This article analyzes some of the most salient features of the state and the legal system in Mozambique. I propose the concept of the heterogeneous state to highlight the breakdown of the modern equation between the unity of the state, on the one hand, and the unity of its legal and administrative operation, on the other. The centrality of legal pluralism is analyzed in light of an empirical research focused on community courts and traditional authorities. I use the concept of legal hybridization with the purpose of showing the porosity of the boundaries of the different legal orders and cultures in Mozambique and the deep cross-fertilizations or cross-contaminations among them. Special attention is given to the multicultural plurality resulting from the interaction between modern law and traditional law, the latter conceived here as an alternative modernity.

The research presented here examines the effect of legal and extralegal resources on the likelihood of female-perpetrated homicides. It looks at the relationship between gender-specific rates of partner homicide in the United States for 1976–79 and 1980–84, and the availability of legal and extralegal resources for abused women, using states as the unit of analysis. Results indicate that the availability of such resources is associated with a decline in the rates of female-, but not male-, perpetrated homicides in 1980–84, compared to the 1976–79 time period. These findings suggest that legal and extralegal interventions can provide nonviolent alternatives for victims of male partner abuse.

Criminal prosecution of abusive men is described here as a power resource used by battered women to help bring about satisfactory arrangements for managing conjugal violence. This article examines relevant theory on exchange and power processes to explain the conditions of victim empowerment. It then describes cases of women who filed charges against their conjugal partners to show how victims may file, but later drop, charges as a rational power strategy for determining the future course of their relationships. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of prosecutorial policies that limit battered women's control over criminal justice processes.

Using Alien Tort Claims Act suits against multinational corporations as an immediate context for discussion, this article explores the emerging field of corporate social responsibility. The article argues for an understanding of concrete legal struggles as part of broader competing strategies for regulating corporate obligations to a multitude of stakeholders. By identifying and analyzing the positions of concrete actors who operate in the field, the main thesis of this article is that the field strongly tilts in the direction of voluntary and self-reliant models of corporate responsibility. The article identifies this process as consistent with the privatization of regulative structures in general and with extant modeling of corporate governance in particular, and points at the correlation between these trends and the interests of multinational corporations.

This article examines the work of immigration inspectors—the front-line gatekeepers at ports of entry to the United States who decide whether foreign nationals should be admitted to the country. Described are the shared categories primary inspectors use that help define travelers as referable or nonreferable for further intensive questioning. The study discusses how these judgments arise in the course of doing a distinctive organizational task that fundamentally shapes their character. The study explores the ways in which the nature of categorization and practical decisionmaking in the setting are shaped by agency concerns and the responsibilities and problems of this set of social control agents.

Simple deterrence will often fail to produce compliance commitment because it does not directly address business perceptions of the morality of regulated behavior. Responsive regulation, by contrast, seeks to build moral commitment to compliance with the law. This article shows that a regulator can overcome the deterrence trap to improve compliance commitment with the skillful use of responsive regulatory techniques that “leverage” the deterrence impact of its enforcement strategies with moral judgments. But this leads it into the “compliance trap.” The compliance trap occurs where there is a lack of political support for the moral seriousness of the law it must enforce, such as is the case with cartel enforcement in Australia. In these circumstances, business offenders are likely to interpret the moral leveraging of responsive regulation as unfair or stigmatizing, and business perceptions of regulator unfairness are likely to have a negative influence on long-term compliance with the law. Moreover, big businesses that perceive regulatory enforcement as illegitimate are also likely to actively lobby for the political emasculation of the regulator. In these circumstances, most regulators are likely to avoid conflict by taking the easy option of enforcing the law “softly,” and therefore ineffectively.

This paper examines the cases of 1017 homicide defendants in Florida. Two main data sources are used: the police department's classification of the case, as found in the FBI's Supplemental Homicide Reports, and the prosecutor's classification, as determined by court records. Each data set characterizes the homicide as involving felonious circumstances, possible felonious circumstances, or nonfelonious circumstances. Attention is focused on cases that differ in their police and prosecutorial classifications. Results indicate that differences in these classifications are related to defendant's and victim's race, with blacks accused of killing whites the most likely to be “upgraded” and the least likely to be “downgraded.” The process of upgrading is then shown to significantly increase the likelihood of the imposition of a death sentence in cases with white victims where no plea bargain is offered.

