This inquiry provides a basic assessment of the impact of three potential determinants of racial discrimination cases in the U.S. Supreme Court since 1954. The research design provides two improved methods of explicating this issue. First, the model allows for a comparison of basic Hamiltonian institutionalism (i.e., the bulwark thesis), majoritarianism, and attitudinalism in a single test, as opposed to previous studies that tended to examine only two theoretical approaches at a time. Second, the majoritarian approach is given more careful consideration through the use of theoretical and empirical evidence, which allows the subtleties of public opinion in this area to be assessed. The findings show some support for the basic bulwark prediction over majoritarianism—decisions fail to reflect majority opinion trends. The bulwark thesis fails to receive full support, however, since the ideologies of the Justices also display a significant influence on outcomes.

Criminal justice systems have been described as fragmented and decentralized “nonsystems,” but sudden changes in the environments of criminal justice organizations may affect the loose coupling that normally characterizes such agencies. Court orders against county jails create pressures to tighten the loose coupling among local organizational subsystems: the jail, law enforcement, courts, probation, and county government. Using interviews with key officials, court documents, and other archival data, we examined changes in interorganizational relations in three California counties under court orders to reform local jails. While court orders eventually resulted in tighter coupling of the subsystems and more proactive interagency responses, the more reactive mode of response characteristic of loosely coupled subsystems initially led to increased interagency conflict. Adaptations were influenced by the legal, political, and organizational environments of each jurisdiction.

The convergence of the forces of national competition among ideologically diverse political parties with the development of a squatter settlement movement brought the issue of neighborhood courts to national attention. In the face of Congressional stalemate over a national decentralization, two local experiments emerged, one employing professional judges holding regular informal hearings beyond their normal judicial duties for poor urban residents, the other involving left-organized squatter settlements' establishment of their own “extra-official” court systems using locally elected lay judges. The organizational and political contexts of the two, and their implicit ideological distinctions, led to somewhat different caseloads and distinct dispute processing styles. The professional court tended to routinize disputes, arbitrate, and rely on state police power; the lay court tended to mediate, focus upon sociological and political causes of disputes, and use formal and informal enforcement power. Each encountered severe constraints inhibiting development and institutionalization. These stemmed from lack of organizational resources and clear-cut goals, and the priorities of the organizational contexts in which they attempted to function. These priorities were, in turn, reflected in the class-based conflict encompassing Chilean politics during the Allende period.

During the past two decades students of public law have amassed a considerable amount of evidence which indicates that the administration of federal justice is not uniform throughout the United States. First, there are significant differences in judicial administration among the federal district courts. Kenneth Vines and others have demonstrated how important these differences can be with regard to race relations cases (Vines, 1963; Vines, 1964; Peltason, 1961; Steamer, 1962). In his study of the federal trial courts and urban affairs, Kenneth Dolbeare concluded that “many of Vine's findings with respect to race relations policy making have parallels in the area of urban public policy generally.” (Dolbeare, 1969: 376). Also, there is some evidence that sentencing behavior in criminal cases varies significantly from one federal trial judge to another.

One serious obstacle to the achievement of social change in America has been the intransigence of large bureaucracies toward changes in goals, procedures, and styles. Although programs ad infinitum to remedy evils such as poverty, segregation, crime, and pollution are proposed and even written into law, the day-to-day operation of our political institutions often fails to reflect these innovations. Thus we are unable to evaluate the merits of alternative solutions to such ills because they are never given the test of full-fledged implementation.

In this paper I am going to suggest various measures to modify the behavior of one important political institution which has been staunchly resistant to change—the police. Our under standing of police operations is still quite limited (due partially to the secretive nature of most departments), but as David Easton (1969) has argued, social scientists have an obligation to use whatever intellectual tools are at their disposal to obtain “quick, short-run answers” to questions of pressing social concern. To this end, what follows is an attempt to apply some principles of learning theory (developed largely in highly-structured psychology laboratories on infra-human subjects) to the chaotic environment of the cop on the beat.

