This article analyzes women's legal consciousness in responding to unwanted sexual attention in the workplace. By focusing on a particular social problem, this study is situated in the particular legal domain of sexual harassment laws and in a specific organizational context. Taking the perspective of the intended beneficiaries of sexual harassment policies and procedures—women with complaints about sexual conduct in the workplace—I show that the implementation of grievance procedures creates powerful obstacles to women's efforts to assert those rights. Moreover, the practices implementing the policies can alter the very definition of sexual harassment in that setting. Thus, in enacting grievance procedures, women and supervisors construct a legality in particular workplaces that offers only limited protection for women's rights.

In “Sander County” Illinois, concerns about litigiousness in the local population tended to focus on personal injury suits, although such cases were very rarely brought. This article explores the roots of these concerns in the ideology of the rural community and in the reactions of many residents to social, cultural, and economic changes that created a pervasive sense of social disintegration and loss. Personal injury claims are contrasted with contract actions, which were far more numerous yet were generally viewed with approval and did not give rise to perceptions of litigiousness or greed. The distinction is explained in terms of changing conceptions of the community itself and in terms of the problematic relationships between “insiders” and “outsiders” in Sander County.

Although the possible effect of race on sentencing decisions is a much-studied question, even recent studies suffer from methodological problems. This paper attempts to correct these problems by using a large number of cases and a large number of offenses, by dividing the sentencing decision into two separate decisions, by using an appropriate scale to measure sentence severity, by including controls for relevant legal and extra-legal factors, and by using multivariate analysis. Our major findings are that race does not have a direct effect on sentence severity, but that blacks are more likely than whites to be incarcerated.

This paper tests the hypothesis that financially and organizationally stronger parties tend to prevail in litigation against weaker parties, either because the normative structure of the American legal system has favored “the haves,” or because judges' attitudes do, or because stronger parties have strategic and representational advantages in litigation. The study is based on a sample of 5,904 cases from sixteen state supreme courts, 1870–1970. According to our data, stronger parties, especially larger governmental units, did tend to achieve an advantage over weaker parties, but the advantage generally was rather small. The stronger parties' edge recurs in subsamples for different types of cases, time periods, and types of legal representation. It is attributed in part to the greater litigational capabilities of stronger parties.

The Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers to provide job-protected leave, but little is known about how these leave rights operate in practice or how they interact with other normative systems to construct the meaning of leave. Drawing on interviews with workers who negotiated contested leaves, this study examines how social institutions influence workplace mobilization of these rights. I find that leave rights remain embedded within institutionalized conceptions of work, gender, and disability that shape workers' perceptions, preferences, and choices about mobilizing their rights. I also find, however, that workers can draw on law as a culture discourse to challenge these assumptions, to build coalitions, and to renegotiate the meaning of leave.

In this paper we use a survey concerning a hypothetical taxpayer to analyze how certain features of the enforcement of the tax laws shape perceptions of the risks of detection and penalties for tax noncompliance. We also examine the effects of these perceptions on intended noncompliance behavior. Our findings provide strong support for various hypotheses concerning the effect of the enforcement process on perceptions. We also find, in contrast to prior results, that the perceived risk of criminal prosecution appears to act as a powerful deterrent to noncompliance. We explain why earlier studies might have failed to detect a deterrent role for the severity of punishment.

New York's Juvenile Offender (JO) Law of 1978 is a significant step away from separate systems of justice for adults and juveniles. The law requires that juveniles accused of violent offenses be tried in criminal court, and it provides penalties comparable to those for adults. This paper evaluates the impact of the JO Law on violent juvenile crime rates in New York City and in upstate New York. Analyzing arrest data through the use of an interrupted time series model, we conclude that the JO Law has not been effective in reducing juvenile crime.

Institutional theories of organizational behavior consistently implicate the professions in explaining the diffusion of new organizational practices; yet there has been little empirical study of precisely what role the professions play. We address that issue by exploring the role of the personnel and legal professions in shaping employers' understandings of law and the threat posed by law. We focus on the implied contract theory of wrongful discharge, a recent common law development that allows employees—under a limited set of circumstances—to sue their employers when they are fired without good cause. We first present an analysis of the actual risk posed by the implied contract theory, based on a survey of published cases in six states. Then, by analyzing articles in professional personnel and law journals, we reveal a striking disparity between the actual threat posed by implied contract theory and the threat as constructed by personnel and legal professionals. Our findings support the argument that the professions play an important role in the diffusion of organizational practices and suggest that the professions' constructions of the environment may critically affect how employers respond to environmental threats.