This paper reports observations from a series of formal and empirical studies of the process of assessing the probative value of evidence in the cascaded or hierarchical inference tasks commonly performed by fact finders in court trials. The formal research develops expressions that prescribe how the ingredients of various forms of evidence can be coherently combined in assessing the probative value of evidence. These expressions allow identification and systematic analysis of a wide assortment of subtle properties of evidence, many of which are commonly recognized in evidence law. The reported empirical research was designed to evaluate the consistency with which persons actually assess the probative value of evidence when they are asked to make these evaluations in several equivalent ways. Results show that persons, when required to mentally combine a large amount of probabilistic evidence, exhibit certain inconsistencies such as treating contradictory testimony as corroborative testimony and double-counting or overvaluing redundant testimony. However, when people are asked to make assessments about the fine-grained logical details of the same evidence, these inconsistencies do not occur.

This article outlines a distinctive, albeit not entirely unprecedented, research agenda for the sociolegal study of contracts. In the past, law and society scholars have tended to examine contracts either through the intellectual history of contract doctrine “on the books” or through the empirical study of how real-world exchange relations are governed “in action.” Although both of these traditions have contributed greatly to our understanding of contract law, neither has devoted much attention to the most distinctive concrete product of contractual transactions—contract documents themselves. Without denying the value of studying either contract doctrine or relational governance, this article argues that contract documents are independently interesting social artifacts and that they should be studied as such. As social artifacts, contracts possess both technical and symbolic properties, and the sociolegal study of contract-as-artifact can profitably apply prevailing social scientific theories of technology and symbolism to understand both: (1) the microdynamics of why and how transacting parties craft individual contract devices, and (2) the macrodynamics of why and how larger social systems generate and sustain distinctive contract regimes. Seen in this light, the microdynamics of contract implicate “technical” theories of transaction cost engineering and private lawmaking, and “symbolic” theories of ceremony and gesture. In a parallel fashion, the macrodynamics of contract implicate “technical” theories of innovation diffusion, path dependence, and technology cycles, and “symbolic” theories of ideology, legitimacy, and communication. Together, these micro and macro explorations suggest that contract artifacts may best be understood as scripts and signals—collections of symbols designed to yield technically efficacious practical action when interpreted by culture-bearing social actors within the context of preexisting vocabularies and conventions.

Legal scholars come to the problem of development somewhat tardily. But legal systems are clearly a part of political, social, and economic development, just as are educational systems and other areas of the culture. No major social change occurs or is put into effect in a society which is not reflected in some kind of change in its laws. Legal institutions are responsive to social change; moreover, they have a definite role, rather poorly understood, as instruments that set off, monitor, or otherwise regulate the fact or pace of social change. Many basic questions of the relationship of law to social change and to cultural development are completely neglected. Does the type of legal system and legal institutions that a society uses help or hinder that society in its march toward modernization? How does law influence the rate of economic growth? How does law brighten or darken the road to political wisdom or stability? How can a society improve its system of justice? What happens when laws are borrowed from more advanced countries?

In recent years, there has been a tremendous proliferation of quantitative evaluative social measures in the field of law as well as society generally. One of these measures, the U.S. News & World Report rankings of law schools, has become an almost obsessive concern of the law school community, generating a great deal of speculation about the effects of these rankings on legal education. However, there has been no attempt to systematically ascertain what, if any, effects these rankings have on the decisionmaking of students and schools in the admission process. This article documents some of these effects by conceptualizing rankings as a signal of law school quality, investigating (1) whether students and schools use this signal to make decisions about where to apply and whom to admit, and (2) whether the creation of this signal distorts the phenomenon—law school quality—that it purports to measure. Using data for U.S. law schools from 1996 to 2003, we find that schools' rankings have significant effects on both the decisions of prospective students and the decisions schools make in the admissions process. In addition, we present evidence that the rankings can become a self-fulfilling prophecy for some schools, as the effects of rank described above alter the profile of their student bodies, affecting their future rank. Cumulatively, these findings suggest that the rankings help create rather than simply reflect differences among law schools through the magnification of the small, and statistically random, distinctions produced by the measurement apparatus.

Current research in sociolegal studies focusing on resistance provides one way to continue the progressive politics of studying social transformation through law. In response to earlier concerns that the turn to postmodernism and the focus on individual acts of resistance has deflected scholarly work from attention to progressive politics, this article advocates broadening the question to examine a range of forms of resistance and their impact on cultural meanings as well as political mobilization. Through the examination of three examples of resistance that take place within and by means of legal institutions, the article endeavors to expand the frame of analysis to include the myriad processes by which the cultural world is made and remade.

Recent legislative responses to a perceived increase in hate crimes have resulted in efforts to quantify the rates of occurrence of such crimes. However, there remains little understanding of the processes by which statutory requirements are implemented at the level of front-line personnel like the police. This article examines the situated decisionmaking practices of police detectives in two divisions of a large urban police department charged with collecting official hate crime data. The authors argue that police detectives engage in certain routine practices in order to determine the hate-related status of an incident and that these practices are inflected by the particular institutional arrangements of the divisions and the department in which they operate. They describe in detail the various categorization practices employed in these two divisions and the ways that a seemingly common orientation to the prevalence of hate crimes have differential consequences for the reporting of hate crimes in each division.

