Thirty-six men served on the Supreme Court of India from its inception in 1950 through 1967. Examination of their background attributes reveals that the prototypic judge was the product of a socially prestige-ful and economically advantaged family, was a Hindu (most often a Brahmin), was educated at one of the better Indian universities or in England, spent twenty years in private law practice before the High Court in his home state, refrained from participation in the nationalist movement before 1947 and in postindependence politics thereafter, was appointed to the High Court before which he practiced when he was forty-seven, spent ten years as a High Court judge by which time he was the Chief Justice or seniormost puisne judge of that Court, and then was promoted to the Supreme Court when he was fifty-seven years of age. There are, of course, exceptions to this prototype, but striking is the homogeneous character and similar socialization experiences shared by these men.

This study examines the factors that determine the probability that a very common form of deviant behavior, shoplifting, will be detected, reported, and sanctioned. Data obtained both from self-reported crime, and from experiments in which researchers actually shoplifted goods from supermarkets and department stores with the authorization of their executive officers but without the knowledge of store employees, indicate that enforcement of the norm is highly selective. Less than 10 percent of all shoplifting is detected, and customers appear unwilling to report even flagrant cases. Even with an announced policy of full reporting and prosecution, only 70 percent of the shoplifting detected is reported, and only 55 percent is sanctioned. Foreigners, adults, and blue-collar workers are disproportionately represented among those sanctioned.

These findings challenge the common assumption that norms backed by legal sanctions are highly effective. One reason may be that the division of labor between stores, which detect, and police and prosecutor, who sanction, completes the differentiation of moral and legal norms, subverting the effectiveness of both. The results also highlight the misleading nature of criminal statistics, which purport to measure crime but in fact describe the behavior of detecting and enforcing agencies.

This article uses Friedman and Percival's (1976) longitudinal survey of the caseloads of two California courts as a vehicle for addressing two conceptual issues that must be resolved in studies of the dispute settlement function of courts. First, one must decide whether the focus of inquiry is on the way courts function (i.e., act) or on the function that courts fill for some larger community. The methodological implications of this decision are discussed. Second, one must decide what counts as judicial contributions to dispute settlement. Seven possible contributions are identified. This article then reanalyzes Friedman and Percival's data on the Alameda and San Benito County courts, controlling for adult population. Reanalysis indicates that these data do not support the conclusion that the courts Friedman and Percival studied became functionally less important to community dispute settlement with increasing socio-economic development. This portion of the article suggests possible causes of some of the patterns observed, and discusses some of the problems that arise in working with longitudinal data culled from court dockets.

This article examines the patterns and changes in the way trial courts have handled both civil and criminal matters. It does so by looking for similarities between the civil and criminal dockets in all levels of trial courts in two rural counties in Illinois for a 90-year period (1870-1960). The data from these sites suggest that there may be an overall pattern in the way matters are handled, one that has fluctuations and changes within it but seems to have persisted over time. About 90 percent of the matters filed in the two counties did not involve a contested hearing or judgment. The pattern of handling matters was characterized, instead, by shifts between the routine processing of uncontested matters and matters that dropped out of the courts short of judgment. Contested matters were always the exception and not the rule. Contrary to some claims found in the literature, the shifts within the pattern seem to reflect changes in the mix of court business rather than some fundamental change driven by environmental factors and marking an overall demise of trials.

Community has been a central concept of political and legal philosophy since its beginning. It has often served as a frame of reference even when not explored as such. From the well-known opening of Aristotle's Politics to the French constitution of 1958, community has served to designate the human group with which politics and law are concerned and to which all the characteristic phenomena of political life, power, authority, law, and the rest must be referred.

—Friedrich 1959:3

The community myth is that there is now, or ever has been, a “community” in the sense of groups of like-minded individuals, living in urban areas, who share a common heritage, have similar values and norms, and share a common perception of social order… . [T]he idea of community contains many implications of the environment encompassed by the myth. Geographically and ethnically identifiable groups become “neighborhoods,” or moral entities characterized by a sense of belonging, a sense of common goals, involvement in community affairs, and a sense of wholeness.

—Crank 1994:336–37

There exists out there, somewhere, “the black community.” It once was a place where people both lived and worked. Now it is more of an idea, or an ideal, than a reality. It is like the mythical maroon colony of the Isle des Chevaliers (for those of you who have read Toni Morrison's Tar Baby), or like Brigadoon (for those of you who are culturally deprived). “The black community” of which I write is partly the manifestation of a nostalgic longing for a time when blacks were clearly distinguishable from whites and concern about the welfare of the poor was more natural than our hairdos.

