This article suggests ways to integrate the insights and findings of two rather distinct fields: docket-based, longitudinal studies of trial courts and studies of dispute processing. In particular, I argue that longitudinal research on courts would benefit enormously from the incorporation of concepts and data on dispute processing. For example, instead of taking court cases as the starting point for study, longitudinal research should explore the multistage and transformative nature of disputing. Historical data should also be collected on the nature of the relationships between opposing litigants, on the roles played by participants other than the litigants (lawyers, supporters, audiences, third parties), and on the nature of processes within courts and within alternative community institutions for handling disputes. Longitudinal research can also contribute to our understanding of dispute processing by showing how current processes have been shaped by past use, and how changes in institutions and legal doctrine have influenced the definition and processing of disputes. I also discuss the weaknesses shared by some of the research in both fields, such as a greater concern for process than for outcome, a tendency to ignore political aspects of litigation, and an overemphasis on individual disputing behavior. I conclude by suggesting that longitudinal research on trial courts should pay greater attention to change in ideas about law and to shifting conceptions of right and wrong, cause and responsibility, and problem definition.

Sociological studies of the family, ethnographic studies of kinship and marriage, and legal accounts of family law have been neither clear nor comparable in explaining how members perceive and interpret arrangements such as “marriage” or “divorce.” These comparative studies invariably include case materials, and accounts which presuppose various linguistic and para-linguistic phenomena, meanings, and unexplicated usages. The precise character of comparable behavior remains obscure. Truncated categories translated from one language to another become verbal signals disengaged from the actual perception of social behavior and its interpretation in subsequent descriptions. The categories of different scholars are presented as equivalence classes in which the adequacy of the descriptions is never an issue because the author assumes that the reader “knows” what the author “means.” Although the categories employed describe general routine practice of members, there is little concern with the language, gestures, voice intonation, and body posturing accompanying the action scenes to which general categories refer.

Constitutions are an important feature of many authoritarian regimes. But what role do they in fact perform in processes of authoritarian regime stabilization and legitimation? Much of the contemporary literature focuses on authoritarian constitutionalism in transitions away from constitutional democracy. This article considers the opposite scenario: pre-emptive constitution-making as a mechanism of authoritarian constitutionalism to contain a potential transition toward constitutional democracy. This is illustrated through the case of Myanmar. Since the 1960s, Myanmar has experienced successive periods of direct military rule without a constitution, followed since 2011 by a new constitution. Adding to the comparative literature on constitutions in authoritarian regimes, this article explains how pre-emptive constitution-making limits a transition to liberal democracy and contributes to authoritarian-regime resilience. This article further identifies “military-state” constitutionalism as a variation of authoritarian constitutionalism in Myanmar. The case of Myanmar offers comparative insights into the ways constitutions are used to contain transitions to constitutional democracy and illustrates the varieties inherent in authoritarian constitutionalism.

This study examines the reactions of thirty complainants to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Complainant class is found to be the single most important explanatory factor; sex and race are not generally important when class is controlled. Higher class correlates with more idealistic motives for filing complaints, greater participation in and higher expectations about the process, better case outcomes, and a more negative evaluation of the Commission. No complainant obtained all the relief sought, but lower class complainants were generally happy with any favorable settlement, while higher class complainants were not. Complainants who seek to vindicate a principle, and therefore are less willing to compromise, find themselves in conflict with the pragmatic approach of most private attorneys (whose own economic interests may also be inconsistent with those of their clients) and with that of the MCAD (which adopts a generally pragmatic stance and prefers to conciliate rather than adjudicate, partly because it is so difficult and time consuming to prove discrimination based on unequal rather than unreasonable treatment). Symbolic and emotional factors determine complainant reactions more than case outcome.

Social psychologists have traditionally been concerned with problems of social conflict, power, influence, and persuasion. Yet, when one looks for systematic theory and evidence regarding the determinants of behavioral compliance to rules, norms, or influence attempts, few prescriptions can be garnered by the practical man of affairs for developing policy in matters of law and order. In a day when shouts of black power, student protests, and antiwar demonstrations reverberate through the legitimate institutions of the country and when violence commissions report the degree of disorder existing in the urban centers of America, lack of social scientific evidence upon which to base policy is a disquieting comment upon the relevance of social scientific research.

