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.

In the 1920s and early 1930s the Marxist legal theorist, Eugene Pashukanis, advanced the thesis that the achievement of communism would produce not only the dissolution of the state but of the legal system as well. Briefly, he argued that law was a direct result of economic exchange, that economic exchange was an integral part of bourgeois society, that all law was hence bourgeois law, and, finally, that the demise of bourgeois society would carry law with it. The fascination Pashukanis exerts is a direct product of the purity of his conclusion. The Revolution does not bring about a revision of the legal system, nor (except for a transitional period) does it even substitute one legal system for another. To the extent that the Revolution succeeds, it obliterates law qua law altogether.

Using case studies and interviews with lawyers and representatives in class actions, this article explores the contribution that class actions make to their ostensible beneficiaries. The article first distinguishes the major types of class actions in terms of the roles of lawyers and class representatives, ranging from very passive representatives to individuals intensively involved with the dispute that gave rise to the litigation. The article next seeks to evaluate the class actions. On the basis of the results of the class actions, the article finds that class actions cannot be proclaimed major contributors to social change. The focus on results, however, is somewhat misleading. The class action plays a much more significant role through its impact on the parties as litigants and as individuals involved with a dispute. To understand this dimension, which has applications beyond the class action, the article suggests that the dispute transformation perspective should be modified to go beyond the metaphor of a dispute that changes form as it goes through different processes. Disputants in the class action can be thought of as an audience that interprets itself—and is empowered or disempowered—in part by what it learns from watching a legal dramatization of the dispute.

This article considers several possible determinants of the transmission of legal precedent across Australian state supreme courts over the course of the twentieth century. The study finds that that the transmission of legal precedent is higher between State supreme courts that are more physically proximate and between state supreme courts in which a majority of judges in both courts are appointed by conservative governments. The study further finds that having an intermediate trial court and providing appointments to the High Court of Australia are correlated with whether a state is a source of interstate citations or a cue sender.

Individuals’ choices about whether to resolve disputes via litigation can be affected by their relationship with the potential defendant. I explore whether gender also plays a role, with women being less aggressive in legal tactics than men as their connection to the potential defendant becomes closer. The study uses a survey design with vignettes to explore decisions across the legal process, including the willingness to sue, responses to settlement offers, and whether or not to appeal. The survey varies the extent of the relationship between the potential plaintiff and defendant and includes two types of injuries—a “slip and fall” and pay discrimination. The findings reveal that once litigation has begun, women have a greater preference than men for mediation in both types of cases, but they are more resistant than men to settlement in discrimination disputes. Neither men nor women's legal strategies seem to be affected by relational distance.

What were the consequences of penal transportation to the New World for eighteenth-century British criminal justice? Transportation has been described by scholars as either a replacement of the death penalty responsible for its decline, or a penal innovation responsible for punishing a multitude of people more severely than they would have been punished before. Using data from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and the Parliamentary Papers, this study examines sentencing and execution trends in eighteenth-century London. It takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by the passage of the 1718 Transportation Act that made transportation available as a penal sentence, thus enabling one to assess the “effect” of transportation on penal trends. This study finds that the primary consequence of the adoption of transportation was to make the criminal justice net more dense by subjecting people to a more intense punishment. While it was also associated with a small decline in capital sentences for some types of offenders, the adoption of transportation was also associated with an increase in the rate at which condemned inmates were executed. The study closes with a discussion of the conditions that may lead to law's unintended consequences, including the mesh-thinning consequences observed here.

Understanding the source of voting changes by appellate judges provides an important window into the factors that shape the votes of the judges more generally. We argue that membership changes, by altering the collegial context in which judges make their choices, affect the information environment, long-term collegial considerations, and short-term strategic calculations. As a result, membership change should lead to greater uncertainty and more frequent voting changes among continuing justices in the term following a replacement. We test this proposition by looking at vote change by justices of the U.S. Supreme Court in two separate analyses: justices' votes on search-and-seizure cases since Mapp v. Ohio (1961) and on the progeny of Miranda v. Arizona (1966). Our results support the argument that the collegial context helps explain changes in voting choices. Our analysis suggests that collegial considerations are an important component of judges' behavior and merit further evaluation in a cross-national context.

How, in a context of growing critiques of financialization, can law contribute to protecting the legitimacy of finance? This paper argues that the assignment of responsibilities between individuals and organizations plays a decisive role, using the recent Libor scandal as an empirical illustration. To do so, the paper offers a Foucauldian framework, the differential management of financial illegalisms, dedicated to the study of illegalities in financial capitalism. The comparison of the legal treatment of two manipulations of Libor, this key benchmark in financial markets, reveals how mid-level traders have been the object of criminal prosecution, while law undervalued the role of top managers and organizations. To capture how differential management is performed in practice, I analyze precisely how the conflict-resolution devices (criminal trial vs. settlement) and the social categorizations prevailing in the two manipulations of Libor favor different forms of responsibility, individual or organizational. I conclude by exploring the implications of law's relationship to financial legitimacy.

