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 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.

Private ordering—i.e., development of extralegal forums and forms of dispute processing by nonhierarchical groups—has preoccupied legal economists for nearly three decades. According to the prevailing analysis, private orders grow in socially-flat market communities without any intervention by the state. This article challenges the received view on two fronts: First, it establishes a causal connection between the development of private orders and a social hierarchy. Second, the article demonstrates that the state often intentionally assumes a proactive role in the creation of these orders. To illustrate this two-pronged theory of private ordering, this article offers a detailed analysis of three well-known cases that have been considered prototypes of private ordering by market communities: the Diamond Dealers Club of New York, the kibbutz in Israel, and ranch owners in Shasta County, California. Finally, the article argues for a need to re-evaluate the feasibility and desirability of private ordering and privatization of law.

This essay traces the rise of longitudinal studies of courts. In the United States, the rise of a sociolegal school of history (the “Wisconsin school”) was the immediate stimulus. Longitudinal studies, in Europe and the United States, explored the relationship between law and the economy; they tended to find an inverse relationship. But more recent findings suggest some reversal of this trend. Changes in the nature of business relationships have stimulated increases in some forms of major business litigation. Moreover, in modern legal culture, freedom is conceived of in substantive terms; and the courts appear more and more to be the place where true justice can be found.

In this paper we investigate a largely unrecognized but nevertheless important chapter in the legal and political history of Soviet Marxism: the simultaneously coherent and contradictory theoretical tendencies in Lenin's pronouncements about law, legality, and delegalization (“the withering away of law”) during the socialist transition. We identify and discuss these tendencies as they unfold against the historical background of the Russian Revolution. We argue that Lenin's political and theoretical objections to legal formalism greatly contributed to the tragic neglect of constitutional mechanisms needed to secure the radical democratic motives of the revolutionary process.

The article presents preliminary findings of a caseload study which covers preindustrial and industrial periods of judicial activity in Bremen, Germany. It discusses the historical comparability of the data and opposes evolutionary approaches in longitudinal research. Waves and exponential trends are examined as stable elements in the time series. Five historical periods of different growth patterns are distinguished. Higher litigation rates of previous times lead to the conclusion that modern society handles far more potential legal conflict with relatively less litigation than did society in earlier periods.

This paper reviews three bodies of research which relate to the severity of societal response to crime: studies of social complexity, of punitive reaction to high rates of deviance, and of the ability of the justice system to control criminal activity. We present a model aimed at integrating these findings and accounting for some of the inconsistent results among them. We contend that while normative diversity, on the whole, tends to lessen the severity of response, this tendency may be counteracted by an increased rate of deviance and a decreased certainty of punishment—also products of social complexity.

Since the mid-1990s, formal scientific risk management has been codified at all levels of food safety governance in affluent states: firm-level standards, national regulation, and international law. Developing countries' access to affluent importers and power in international standard-setting fora now hinges on their scientific capacity. This article explores the consequences of these developments in India, which moved quickly from resistance to acquiescence, and then later to mobilization around narratives of scientific risk management's local benefits. The case suggests a two-stage model of scientization among developing countries: (1) coercive and competitive mechanisms drive adoption of science-based governance models, and (2) as local actors mobilize to meet foreign demands, they attach their own interests and agendas to science-based reforms. The outcome is a set of rational myths about the benefits of scientization. The article draws on content analysis of organizational, policy, and news documents and a small set of interviews with highly placed pubic officials and industry representatives.

This article explores the realization of the right to access in France, based on biographical interviews with people with mobility or visual impairments. I lay out an original theoretical framework for studying rights realization at the individual level. Although rights activation is the horizon of most rights consciousness research, I argue that rights do not necessarily need to be activated in order to be made real. This realization may also derive from effective policy implementation. In France, however, disabled individuals are very active in realizing their right to access, in a context of insufficient implementation. Moreover, although there is limited collective mobilization, several types of policy feedbacks fuel rights activation and the emergence of grievances regarding the lack of accessibility. Studying the realization of the right to access thus opens up promising perspectives for sociolegal research.

I shall comment here on the theoretical framework Professor J. H. Skolnick suggests for studies in the sociology of law and the adequacy of the bibliography in his Social Problems article “The Sociology of Law in America: Overview and Trends.” While I welcome Skolnick's emphasis on theory and the “larger philosophical issues,” I think his theoretical orientation would unnecessarily constrict social studies of law.

