This paper examines whether—and if so how—a 2002 European Directive on sexual harassment has changed the practice and content of sexual harassment law in France. It finds that the European Directive shaped how French courts address sexual harassment and informed the content of a new sexual harassment law France passed in 2012. Yet, its influence has been mediated by dominant national attitudes about: (1) the nature of sexual harassment, (2) which legal institutions are best suited to address it, and (3) the character of women who claim to have been harassed. This paper further suggests that news reporting on a 2011 arrest of a French politician for sexual assault led to more positive attitudes about sexual harassment victims.

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.

Health care rights for transgender and/or nonbinary people have dramatically expanded in recent years, including in insurance coverage for the treatments and procedures they need. Yet, trans people themselves still identify health insurance problems as a top priority for research and policy change because of significant difficulties gaining and using coverage. Wrangling over coverage determinations happens through multiple types of interactions, bureaucratic, interpersonal, and medical. When these interactions become difficult, it is because key terms such as medical necessity are both powerful and indeterminate. This study examines how trans people and health care intermediaries navigate the health insurance process and contest the meaning of medical necessity in coverage determinations. These disputes constitute the ground-level reality for instantiating health care rights to gender affirming care. Relying on analysis of contract language and 32 interviews with people who sought gender-affirming care and allied professionals, we find that health insurance policy language, interpretation, and implementation often create disadvantages and barriers for trans people who attempt to access care. Our study highlights how the contested life of insurance policy terminology produces a reality for rights but also details the mechanisms through which insurance-mediated care is a socially contested and negotiated process

Legal proportionality is one of the most important principles for adjudicating among conflicting values. However, rather little is known about the factors that play a role in the formation of proportionality judgments. This research presents the first empirical analysis in this regard, relying on a sample of 331 legal experts (lawyers and legal academics). The policy domain addressed by the experiment is the antiterrorist military practice of targeted killings, which has been the subject of a legal debate. Our experimental findings suggest that proportionality judgments are receptive to normatively relevant facts. We also find strong correlational evidence for the effect of ideological preferences on such judgments. These results are consistent for two proportionality doctrines. We suggest that proportionality judgment is anchored jointly in the experts’ policy preferences and the facts of the case. We outline the implications of the findings for the psychological and legal literature.

Scholars often argue that whereas unanimous rulings should boost public support for court decisions, dissents should fuel public opposition. Previous studies on public responses to U.S. Supreme Court decisions suggest that unanimity does in fact bolster support. However, a recent study has also found that dissents may increase support among opponents of a court decision by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. By examining how individuals react to dissents from the Supreme Court of Norway, this article is the first study outside the U.S. context of the public's reaction to unanimity and dissent. Breaking with the common notion of the negative effects of dissent on public support, the article shows that when the Supreme Court handles cases of higher political salience, the formulation of dissenting opinions can be a meaningful way of securing greater support for its policy outputs by suggesting evidence of procedural justice. Contrary to recent studies, however, this positive influence of dissent is irrespective of individuals' ex ante policy views.

This article draws upon the law-in-action, repeat players, and motive to understand how legal actors construct the “good case” in dispute settlement systems. The construction of “good cases” is examined at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a relatively new and unexplored site for the study of dispute settlement. Findings show that the good case encompasses flexible sets of motives including economic, political, and symbolic characteristics of trade grievances to mobilize WTO law. The flexibility is due to uncertainties associated with litigation, which are manifestations of four features of the WTO: the newness of the system, the organizational and legal structure of the dispute system, the context of the WTO as an intergovernmental agreement, and the persistence of inequality between states. Six variations of the good case are identified.

Two fundamental questions for any discipline are: (1) What is the subject matter of the field? and (2) What is to be asked about the subject matter? The answer to the first question as it applies to jurisprudence can be given in a word—law. This designation may appear as a gross oversimplification, but that is not the problem at all. If there were consensus in jurisprudence as to a universal and empirically applicable definition of law, the term would be suited admirably for identifying the subject matter of the field. But such consensus is lacking. Debates over conceptions of law have an ancient history, and since the end of the eighteenth century they have become more intense. Given the fact that contemporary schools of thought in jurisprudence are distinguished first and foremost by the kind of definition of law advocated, it is difficult to understand Selznick's assertion that definitions of law “are not really so various as is sometimes suggested.” To the contrary, one would be hard pressed to identify a more controversial issue in either jurisprudence or the sociology of law.