In Egypt in 2012, several anti-harassment groups were established to respond to an increase in sexual violence in public spaces and to the failure of the state to tackle the issue. Anti-harassment groups organized patrol-type intervention teams that operated during demonstrations or public celebrations to stop sexual assaults. This article examines how activists perceived the police in five anti-harassment groups between 2012 and 2014, and the role these perceptions played in groups' decisions about cooperating with the police, and on-the-ground strategies of action. I argue for a multidimensional view of legal cynicism that conceptualizes legal cynicism as composed of three dimensions: legitimacy (a sense that law enforcement agencies are not entitled to be deferred to and obeyed), protection (a perception that the law fails to protect rights and provide public safety), and threat (a perception that the law represents a threat). This approach helps uncover the various meanings that legal cynicism takes for different actors in different contexts, and how actors justify their strategies of action based on their specific perceptions of the police's legitimacy, protective role, and threat.

Drawing on the experience of the European working group for the comparative study of litigation patterns, the author assesses the possibilities and limits of longitudinal international comparisons. The major challenge is ensuring that what is compared is comparable. Overall national litigation data are not comparable as such; official statistics raise more questions than they answer. The problems lie in the (socio)legal categories used in various countries, consistency of registration over time, and differences in legal procedures. The author suggests that a more fruitful line of inquiry begins with sociolegal categories of problems (e.g., housing, debt) and searches for litigation patterns. Thus disaggregating litigation data has the additional advantage of allowing the use of problem-specific baselines, which makes for greater comparability of data.

The changing rights of legally designated officers provides a comprehensive framework for following American constitutional development over time, in both public and private settings. Rights are defined as judicially enforceable claims on the person or actions of another; development, as enduring change in constitutional provision, structure, and doctrine. It is proposed that constitutional development as a historical process has consisted of a shift in the balance between the rights of officers and the rights of citizens. The framework is demonstrated empirically in connection with the Bill of Rights, federalism, and the separation of powers. Officers' rights is recommended as a method for studying constitutions comparatively and for linking constitutional development to other political events and phenomena like social movements and parties.

Political scientists until recently have ignored the study of the process involved in complying with Supreme Court decisions. As Richard M. Johnson (1967: 4) has stated, to neglect such studies “is to neglect an indispensable segment of the total judicial process.” Despite the increasing awareness of the importance of this aspect to the judicial process, there are still almost no studies which attempt a comparative analysis of patterns of compliance with or resistance to Supreme Court decisions.

Civil courts and litigation, long a neglected area of legal scholarship (Hurst, 1981), have begun to receive more attention and due recognition of their important role in the legal system and society. Analyses of what the civil courts do, and fail to do, are taking their place beside the numerous studies of the criminal courts. A critical literature has emerged, with some arguing that our system provides no effective forum for many civil complaints (Nader, 1980) and others expressing concern that the adversarial mode of dispute processing—the hallmark of Anglo-American civil procedure—may be costly and inappropriate for many conflicts (Fuller, 1978; Horowitz, 1977; Simon, 1978). Critics have also pointed to rising litigation rates and court caseloads, generated spectres of a “litigation explosion” or “crisis in the courts,” and worried about excessive litigiousness (Barton, 1975; Manning, 1977; Rosenberg, 1972).

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of voluntary citizens' patrols (hereafter called citizens' patrols) in the urban areas of this country (Brown, 1969; Knopf, 1969; Marx and Archer, 1970 and in press). Many of these groups were shortlived responses to situations of social unrest and upheaval. They frequently were based on the premise that community residents could do more to prevent an area from burning to the ground than could the regular police, who were envisioned as an invading army. When the riot or disturbance was over, and the rationale of the citizens' patrol as an agent of social control became less obvious, such groups tended to disappear.

This article documents and explains the emergence of implicit plea bargaining in the federal district courts during the Progressive and Prohibition periods. Three competing explanations for plea bargaining are tested statistically—the caseload, the substantive justice, and the evidentiary quality arguments. All three receive qualified support. The historical operation of each of these causal paths, however, was shaped by the preoccupation of more elite federal judges with their own professional self-image in the face of Prohibition. Implicit plea bargaining in the federal courts emerged reflexively as an unintended consequence of the failed Progressive assault on the “corrupt” explicit plea bargaining practices of lower state and county courts.

Law's saliency in the development of West Indian societies began in the earliest days of settlement and has remained critical and constitutive. The author examines the transformation of Caribbean law over time as an instrument of class, kinship, and gender relations and investigates ethnographically the repeal in 1986 of illegitimacy as a legal category in Antigua and Barbuda. In contrast to the colonial era, working-class ideas about gender and family and actions by married women played a pivotal role in banishing bastardy and reconstituting the relationship between families and the state. This struggle reveals lawmaking as a deeply contextualized and gendered practice.