Amicus curiae participation is a staple of interest group activity in the U.S. Supreme Court. While a reasonably large body of scholarship has accumulated regarding the effectiveness of this method of participation, little attention has been paid to examining the reasons why amicus participation might increase litigation success. In this article, I test two separate, but not mutually exclusive, theories as to why amicus briefs may be effective. The first, the affected groups hypothesis, suggests amicus briefs are influential because they signal to the Court how many groups and individuals will be potentially affected by the decision. The second, the information hypothesis, proposes that amicus briefs are effective because they provide the Court with added information that buttresses the arguments of the direct parties. When subjected to empirical verification, the results indicate that not only does amicus participation increase litigation success, but also that this influence may be best explained by the information hypothesis.

“Predatory policing” occurs where police officers mainly use their authority to advance their own material interests rather than to fight crime or protect the interests of elites. These practices have the potential to seriously compromise the public's trust in the police and other legal institutions, such as courts. Using data from six surveys and nine focus groups conducted in Russia, we address four empirical questions: (1) How widespread are public encounters with police violence and police corruption in Russia? (2) To what extent does exposure to these two forms of police misconduct vary by social and economic characteristics? (3) How do Russians perceive the police, the courts, and the use of violent methods by the police? (4) How, if at all, do experiences of police misconduct affect these perceptions? Our results suggest that Russia conforms to a model of predatory policing. Despite substantial differences in its law enforcement institutions and cultural norms regarding the law, Russia resembles the United States in that direct experiences of police abuse reduce confidence in the police and in the legal system more generally. The prevalence of predatory policing in Russia has undermined Russia's democratic transition, which should call attention to the indispensable role of the police and other public institutions in the success of democratic reforms.

After a good deal of thought I have decided not to respond directly to Professor Trubek's exhaustive review of The Dialectics of Legal Repression, but will rather leave it to readers of my book to determine for themselves the adequacy of his description, analysis, and evaluation of the material contained therein. However, insofar as Professor Trubek also refers briefly in his essay to my “more recent,” and until now unpublished, work, it seems appropriate to present a sample of this work, especially since Trubek himself argues that it entails a “major refinement” which “allows Balbus to explain what remains unexplained in The Dialectics.” Indeed, in certain respects the following essay constitutes an autocritique of the theoretical analysis in my book, and a comparison of the two will thus permit the reader to assess indirectly the extent of my agreement with Trubek's critique. At the same time, what follows also constitutes an implicit and, at times explicit, critique of Trubek's own effort to elaborate and apply an alternative to my position, the effort he calls “critical social thought about law.”

This study tests the impact of OSHA enforcement on workplace injuries. Using data on injuries and OSHA inspections for a panel of 6,842 large manufacturing plants between 1979 and 1985, we find significant specific deterrence effects. Inspections imposing penalties induce a 22% decline in injuries in the inspected plant during the following few years. We suggest that narrow deterrence perspectives have led to unduly pessimistic assumptions about enforcement effectiveness and that a managerial attention model is more consistent with our findings.

In a technical appendix we describe the Chamberlain technique, a powerful analytic approach for panel data that provides tests and corrections for potential biases endemic in enforcement studies, including unmeasured heterogeneity among units, serially correlated dependent variables, and endogeneity of inspections. We argue that more empirical studies of enforcement impacts are necessary to provide an appropriate perspective for descriptive and analytic studies appraising regulatory behavior.

This study is a reexamination of the effect of situational characteristics on police arrests in domestic disturbances. Using observational data, we replicate recent research based upon official police reports. We also consider the implications of variables not available in the earlier study, especially the role orientation of the intervening officer. The results support the previous finding that the arrest decision turns on situational cues, but it suggests that the salience of such factors differs for officers whose role orientations differ.

Most research on social control decision-making takes the individual case as the sole unit for the analysis of decision outcomes. Yet under a variety of organizational circumstances, social control agents process and respond to cases in relation to, or as part of, some larger, organizationally determined whole. This paper identifies three such larger units of cases found in social control decision-making—case sets, caseloads, and collections of cases grouped by the demands of establishing precedent and consistency—and suggests conditions which increase and decrease the effects of such holistic units on decisions made in particular cases.