Theory linking litigation onset, process, and outcome in jail reform lawsuits has been scarce. The author proposes a four-stage, comparative model: (1) conditions of surrounding legal and political environments, in concert with contextual factors (e.g., type of legal representation), set the stage for litigation in the trigger stage; (2) specific legal claims, defendants named, and litigation strategies shape litigation process at the liability stage; (3) the nature and degree of remedies crafted is shaped by complex interactions between litigants and judges at the remedy stage; and (4) judicial methods and litigant behavior shape negotiations, modifications, and compliance efforts in the postdecree stage. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, the researcher examined hypotheses linking the four stages. All general-conditions lawsuits against California county jails between 1975 and 1989 (N=43) were coded and analyzed. Critical factors identified at each stage significantly influenced litigation incidence, process, and legal outcomes. The author discusses implications of a multimethod, comparative approach for studying court-ordered reform of public institutions.

Media and scholastic accounts describe a strong backlash against attempts to advance gay rights. Academic research, however, increasingly raises questions about the sharply negative and enduring opinion change that characterizes backlash among the mass public. How can we reconcile the widespread backlash described by the media with the growing body of academic research that finds no evidence of the opinion change thought to be its hallmark trait? We argue that rather than widespread opinion change, what appears to be backlash against gay rights is more consistent with elite-led mobilization—a reaction by elites seeking to prevent gays and lesbians from achieving full incorporation in the polity. We present evidence from what is widely considered to be a classic case of anti-gay backlash, the 2010 Iowa Judicial Retention Election. Analysis of campaign contribution data in Iowa versus other states between 2010 and 2014, and voter roll-off data exploiting a unique feature of the 2010 retention election supports this argument. The results simultaneously explain how reports of backlash might occur despite increased support for gay rights, and an academic literature that finds no evidence of backlash.

It has become obligatory for leaders of professional associations to exhort colleagues to practice their craft in a socially responsible manner. But Joel Handler has issued a more controversial challenge in his 1992 presidential address to the Law and Society Association. He marries the idea of responsible legal scholarship to a recovery of faith in structuralist political analysis and transformative political vision.

Many in the association no doubt will find this proposed marriage undesirable for a variety of intellectual and political reasons" By contrast, I join those many who have found Handler's bold jeremiad provocative and important. Moreover, I share some of his particular concerns about the limitations of much contemporary legal study and political movement activity. At the same time, however, my research on legal mobilization by social movements has led me to draw differently the conceptual lines of both connection and division among the various trends that he identifies. The following comments aim to outline briefly some alternative, although often complementary, readings of these trends and their implications for scholarship. The discussion evolves from my most critical to my most supportive points.

Do the causal determinants of legal change differ for controversial and noncontroversial laws? Using rape law reforms as an example of legal change, I answer this question via a longitudinal examination of the intrastate characteristics and interstate processes that affect the adoption of both controversial and noncontroversial rape law reforms. The results show that the adoption of partial reforms significantly decreases a state's likelihood of passing a stronger version of the reform only for controversial rape law reforms. Other factors, such as women's economic power and the interstate process of diffusion similarly affect both controversial and noncontroversial reforms. Thus, contrary to the idea that the process of diffusion operates differently for controversial reforms, the results indicate that spatial proximity negatively affects the adoption of both controversial and noncontroversial rape law reforms. These findings have important implications for theoretical explanations of legal change, research on rape law reforms, and social movement research and activism.

The constitution of South Africa mandates equitable redress for individuals and communities evicted from their properties during colonialism and apartheid. The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights' institution-wide assumption is that the financial awards given as equitable redress had no long-term economic impact on recipients because the money is gone and they are still in poverty, whereas if people had received land, the economic impact would have been lasting. Consequently, in recent years, the commission has adopted a policy of using its soft power to force claimants to choose land restitution instead of financial awards. However, the interviews I conducted with financial award recipients show that in 30 percent of the cases, the award did produce a long-term economic benefit because respondents invested in their homes. This empirical evidence suggests that the commission should rethink its recent shift in policy and not totally discount the potential of financial awards to produce a lasting economic benefit.

