1986 Constitution and the changes in the Family Code that have enhanced the legal equality of women within the family. She also calls for continued political work to assure the implementation of existing law and further legal changes that will benefit women.

We investigate an unexplored aspect of the U.S. Supreme Court confirmation process: whether questioning senators treat female and minority nominees differently from male and white nominees. Applying out-group theory, we argue that senators will ask female and minority nominees more questions about their “judicial philosophies” in an effort to determine their competence to serve on the Court. This out-group bias is likely to be exacerbated for nominees not sharing the senator's political party. Our results do not support racial differences, but they do provide strong evidence that female nominees receive more judicial philosophy-related questions from male senators. This effect is enhanced when the female nominee does not share the partisan affiliation of the questioning senator. Together, these findings indicate that female nominees undergo a substantively different confirmation process than male nominees. We further find that this effect may be most intense with nominees like Justice Sotomayor, whose identities align with more than one out-group.

In this article, we begin to respond to the deceptively simple question: How do cause lawyers decide when and where to litigate on behalf of their cause? We consider the choice of location and timing faced by cause lawyers when more than one jurisdiction evinces a suitable legal environment for pursuing litigation on their cause. To consider this choice, we use evidence from the timing and actions of cause lawyers in the marriage equality cases in the United States from January 1990 through December 2004. And, we show the value in utilizing methods that are relatively novel in cause lawyering research—statistical models—to consider the apparent commonalities, beyond a suitable legal environment, across locations and time periods that might prompt cause lawyers into action.

Despite increased research into court operations, reliable knowledge about court functions continues to be scant. Case volume has grown, but court dispositions account for a small part of all dispute resolutions. Most matters which reach disposition in court end at some stage of trial court proceedings. Judges also continue to be makers of general public policy. Common law growth has dwindled. But courts contribute much to the content of public policy through their interpretation of statutes and their review of executive and administrative action. Judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation has declined sharply in fields centered on the economy, while expanding in areas of civil liberties.

Civil litigation rates in the European and Latin American countries examined in this article rose during the 1970s. It is unlikely, however, that this growth was primarily caused by socioeconomic development. First, per capita economic growth slowed during the 1970s compared to the earlier postwar period. Second, litigation rates between 1945 and 1970 were either flat or cyclical, reacting to forces independent of socioeconomic development. Third, rates of filing civil cases in the 1980s seem again to be falling. By investigating regional litigation rates within a country, nevertheless, it appears that the level of socioeconomic development does influence the total number of disputes generated or the citizenry's propensity to use formal courts. Further progress in understanding the multiple factors affecting civil litigation trends will depend on a sophisticated local environment model and further intracountry studies.

Tate and Haynie's (1993) recent essay in these pages on the functions of courts in authoritarian regimes is evidence of an increasing interest among American political scientists in the comparative study of judicial politics. There have always been a few among us who have argued for the benefits of broadening our perspectives beyond the American judiciary. As the story goes, the effort began 30 years ago with just a handful of pioneers meeting in a Dallas hotel room to discuss ways to make comparative judicial studies a more conspicuous feature of public law scholarship among political scientists (see Abraham 1987). Over the years a fairly diverse and distinguished group of social scientists have contributed to this effort (see Tate 1987). By 1981 there was sufficient interest among scholars affiliated with the International Political Science Association to convene the Mansfield College Conference on Comparative Judicial Studies. That same year Martin Shapiro gave a boost to these effort with the publication of his influential and widely read Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis. Still, it was not until 1987 that the first collection of essays was published on “comparative judicial systems,” and even then the papers in that volume were characterized in the subtitle as representing “challenging frontiers in conceptual and empirical analysis” (Schmidhauser 1987). Over the course of 30 years a few more pioneers were recruited, but apparently the terrain was still a frontier.

In their admirable “Legal Evolution and Societal Complexity,” Professors Schwartz and Miller (1964: 161) expressed doubts about the validity of Durkheim's (1933: 68-174) well known generalization that repressive sanctions characterize a society based on organic solidarity; as distinct from one based on a complex division of social labour, in turn characterized by restitutive, rather than repressive, sanctions. Although Schwartz and Miller express considerable diffidence in their views on the invalidity of Durkheim's generalization, some later literature has taken their valuable study to be a “refutation” of Durkheim's theory (e.g., Schur, 1967: 111-13). The present comment attempts to analyze the reasons justifying the diffidence expressed by Schwartz and Miller and to show that their findings do not result in a definitive invalidation of Durkheim's thesis.