I draw on the archives from two Indonesian courts to analyze how judges have reached decisions in the face of conflicting legal norms. Judges in the town of Takèngën, in the highlands of Aceh province, hear claims based on Islam and on local social norms (adat). Between 1960 and the mid-1990s, they changed the way they resolved disputes over inheritance cases, from accepting village settlements as valid, to rejecting those settlements as either contrary to Islam or as coercive. I examine the justifications offered in the earlier and the later periods for these decisions. I find that in both periods judges employed creative legal devices to resolve or bridge differences between Islam and adat, and that they consistently referred to broader cultural values of agreement and fairness. I suggest that the change in their decisions was due to the combination of political centralization, increased legitimacy of the Islamic court, and judges' perceptions of a more individualized society.

There can be no doubt that parties to a lawsuit in ancient Hindu law had a right to be represented by other persons. The question arises whether or not the representatives referred to in the ancient texts correspond to the pleaders, advocates, vakils or attorneys of modern India. In other words, did ancient Hindu law have the kind of legal procedure in which the rights of the parties were safeguarded through the services of a class of experts, as is the case in present day India and in most other modern legal systems?

Looking at Hindu law as it became known to the West in the latter half of the 18th century, it did indeed seem as if the question was to be answered in the affirmative. Halhed's Code of Gentoo Laws (1777), translating the Vivadarnavasetu, did have a section (ch. III, § II) explicitly called “Of appointing a vakeel (or attorney).”

Powerful corporations leverage the law to shape the regulatory environments in which they operate. A key strategy for achieving this is litigation. I ask under what conditions corporations litigate, and specifically, what happens when two repeat players, transnational agribusiness firms and local governments, face each other in court. I compare outcomes of two cases—Hawaii and Arica, Chile—documenting how different sociopolitical contexts and legal systems shape how actors engage the law. Interviews with firm managers, unions, government officials, lawyers, and advocacy organization leaders and document analysis reveal that firms seize on existing institutional norms and politics to define their localized legal strategies. Through strategic legalism, a defensive legal strategy that is outcome-oriented and context-specific, firms accomplish legal compliance and political containment of their opposition. In Hawaii, firms rely on preemptive legality, a strategy that moves controversial issues like pesticide safety from one domain of democratic politics to another that is largely incontestable because it is preempted by a higher authority. In Chile, firms use authoritarian legality, an approach that draws on authoritarian structures and policies within the state, to sway legal outcomes. These cases reveal the mechanisms that corporations draw on to institutionalize their power advantages through the law, offering a typology for future scholars to better understand how the strategic behavior of corporations shapes regulatory outcomes.

The allure of law schools as transformative institutions in the United States prompted Christian Right leaders to invest in legal education in the 1990s and early 2000s. The aspiration was to control the training of lawyers in order to challenge the secular legal monopoly on law, policy, and culture. In this article, we examine three leading Christian conservative law schools and one training program dedicated to transforming the law. We ask how each institution seeks to realize its transformative mission and analyze how they organize themselves to produce the kinds of capital (human, intellectual, social, cultural) needed to effectively change the law. To do so, we develop a typology of legal institution-building strategies (infiltration, supplemental, and parallel alternative) to compare the relative advantages and disadvantages of institutional forms. We conclude by discussing implications of our findings for those looking to law schools as sites of broader transformation within the law.

This article examines the recent failure of formal constitutional amendments in the United States and Canada by closely analyzing the institutional environment in which constitutional modification takes place. I focus first on the instrumental objectives of constitutional reform to develop an institutional design model of constitutional modification and identify the structural factors that affect the level of controversy generated by proposed amendments. I then revisit the failed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to demonstrate more explicitly how these institutional factors affected the amendment's fate. Finally, I extend the analysis by undertaking a comparative case study of the recent politics of constitutional modification in Canada. In particular, I focus on the failure of comprehensive constitutional change between 1987 and 1992. I argue that the same institutional design model, which focuses on institutional rigidity, interpretive flexibility, and litigation potential, enhances our ability to understand both the U.S. and Canadian cases of amendment failure.