In four empirical studies, we showed that laypeople apply the ignorance of the law defense differently depending on the perceived morality of the defendant's course of conduct at the time of the illegal act. Moral and neutral defendants who pled ignorance of the law were afforded leniency, whereas immoral defendants were sentenced as though they were not ignorant, even when defendants in all three conditions violated identical laws. These findings suggest that laypeople adopt a just deserts approach to criminal law, which influences their responsiveness to a criminal defendant's claim to be ignorant of the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal law and argue that legal doctrine should reflect laypeople's moral intuitions.

A resurgent debate in the field of judicial politics has been the controversy over which has the greatest effect in decisionmaking: legal or extralegal variables. This study applies the controversy to an arena in which a consistent answer has yet to be found: federal district court reception of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that there was a great deal of variation in compliance, with southern district justices being substantially unwilling to apply the new precedent. Results found here, however, strongly suggest that the legal variable was in fact significant. Moreover, this variable was more important than region or type of case.

In measuring the impact of court-ordered prison reforms on state budgets, Taggart (1989) challenged Harriman and Straussman's (1983) conclusion that court decisions have affected state spending for corrections. This Research Note explores important questions left unanswered by both studies: (1) What impact did the courts have on cases litigated during the 1980s? (2) Why are the courts able to influence spending in some states but not others? The results support Taggart's conclusion that spending for corrections follows an incremental pattern. Judicial influence on state budgets declined during the 1980s as courts narrowed the scope of prison reforms.

The formal literature on pre-trial bargaining offers considerable insight on how different bargaining procedures asymmetric information affect efficiency. Less attention has been paid to fairness, despite the fact that fairness is an essential component of any system of justice. We address this state of affairs by analyzing the equilibria of a pre-trial bargaining model for both fairness and efficiency. This analysis involves ascertaining whether fair and efficient equilibria are possible and whether they occur for common parameter values, and characterizing their behavioral and distributional properties. We conclude that fairness is a paramount concern to litigants and society and that fair and efficient equilibria are possible.

This 2009 Law & Society Association presidential address combines the personal and political to address issues relating to race relations in the United States. Combining narrative methods and quantitative data the article traces the roots of the author's commitment to racial equality and evaluates the degree to which over the past 60 years anti-black prejudice has diminished and black-white equality increased. The conclusion is that important progress toward black-white equality has occurred and prejudice is less of a barrier than it once was, but large gaps remain, and the progress achieved is fragile. Moreover, the greatest progress is in areas where the government has most strongly intervened, meaning that the racial jurisprudence of the current Supreme Court and conservative economic policies may present major impediments to further closing black-white gaps. Law and society scholars are urged to attend more to racial equality issues than they have in the past.

The police in several Western countries have been the object of a good deal of dissatisfaction lately, whether in open confrontation with rioters and demonstrators, or as the object of severe criticism by the courts and civilian review boards. Since the respect and cooperation of the public are essential for effective police operation–in reporting crimes, assisting officers, testifying in court, or in less direct ways–police departments have begun to turn their attention to the sources of this tension. Simultaneously, this problem has become a focus of study for a number of social scientists (see, for example, Banton, 1964; Bordua, 1967; Cumming et al., 1965; Gardiner, 1969; Goldstein, 1963; Gourley, 1954; Skolnick, 1966; and Wilson, 1968). We have undertaken a study of some aspects of the relationship between the police and the public in Israel, in the context of a wider series of studies on patterns of contact between bureaucratic organizations and their clients. There may be factors in this relationship which are not evident in other countries; for example, Israeli police are organized on a national basis with centralized control rather than by local departments as in the American system, and the Israeli police are integrated with the national security effort. These very differences, however, may clarify some fundamental elements of the police-public encounter in general.