This article examines the effects of hate speech laws in Australia. Triangulating data from primary and secondary sources, we examine five hypothesized effects: whether the laws provide a remedy to targets of hate speech, encourage more respectful speech, have an educative or symbolic effect, have a chilling effect, or create “martyrs.” We find the laws provide a limited remedy in the complaints mechanisms, provide a framework for direct community advocacy, and that knowledge of the laws exists in public discourse. However, the complaints mechanism imposes a significant enforcement burden on targeted communities, who still regularly experience hate speech. We find a reduction in the expression of prejudice in mediated outlets, but not on the street. We find no evidence of a chilling effect and we find the risk of free speech martyrs to be marginal. We draw out the implications of these findings for other countries.

Law has become a key signifier in British Virgin Islander nationalist discourse. British Virgin Islanders cast law as central to their identity as a people and celebrate the self-authoring of law. At the same time law writing has fostered continued colonial rule and subordination to the global market. The International Business Companies Ordinance, hailed as the BVI's first truly self-authored law, produced a marketable identity for the territory in the world of international finance, yet led to increased surveillance by metropolitan powers and contributed to the deferral of political sovereignty. This article considers the role of law in modern narratives of national uniqueness. It explores the paradox that modern law, with its accompanying rhetoric of progress, its formations of history, and its construction of “national” selves, is central to the cultural politics of difference, yet is also central to the processes of capitalist integration that both deny and demand difference.

The relationship between social structure and the development of legal institutions is the central theme in the classic study-by Richard Schwartz, now more than two decades old, “Social Factors in the Development of Legal Control: A Case Study of Two Israeli Settlements” (1954). The article is based on an examination of the systems of control developed in two rural communities, one a kibbutz (or kvutza), based on social and economic collectivism; the other a moshav, a cooperative settlement with private property and social life geared to the nuclear family. Internal controls in both communities were exercised through a General Assembly, composed of all members, and by a number of specialized committees. In contrast to the moshav, which had a Judicial Committee performing an adjudicatory function, Schwartz found that the kibbutz “had no distinctly legal institution” and that its control system “must be considered informal rather than legal” since public opinion constituted its sole sanction (Schwartz, 1954: 471,476).

This article details the history and philosophy behind attempted major changes in police tradition and organization that were fostered by women between 1920 and 1931 in Germany. Women police, led by Josefine Erkens and influenced by their background as social workers, tried to develop a social-work–oriented policing. Erkens held successive leadership positions in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. With each new position she pioneered ways of thinking about the role of women in police work and about the relation between social work as a profession and policing as a profession. She became a controversial figure and was finally dismissed from her position in Hamburg. The case examined in this paper shows the influence on police of gender role uncertainty, interest group pressures, the political environment, and conflicting views of police professionalism. The article also discusses the difficulties involved in trying to integrate within one organization two disparate professional paradigms: that of law enforcement, with its emphasis on deterrence, and that of social work, with its emphasis on rehabilitation.

Despite the impressive body of scholarship dedicated to analyzing litigation involving the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Supreme Court of Canada, there remains an incomplete understanding of why these cases come to the Court. Notably absent from the literature is sustained analysis of why governments, the most frequent class of appellant, bring Charter cases to the Supreme Court. Recent work has addressed the decision to appeal by the U.S. federal government and state attorneys general and provides an excellent theoretical starting point. I use case data collected from interviews with federal government lawyers and law reports to test whether the Canadian federal government's decisions to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in Charter cases are also “procedurally rational.” I conclude that these decisions are primarily shaped by strategic considerations related to policy costs, case importance, reviewability, and the prospect of winning on appeal, regardless of the party in power. In the process, the article further extends the application of strategic decisionmaking theory with regard to law and courts beyond judicial behavior, and beyond the U.S. context.

Using a data base of 28,000 trial cases decided in four Arizona trial courts between 1912 and 1951, this article examines the relationships between crises, litigation, and policy change. After comparing and contrasting consensus and conflict perspectives on trial court litigation, an interrupted time series design is used to test three propositions derived from the conflict perspective. These propositions concern the impact of crises, namely, world wars and depressions, on different types of litigation; the victory patterns of different types of disputants; the ability of losing litigants to obtain policy relief; and the impact of policy change on varying disputants and litigants. The results suggest the utility of further attempts to explore litigation from an economic and political conflict perspective.