Those who champion the representation of blacks on the bench argue that black judges may make a difference. Indeed, some suggest that increasing the proportion of black judges might result in more equitable treatment of black and white defendants. In this study we test these expectations. Using data on defendants charged with violent felonies, we compare the sentencing decisions of black and white judges in Detroit. We find remarkable similarities and conclude that judicial race has relatively little predictive power. More important, we find that both black and white judge sentence black offenders more severely than white offenders. Our results raise questions about the appropriate interpretation of racial disparity in incarceration rates and suggest that the harsher treatment of black offenders cannot be attributed to the racism of white judges.

This article evaluates the widespread scholarly claim that the courtroom victories of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights movement have invariably provoked a counterproductive political backlash. Those victories have indeed provoked conservative countermobilization, but that has not been their only or even their most prominent effect. Assessing the political reaction to the movement's judicial victories, the policy impact of those victories, and the alternative strategic paths that were available to the movement at the outset, I argue that here, as elsewhere, legal mobilization has sometimes been a promising avenue for pursuing policy changes whose prospects were otherwise quite limited.

This article examines the strategic legal activity of the environmental movement in the United Kingdom over the past twenty years. Environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have increasingly turned to the courts in pursuit of their policy goals, despite significant losses on substantive legal issues, difficulties gaining standing and high costs awarded against them under the “loser pays” system. This presents a puzzle: why does the movement continue to pursue legal action in the face of what activists claim is a hostile legal opportunity structure (LOS)? This study explores this seeming paradox using a single-country, cross-temporal comparative approach, an original dataset of legal cases taken by NGOs as well as qualitative case studies of strategic litigation. It highlights the agency the movement exhibits within opportunity structures and suggests that NGOs that use litigation are able to highlight the failings of the existing system and improve future access to justice for themselves and other groups.

Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation's highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences (legal realism and the attitudinal model), the belief that the justices merely “apply” the law (mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality) is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the most unaccountable of all American political institutions, is nurtured by the view that judicial decisionmaking is discretionless and mechanical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under legal realism are less obvious. Here, we demonstrate, using a nationally representative sample, that the American people understand judicial decisionmaking in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in mechanical jurisprudence is therefore not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.

Sociologists have long been interested in how reactions to deviance influence social order and consensus. However, classic statements on this subject present contrasting hypotheses. This article extends previous work by examining how the extensive media coverage of an interracial homicide influences public attitudes toward the criminal justice system. Initial results indicate that race, education, and police contact directly effect perceptions of criminal injustice. Perceptions of injustice are especially high among well-educated blacks who have had recent contact with the police. Further analysis reveals that the media coverage of the homicide seems temporarily to consolidate public confidence in the police and criminal courts. However, this effect varies by race and education. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.

Legal clarity is important to understand and measure because of its connection to the rule of law. We provide the first systematic examination of the clarity of Supreme Court opinions and discover five important results. First, certain justices systematically craft clearer opinions than others. Justices Scalia and Breyer write the clearest opinions, while Justice Ginsburg consistently writes the most complex opinions. Second, ideology does not predict clarity in majority or concurring opinions. Third, all justices write clearer dissents than majority opinions, while minimum winning coalitions produce the clearest majority opinions. Fourth, justices across the board write clearer opinions in criminal procedure cases than in any other issue area. Finally, opinions that formally alter Court precedent render less clear law, potentially leading to a cycle of legal ambiguity.

There has been considerable discussion since September 11 of the enormous resource that local police potentially represent in the fight against terrorism. This article identifies limits to the local role in homeland security by analyzing a case study of Dearborn, Michigan. Partly because Dearborn is home to one of the largest concentrations of Arabs in the United States, its experience with homeland security highlights two kinds of burdens that cities incur when they engage in proactive surveillance to identify potential terrorists: damage to their reputation (since police surveillance implies that its objects are not trustworthy) and damage to police legitimacy (since new surveillance may undermine trust between police and the community). Because the benefits of efforts to identify terrorists typically accrue to jurisdictions other than the one that engages in it—unlike street crime, terrorism is a national or even international problem—local governments have little reason to pursue it. Instead, cities such as Dearborn have reason to emphasize what I call the “community protection” aspects of homeland security, such as target hardening and emergency response. This finding has more general implications for our understanding of the police role and the politics of policing, showing how both are shaped by the structural location police occupy in federalist systems of government.