—Austin 1992:1769

Lawyers had a profound influence upon the legislative history of the Hindu Code Bill. Enacted as a series of separate acts between 1954-1956 by India's First Parliament, this bill was intended to modernize, unify, democratize, and secularize Hindu family law and Hindu society, and especially to emancipate Hindu women. I shall first outline the general influence of lawyers in India's national legislature during 1921-1956. Then I shall describe their influence on the pivotal events of this particular legislative history, with primary emphasis upon the British Indian period.

Throughout this legislative history lawyers tended to dominate the legislature, its leading political parties, and the executive (not to mention the judiciary). In the British Indian Central Legislature, lawyers usually formed the largest single occupational group. Even when landlords achieved numerical supremacy, lawyers maintained actual legislative leadership. Parties did not attain great strength in this legislature, but the more important of those that did arise were led by lawyers. After independence, in the Provisional Parliament (the legislative side of the Constituent Assembly) and in the subsequent First Parliament, lawyers constituted the largest and most influential occupational group. Lawyers supplied the majority of members and most of the leadership of the Congress Party, which controlled these Parliaments, and of other parliamentary parties which took an interest in the bill.

Thai government policies for highland development are creating serious problems for ethnic hill tribes, among them environmental pollution, prostitution, AIDS, increasing opium addiction, and social disruption. Three questionable assumptions underlie government policies. Concern for opium eradication not only directs attention and funds away from groups who do not produce opium but has also failed, thus far, to find substitute crops that do not require extensive use of polluting chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The flawed assumption that shifting cultivators, rather than logging concerns, are major destroyers of the forests has led to fruitless efforts to relocate hill peoples. And the questionable theory that ethnic peoples pose a threat to national security has led to educational efforts that undermine traditional forms of village authority.

Accounts of the legal scene in Asia often refer in passing to the activities of a shadowy set of backstage characters encountered in the peripheries of the law. The assessment of the peripheral figures has varied. Only very recently have they received much direct attention from students of Asian social life and those concerned with planning social change. Earlier accounts came mostly from colonial administrators, law officers and occasionally from the local intelligensia (Morrison, 1972b: 327). These reports were invariably derogatory. They blamed these peripheral figures for a socially and economically destructive proliferation of litigation, and depicted them as swarming at the courts where for ill-gotten personal gain, they encouraged and facilitated lawsuits among the peasantry. But these figures were never described in much detail and their work seems rarely to have been observed at first hand. A variety of European terms were used to characterize them: “sea advocates,” “bush lawyers,” “touts,” and the like. Both lay and semi-official roles seemed to be included.

Interest in contemporary disruptions of human services administrations by involuntary clients, from welfare recipients to draft inductees, warrants an empirical investigation of prison rioting for two reasons. First, interest derives from a crisis of normal services involving such key foci of recent administative research as informal organizational behavior, the nature of professionalization of roles, and the ambiguities of clientelism. Second, the prison, while certainly not a microcosm of society, is a self-contained unit more amenable analysis than more diffuse social service milieus such as “the ghetto,” another prime locale of involuntary clientelism. The present exploratory study reviews alternative theories of the disruption of prison administration in the light of data collected on over a hundred inmate disturbances in the period from 1863-1970.

In this essay, I propose to pay attention to Karo-Batak dispute settlement in the framework of regional manifestations of musjawarah, the Indonesian way of popular decision-making. To that end, I shall begin with a brief description of the Karo categories of kinship and affinity, followed by an exposé of the Karo institution of dispute settlement, called runggun adat as well as by the description of a specific case which I recorded in 1969, almost thirty years after it occurred.

In this article, we investigate how victims pursue legal participation when they are confronted by legal barriers and dilemmas that arise from tensions between legal formality and lay expectations and contributions of legal proceedings. We use the trial against Anders Behring Breivik as a case. Breivik placed a bomb in Norway's Government District before he shot and killed 69 people on a small island. We analyze interviews with 31 victims who testified against Breivik in court. We argue that the circumstances of the trial against Breivik can be characterized as “ideal” in terms of victims’ rights. The exceptionality of this case facilitates a focus on unquestioned obstacles to victim participation concerning the professionalization of the legal system. We question the presumption prevalent among some theorists that the professionalization of the legal system excludes lay participation, by arguing that legal formality both alienate and empower lay participation.