Legislative and policy interventions in response to the organ trade have centered on the introduction of criminal sanctions in an effort to deter organ sales and/or “trafficking.” Yet, such measures fail to take account of the social and political processes that facilitate the exploitation of individuals in organ markets in different contexts. Informed by empirical data, gathered via a series of in-depth interviews with Sudanese migrants who have sold a kidney, this paper examines the link between increased urbanization, migration patterns, informalization, and the emergence of organ markets in the Egyptian-Sudanese context. The findings illustrate how processes of legal marginalization and social exclusion leave people vulnerable to exploitation in organ markets. The prevailing law enforcement response does not capture or respond to the empirical reality. Accordingly, this paper shifts the emphasis away from criminalization toward an analysis of the legal barriers and policy decisions that shape the poor bargaining position of organ sellers. In doing so, it opens up discussion of the organ trade onto wider critiques that disrupt boundaries between formality and informality in labor markets and trouble dominant modes of criminalization.

Police often ask people to consent to a search of their person or possessions. Many people agree to allow such searches because they interpret the officers' ostensible “requests” as indirect commands. Yet courts routinely interpret police utterances in this situation as requests. A similar issue arises in the context of custodial interrogation. People being interrogated are inclined to invoke their right to counsel in relatively indirect or tentative terms. Yet courts often conclude that the suspect did not really “request” the presence of counsel. We refer to this inconsistency as “selective literalism,” by which we mean that courts selectively consider pragmatic circumstances in interpreting the speech of suspects. Using analytical tools from linguistic theory, this article explores how courts employ selective literalism. It further examines some of the consequences of this inconsistent use of interpretive devices, both practically and jurisprudentially.

This article examines how the Hague Convention on the Protection of Children and Co-operation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption (Hague Adoption Convention) plays a central role in justifying the institution of legal adoption. The Hague Adoption Convention has often been regarded as a response to the challenges that the “global situation” brings to adoption practice. Based on private international law, the agreement contains protocols and norms to ensure the protection of the child in intercountry adoption. In the article, I propose that the Hague Convention can be understood as a “transparency device”; a complex assemblage working in pursuit of global “good governance.” The device, however, also operates as justification within the institutional domain, allowing adoption agencies to make distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate adoptions. Idemonstrate how the logic of transparency disguises as much as it promises to reveal. While the doctrine's aim is to validate adoptability and combat trafficking, it also helps to mainstream Euro-American adoption knowledge to other parts of the world.

This review of work and trends in the sociology of law makes no claims to being exhaustive or comprehensive. If it succeeds in pinpointing and highlighting major work, important problems, and gaps in the field, in showing trends that have developed, and in suggesting ideas for future direction, we shall have accomplished our objectives.

McEwen and Maiman (1986) have disagreed with my claim that the case characteristic of admitted liability explains more variability in dispute outcome and compliance than whether the case was resolved through a mediation or adjudication forum. Those authors reanalyzed some of my data from an Ontario small claims court and concluded that forum type is the stronger variable. I take issue with them on a number of conceptual and methodological points. In my own reanalysis of the Ontario data I am able to demonstrate statistically that admitted liability is the stronger predictor of outcomes. I also discuss why this should be so and raise some questions about compliance. Whether we can generalize to McEwen and Maiman's data from Maine courts is a matter of speculation, but I am inclined to infer that we can. Our debate raises important issues in the assessment of dispute resolution.

The history of the Australian Press Council presents an opportunity to examine the thesis that advanced capitalist states are systematically resorting to dispersed forms of social control. While the council appears to conform to the specifications of a “dispersed agency,” it appears largely to be unintelligible in such terms. While representing some aspects of a social control institution, it is better comprehended in terms of the contradictory characteristics of the social field in which it is located, rather than in terms of a broad strategy of state expansion. The dispersal model should be recast to take account of such variations and to recognize the extent to which social fields may generate their own forms of institutionalized control, which bear a highly problematic relation to state regulation.