In his presidential address to the Law and Society Association, Joel Handler describes recent changes in the character of social protest and the scholarship that seeks to understand these resistant practices. In his description, Handler depicts a world in which all that was once collective and effectual is now fragmented and futile. Not that long ago, he suggests, we had real (ideological/class-based) social movements and vital communities that were documented by scholars in optimistic stories of resistance and protest. But time passed and we became postmodernized: destabilized and uncertain, ironic and listless. Where once we challenged oppression and power en masse to the flourish of trumpets, now we are just so many flatulent individuals.

This article analyzes a survey of attorneys' motivations in choosing federal or state courts in diversity cases in four judicial districts. The study examines the importance of lawyers' perceptions of (1) local bias based upon residency, (2) the comparative efficiency and quality of state and federal courts, and (3) familiarity with and partiality for state or federal court procedures. It is shown that the rural versus urban setting of the court influences the perception of local bias and quality of the courts. Relative efficiency and differences in procedure between state and federal courts are also important factors affecting forum choice. The survey offers some insight into the potential impact of proposed reforms of the federal diversity of citizenship jurisdiction. The variation in motivations for forum choice among the districts provides little support for nationwide abolition of diversity jurisdiction.

Marc Galanter's 1974 article “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead” has been exceptionally influential, and for good reason. Its analytic elegance and power, particularly in its famous distinction between repeat players and one-shotters, have illuminated many aspects of the legal process. Yet the article's influence also stems at least in part, I suspect, from the tension between its two related but very different motifs. It predicted that resource-rich parties will generally fare better than other parties in the legal system, and provided a coherent theoretical account of why: because such parties are more likely to be “repeat players” that have the organizational and resource capacities to “play for rules” over the long term. The “Haves” article also, on this basis, provided a coherent theoretical account of how the fates of “have not” parties in the legal system may be improved: by upgrading their capacities for longer-term strategic action, principally through increasing the funding of legal services, improving access to legal knowledge and skills, and organizing diffuse “have not” classes as repeat players. In these and other ways, “have nots,” he suggested, may achieve some of the organizational and structural advantages held by the “haves” (1974:140–44). This subtext might have had its own subtitle to “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead,” such as “And How the ‘Have Nots’ Can Organize to Come Out Less Far Behind.”

In addition to containing religious centers of pilgrimage, regional and local markets, and educational establishments, a district headquarters town in India is, virtually by definition, the seat of a whole complex of law courts. The personnel whose activities contribute to the patterning of social life in such towns includes as an essential feature a small brotherhood of local legal practitioners. The present paper describes one such brotherhood: the advocates who practice in a district headquarters town in Haryana. The main problem with which I shall be concerned is that of isolating and describing the system of social relations, the interconnected set of behavioral patterns, that occurs in the daily interactions among a hundred or more professionals in the district courts. It follows that the paper looks to lawyers rather than law.

In 1985, laws mandating the wearing of automobile seatbelts went into effect in Illinois and in Yugoslavia. Although the form of the legislation was similar in both jurisdictions, the public response to the laws was very different in the two societies. In Illinois, there was public opposition, a protracted legal challenge to the law, and minimal enforcement by the police. In Yugoslavia, there was no public or legal challenge to the law yet strict enforcement. Compliance, however, was much greater in America than in Yugoslavia. Since previous studies of the impact of seatbelt laws in the United States and in other countries had found patterns of compliance that were similar to those in Illinois, the Yugoslav situation is anomalous. This unexpected finding raises questions concerning the importance of cultural context on the effectiveness of seatbelt laws, on the basic views of law in the two societies, on problems in testing deterrence theory cross-culturally, and on the problems and benefits of comparative research on the impact of legislation.