This article discusses how administrative practices shape immigration detention policies, addressing both administrative discretion in detention orders and their judicial supervision. Due to vaguely formulated legal criteria and ineffective ex-post judicial supervision, the authorities have considerable discretionary powers in ordering detentions for noncompliant and criminalized noncitizens. Instead of being a measure of last resort, immigration detention is used in a routine manner, with little individual assessment, for the enforcement of removals and the prevention of irregular migration, as well as extensively for crime prevention. The findings demonstrate the role of the police as the main actor in the detention system in Finland, with significant implications for the formation of detention policies.

Popular compliance with prescribed patterns of behavior is the fundamental constraint on social disruption. Even the effectiveness of control by legal sanctions depends on the public's acceptance of their use by authorities. Inquiry into the sources of popular adherence to norms conducive to compliance with authorities has been an aspect of socialization research. This essay comments on political science research on socialization, and points out how it differs from the research reported by psychologist Joseph Adelson and his associates (1970) in this journal and in a previous study (1966). The socialization studies are compared in order to determine their utility for discerning the sources of compliant behavior.

About 11% of death-sentenced prisoners executed in the United States hastened executions by abandoning their appeals. How do these prisoners persuade courts to allow them to abandon their appeals? Further, how do legal structures and processes organize these explanations, and what do they conceal? An analysis of Texas cases suggests that prisoners marshal explanations for their desires to hasten execution that echo prevailing cultural beliefs about punishment and the death penalty. The coherence of these accounts is amplified by a non-adversarial, unreliable legal process. This article contributes to our understanding of legal narratives, and expands their analysis to include not only hegemonic stories and legal rules, but also the legal process that generates them.

Allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment by prominent entertainment and media figures and politicians in the United States have brought renewed attention to a political debate that earlier had been focused on universities and the military: the apparent failure of institutions to address and punish cases of sexual assault by their members. In light of this debate, we consider how cases fare in an institution that is perennially accused of gender bias and of tolerating rape: the US military. Through the analysis of 585 sexual assault report summaries from the US military bases in Japan, we find that the military often tries to punish cases of sexual assault. However, many cases do not have sufficient evidence for prosecution as sexual assault cases. Low conviction rates at court-martial for reported sexual assaults may indicate systemic problems with the nature of the cases themselves and the circumstances in which the cases arise. Low conviction rates may also reflect the military's legal mandate to prioritize mission, and its legal system's multiple options for addressing crime outside of trial procedures. Case characteristics interact with the primary concerns of command authority and complainants, within a highly institutionalized, closed context, to affect the military's handling and disposition of reported sexual assault cases.

It is an instructive irony that Frank Munger delivered his Presidential Address in Miami Beach. As someone who was there on Memorial Day weekend of 2000, I can report that at the time of the address there was more than the usual contrast between setting and substance. Munger issued his call for connecting law and society research to the real world of struggle and politics in the cool, windowless expanse of a plush convention-hotel ballroom. The response of the audience was polite, if not inspired. In sharp contrast, immediately outside the hotel, the hot and humid streets of South Beach buzzed and blared with a Hip Hop convention that had drawn masses of young people from around the country. This was an audience that really was turned on to the message of its leaders.

A basic tenet of communist legal theory is that the judicial function should be socialized, that is, executed by laymen rather than by professional judges. Social courts have been created in all of the Eastern European socialist countries to fulfill this mandate. However, the little empirical evidence available on the use of these courts indicates that they are rarely used voluntarily by individuals, but rather are primarily instruments of state social control over individuals.

The major exception to this pattern of use is exhibited by the Yugoslav version of social labor courts, the Courts of Associated Labor (hereafter CAL). These courts are heavily used, and over 90 percent of their cases are brought by individual workers. This paper discusses why the CAL are attractive to individual workers, drawing on ethnographic research in the trial CAL in Belgrade and on the political arguments surrounding a 1982 parliamentary effort to “reform” the CAL out of effective existence. The basic conclusion is that the CAL are successful in attracting individual workers as litigants because they are not really social courts. Further, it is suggested that the idea of social courts is contradictory: Such courts can offer little to most members of society, but instead are even more prone than regular courts to be used as mechanisms for social control by politically powerful elites.