The ways in which grievance procedures are used and perceived by incarcerated people raise important questions about the operation of procedural justice and legal consciousness and mobilization scholarship in settings where rights are especially vulnerable. This paper analyzes perceptions and usage of the grievance procedure for incarcerated people using survey data from people (N = 508) in three prisons in Ireland. We find that incarcerated people's views of the grievance procedures are generally negative, though some use it, especially those serving long sentences and those in segregation, with education level not significant in terms of usage. Additionally, having confidence in staff is associated with satisfaction with the procedure, as is the perception that one's rights are respected, showing important connections between perceptions of complaints and aspects of legal consciousness. We suggest a need for further situated analyses of procedural justice and legal consciousness, as well as practical requirements for complaints systems to elicit confidence among incarcerated people.

The U.S. courts consistently have upheld the constitutionality of laws regarding mandatory drug testing policies in the workplace and schools; these policies were designed to detect individuals' drug use that could compromise public safety. Yet looking at the uses of drug test results in another setting—the justice system—reveals one aspect that goes largely unaddressed in these laws and prior research on drug testing: the organizational context surrounding the administration of drug tests that shapes how their results are understood. In response, this article uses ethnographic methods to analyze the ways that staff at a juvenile drug court in southern California interprets drug test results. The article demonstrates that the staff's understandings of drug testing results involve interactional and institutional processes, dependent upon meanings constructed and situated in local organizational contexts.

The two articles that follow contribute to the mapping of dispute behavior in contemporary society. Hannigan (1977) describes how a newpaper action line, or ombudsman, handles consumer disputes. Best and Andreasen (1977) report the findings of their survey of consumer experiences and what consumers did about the problems they encountered. These essays represent complementary approaches to the study of how people and institutions respond to common consumer disputes. I will begin by indicating where they fit into the evolving tradition of sociolegal research and how they add to our still redimentary understanding of dispute behavior.

Some aspects of the effects of the legal regulation in the socialist economy are discussed on the basis of interviews with two samples of managers of state enterprises in Poland. Emphasis is on the mode of adaptation by the managers to what they perceive as conflicting economic, legal, and administrative demands—especially in interactions between the enterprises. An attempt is made to specify the role played by the norm and mechanism of reciprocity, as well as by the other mutual sanctions that order economic cooperation, beyond the official legal regulations.

This article examines the theory and empirical methods of recent studies of law and litigation. It argues that the recent interest in longitudinal studies of trial court dockets proceeds from a deeply rooted functionalist theoretical tradition in empirical work on courts. Functionalist theory, through its sophisticated application in the work of James Willard Hurst, is described as the direct or indirect source of theory for longitudinal litigation studies. Though there are many reasons for suspecting that fuctionalist theory is inadequate, it has seldom been rejected through proper empirical testing of its hypotheses. The theory, often poorly conceptualized, is discussed here in detail. Hypotheses derived from a careful reading of Hurst and others are operationalized, employing data from the dockets of three West Virginia trial courts between 1870 and 1925, and a test of the hypotheses is constructed taking advantage of the historical variation in the economic development of three neighboring counties. Conclusions supported by the analysis of these data are largely prophylactic. Research can address the widespread problems of poor conceptualization and data analysis that have limited the value of much longitudinal trial court docket research. If court function is to continue to be the focus, theory, it is argued, must take account of the social organization of relations between litigants outside the courts, as well as the organization of the courts themselves. Data analysis must address the measurement of the power, litigation capacity, and perception of usefulness of litigation held by litigants. Illustrating the value of hypothesis testing as employed here, it is contended, these conclusions about appropriate future directions and methods for longitudinal court docket research are based on properly supported findings.