Gibson (1989) questions whether the Supreme Court's ability to legitimate unpopular policies is based on public views that the Court is a fair decisionmaker. His claim is based on his analysis of a survey examining the ability of the Supreme Court to gain acceptance of the right of an unpopular political group to demonstrate. A reanalysis of Gibson's data using a model allowing for both direct and indirect effects of public views about the fairness of court decisionmaking procedures on acceptance does not support Gibson's conclusion that procedure has no influence on acceptance. Our results indicate that public views about the fairness of Supreme Court decisionmaking procedures have an indirect effect on acceptance through their influence on public views about the Court's legitimacy and support the suggestion of a number of studies that the legitimacy of both local and national legal institutions, and the willingness to accept their decisions, are influenced by views about the fairness of their decisionmaking procedures.

Many explanations have been proposed for gender differences in criminal court outcomes, but none has been grounded in a systematic study of the reasoning processes used by court officials in sanctioning male and female defendants. Interviews with thirty-five court officials (prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers, and judges) are presented here to assess extant theory and to offer a reconceptualization of why gender differences may emerge in the course of “doing justice.” The interviews reveal that the sanctioning process is structured by familial paternalism, that is, a concern to protect family life, men's and women's labor for families, and those dependent on defendants. Familial paternalism more accurately explains family- and gender-based disparities in sentencing than existing social control arguments, and it is distinguished from female paternalism, which is based on the view that women, as the “weaker sex,” are subject to greater court protection than men before the criminal court.

Data from 300 homicides involving an aggravating felony were examined to determine what factors influence the prosecutor's decision to seek the death penalty. It was found that the race of the victim was significantly related to the decision to seek the death penalty even when several legally relevant factors were taken into account. The data also revealed that black killers of whites were more likely and black killers of blacks less likely to have the death penalty requested. A breakdown of homicides into those involving a single aggravating felony and those involving multiple felonies revealed that racial effects were stronger in the former category. There was some evidence that this difference in the effects of race reflected a different threshold of tolerance for white and black murders. Black victim homicides resulted in a death request only when they crossed a threshold of aggravation that was higher than that found for white deaths.

Research has shown that legal cynicism is pervasive among residents of poor, black neighborhoods. However, controlling for crime rates, these residents call police at higher rates than whites and residents of middle-class neighborhoods, and ethnographic research suggests that mothers in particular sometimes exact social control over partners and children through police notification. Given these findings, how might researchers better understand how legal cynicism and occasional reliance on police fit together? Drawing on interviews with poor African-American mothers in Washington, DC, this article develops an alternative conception of cultural orientations about law: situational trust. This concept emphasizes micro-level dynamism in cultural conceptions of the police, expanding the literature on police trust by emphasizing situational contingency. Mothers deploy at least four alternative strategies that produce moments of trust: officer exceptionalism, domain specificity, therapeutic consequences, and institutional navigation. These strategies shed light on the contextual meanings of safety and legitimacy.

Drawing on data collected from district-level governments, this article studies how the Chinese state responds to labor protests in South China. It examines both the internal logic and operational patterns of the state response involving the local courts and an assortment of government agencies. Internal documents and interviews reveal an emerging mode of state reaction. In the context of protest, the courts and related government agencies engage protesters on the street, which often grants a favorable resolution. This “street as courtroom” is a result of the weak capacity of the legal system coupled with a government-wide campaign to build a “harmonious society.” These findings compel researchers to reconsider the institutional boundaries of the prototypical court, the outcome of social protest, and the appropriate role of the courts in China.

This paper argues that American legal culture, specifically the complex of public attitudes toward our major legal institutions and values, is truly democratic. The most persistent, although often unexplained, theme in that complex of attitudes is the demand for equal treatment. Americans endorse the ideals of equal treatment and believe that the most glaring defect of the present legal system is its failure to provide such treatment. Yet, as de Tocqueville noted, our ideas of equality are often incomplete; the demand for equal treatment appears to be a demand for equality between oneself and those now accorded preferential treatment rather than a demand that those less favored be treated as well as oneself. Evidence in support of the argument is gathered from survey studies of public attitudes toward the police, lawyers, and courts as well as of their attitudes toward crime, punishment, and civil liberties.