In many countries, the law permits state authorities to detain noncitizens before deportation. Typically judicial decisions about preremoval detention must be made within a short period of time during which deportable noncitizens are held in police premises, and depending on the country detention may last just one month (e.g., France) or up to 18 months (the Netherlands). While previous research has explored various dimensions of noncitizen detention including the legal procedure, health consequences, the condition of detention centers, and the lives of deportable noncitizens, the empirical assessment of the determinants of decisions on preremoval detention are largely unexplored. Using data from court proceedings of police petitions of detention in Spain and a quantitative strategy, in this article we undertake an empirical analysis of noncitizen detention combining personal background of deportable noncitizens, legal factors of the case, and the behavior of different actors involved in the procedure. To do it, we fit models that take into account variation occurred at judicial district levels. Results indicate, on the one hand, that relevant actors involved in the procedure use different informational cues to decide on cases. On the other hand, the role of prosecutors and attorneys during hearings proves also relevant to predict detention.

At the turn of the 20th century, as more people in the United States started moving to urban areas, the quality of the milk supply became one of the preeminent public health challenges of the day and a centerpiece of the Progressive agenda. Governments passed ordinances and statutes to safeguard the milk supply and sanctioned violators of these laws. This study collects the published cases where judges were asked to enforce these health regulations.

Contrary to the Revisionist reading of Progressive Era constitutional history, these cases demonstrate that enforcement of these health laws became more difficult during the Progressive Era. Parties resisting these laws made broader constitutional challenges to the laws more often. While the number of victories for these parties remained steady, the scope of their victories became broader. The study also throws light on the early use of “regulatory crimes.” Governments were more likely throughout the study period to use a criminal rather than a civil enforcement process. Surprisingly, the use of criminal enforcement did not affect the government's success rate in these cases.

This article deals with copyright regulation meeting the quite rapid societal changes associated with digitization, and it does so by reinterpreting Karl Renner's classical texts in the light of contemporary cognitive theory of conceptual metaphors and embodiment. From a cognitive theory perspective, I focus on the notion that the legal norms only appear to be unchanged—the Renner distinction between form and function. This includes social norms, technological development, and changes in social structures in general, which create a social and cognitive reinterpretation of law. This article, therefore, analyzes the contemporary push for copyright as property, which I relate to historical claims for copyright as property as well as de facto legal revisions in intellectual property faced with the challenges of digitization. Of particular relevance here is what Renner described in terms of property as an “institution of domination and control,” and thus the increased measures for control that are added to a digital context in the name of copyright.

Hierarchy and stratification characterize labor markets all over the Western world. Racial, ethnic, and national minorities; women; and those belonging to lower socioeconomic classes are underrepresented in prestigious positions and overrepresented in lower-paying jobs in proportion to their percentage in the general population. Even when employed in similar positions, members of devalued social groups earn lower wages and are promoted less frequently. The legal profession is no different. Decades of research have clearly shown that the market for legal services follows the same patterns that determine the outcomes in other domains of social and economic life (see, e.g., Carson 2004). Yet in the spirit of Tolstoy's famous maxim, while all egalitarian labor markets are alike, each hierarchical market is stratified in its own way. Stratification is based on numerous distinctive characteristics such as the legal profession's structure, size, and degree of homogeneity, as well as the regulations governing it and the legal culture it exists in. Likewise, factors related to the general social structure—such as the stratification in broader society and the social role of the legal profession—also affect stratification within the legal profession. In this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on hierarchy and stratification within the legal profession through an in-depth examination of the patterns of inequality in the Israeli legal profession.

Despite the lack of consensus regarding the meaning or significance of race or ethnicity amongst scientists and the lay public, there are legal requirements and guidelines that dictate the collection of racial and ethnic data across a range of institutions. Legal regulations are typically created through a political process and then face varying kinds of resistance when the state tries to implement them. We explore the nature of this opposition by comparing responses from businesses, scientists, and science-oriented businesses (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) to U.S. state regulations that used politically derived racial categorizations, originally created to pursue civil rights goals. We argue that insights from cultural sociology regarding institutional and cultural boundaries can aid understanding of the nature of resistance to regulation. The Food and Drug Administration's guidelines for research by pharmaceutical companies imposed race categories on science-based businesses, leading to objections that emphasized the autonomy and validity of science. In contrast, similar race categories regulating first business by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and later scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encountered little challenge. We argue that pharmaceutical companies had the motive (profit) that NIH-supported scientists lacked and a legitimate discourse (boundary work of science) that businesses regulated by the EEOC did not have. The study suggests the utility of a comparative cultural sociology of the politics of legal regulation, particularly when understanding race-related regulation and the importance of examining legal regulations for exploring how the meaning of race or ethnicity are contested and constructed in law.