In many American states, public defense is provided at the county rather than state level (Langton & Farole 2009). Local governments have discretion over implementing and funding the right to counsel, resulting in considerable variability in programs and funding levels. Placing this issue in the theoretical context of redistributive policies and politics, we investigate decisions on funding this service across upstate New York counties. Using as a point of departure Paul Peterson's classic explication of community politics, we first model variation in funding as a function of counties' fiscal capacity, need for services, and costs of supplying legal representation. We also test Peterson's prediction that local political factors will play little if any role in budget decisions. Second, through interviews with program administrators we explore the characters of twelve defender programs in which expenditures departed from the model's predictions. We find that three factors—which we term “influence,” “infrastructure,” and “ideas”—also vary directly with levels of funding. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for theoretical thinking about due process policies and local politics, and for policy debate over how best to ensure adequate counsel in criminal court.

This article is about claims manipulation and the influence of context on the careers and outcomes of disputes. We explore eleven cases in which civil tort action was used when citizen opponents petitioned the government (lawsuits called SLAPPs or “strategic lawsuits against public participation”). Rather than being totally contingent on interactional and situational factors, these disputes followed two general trajectories of transformation, depending on whether they arose from an “internal” or “external” setting. Disputes initially tied to a broad cultural or political claims base were transformed into more narrow and concrete claims. Yet the original political claims of the lawsuit targets were less likely derailed.

For over two thousand years, the science of law has been a dull esoteric subject, with traditional logic its long suit and the syllogism its ace in the hole. The erudite tended to empathize with Socrates, who could define justice only in metaphysical terms, and to scorn the occasional iconoclasts in the Thrasymachian tradition, who would have operationalized the concept of justice on the basis of political interrelationships of power and influence. Throughout these two millennia, jurisprudence was a “science” only in the sense of “moral science,” that is to say, it was a branch of philosophy. It was concerned with prescriptive norms rather than with descriptions of human action, and therefore it dealt almost exclusively with ideals for, rather than with the realities of, the behavior of judges, lawyers, jurors, and litigants.

The institutional environment in both the private and public sector, according to a wide range of observers, is increasingly “legalized”: decisionmaking processes and substantive policies are increasingly subject to legal rules and procedural requirements that are enforceable in court. Although there is little dispute that legal liability has expanded in this way, there is great dispute about the effect of these changes, particularly their costs, on public organizations in practice. Some observers argue that legalization has imposed heavy costs, especially financial costs, on organizations; others, for a variety of reasons, argue that these costs are likely to be exaggerated. In this article I suggest that organizational expenditures on legal services are likely to be a valid indicator of certain important elements of the costs of administrative legalization. I present the results of a study of the legal services expenditures of 13 major U.S. cities over a 35-year period. The results indicate that legal services expenditures indeed have increased in many cities, although not as much as some commentators have speculated. Furthermore, there are significant variations in expenditure patterns among the cities, and a number experienced no long-term growth trend in legal services expenditures.

I agree completely with most of the issues raised in Mark Atlas's article “Rush to Judgment” in this issue (Atlas 2001). First, environmental justice is an important research topic that is too often addressed by writers with preconceived notions about the presence or absence of discrimination in environmental protection. Second, I agree with Mark's critique of the National Law Journal (NLJ) study, the first to investigate possible racial or class inequities in civil environmental penalties. Third, I agree that researchers need to use appropriate data, controls, and statistical techniques and that there is no evidence that civil penalties for violating environmental regulations are systematically lower in poor and/or minority communities. Finally, I agree that in “Rush to Judgment” Atlas makes a unique and valuable contribution to the environmental justice literature—which is why I recommended that the manuscript be published in Law & Society Review. Nevertheless, I believe that “Rush to Judgment” has substantial weaknesses that detract from its stature as a piece of social science research. Not surprisingly, I disagree with Mark's assessment of the validity of the conclusions from my previous work in this area—conclusions that “Rush to Judgment” reinforces in every respect. More important, however, I believe that Mark's article displays fundamental flaws regarding how we use evidence to draw generalizable conclusions about the world around us, and how one makes use of extant research to carve out a niche for one's own work.

Empirical tests of Durkheim's legal theories can neither confirm nor refute their central hypotheses. Rather than serving to substantiate or refute theoretical propositions, empirical evidence is best conceptualized as providing for the specification and elaboration of a research program. In the case of Durkheim's legal theories, the programmatic effort is to use social science to help resolve the major social, moral, and legal tensions characteristic of modern society. In this light, Durkheim's legal theories are viewed as comparative and contextual, containing insights into the relationship between law and the social constitution of morality.