The last two centuries have witnessed a worldwide movement toward centralized, bureaucratic, professionally-staffed legal systems, sponsored by and closely allied with nation-states. One concomitant of these developments has been the emergence (or growth) of bodies of independent professionals whose members mediate between these systems and the populations they regulate. Thus the “expropriation” of the making and application of law into a purely governmental function has been accompanied by the growth of a corresponding “private sector”—the lawyers. The intimate involvement of lawyers in the emergence of modern nations has been recognized, but there has been little systematic comparative study of them. This issue contains a series of studies of one of the largest of these professional groups—Indian lawyers. These studies were prepared for a Conference on the Comparative Study of the Legal Profession with Special Reference to India, sponsored by the Committee on Southern Asia Studies of the University of Chicago, held at the Moraine-on-the-Lake Hotel in Highland Park, Illinois from August 10-12, 1967.

Social scientists are accustomed to thinking of the family as a primary social institution. They are less accustomed to thinking of it as one of the primary “back-up institutions” of American society. A back-up institution carries out the work of some other institution of society when that other institution fails in its task. The back-up institution might have been called an “institution for redundancy,” defining redundancy with Hall as “information [or action] from one [institutional] system which is backed up by other systems in case of failure.” Thus, if the original institution fails in its purpose, some other institution takes over its tasks or goals, and fulfills its functions in either the original or a modified form.

Sargent Shriver, the first Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, forecast at the outset that the lawyers in the legal services program would come to be recognized as the heavy artillery in the war on poverty (Shriver, 1966: 219). Shriver's success as a soothsayer was considerable. Poverty lawyers have proven to be among the most effective weapons in the war on poverty's arsenal. In practice it seems that many of the lawyer's skills and much of his legal training are helpful and even powerful when directed at the legal problems of the poor. Nevertheless, one wonders how much credit for the poverty lawyer's success can properly be attributed to OEO's leadership. There never really was reason to doubt the lawyer's fire power. But the record reveals much reason to doubt whether his potential power has been used efficiently and with maximum efficacy. An examination of OEO's belated efforts to orient the local legal services offices toward more meaningful targets leads to the belief that the strength of the program lies in the professional training and prodigious labors of the lawyers in the field and its weakness lies in the manner in which OEO has constructed and conducted the legal services program.

This study examines the development of organizational probation. That this sanction emerged from the long process of developing organizational sentencing guidelines as a clearly specified, widely available, and often binding sanction represents an unexpected statutory outcome: an interventionist, nonmarket sanction during a time of deregulatory free market policy and ideology. This outcome is explained through a multi-theoretical framework emphasizing the structural capacity of the primary lawmaking agency, the United States Sentencing Commission, the role of middle-level state workers, and the bounded rationality of strategic decisions made by business strategists and lobbyists.

In successfully lobbying for the expansion of the copyright protection term, culture industries in the United States have used one of the temporal dimensions of intellectual property law to strengthen their control over the circulation of cultural goods. There is another less obvious way that time factors into the regulation of cultural products, and this has to do with the modes of temporality within which those products are made and their circulation regulated. In Ghana, where certain cultural products are protected as “folklore” under copyright law, cultural goods from one kind of temporality enter a regulatory framework that belongs to another. In this article, I examine these two ways of organizing time and argue that differences in ways of conceptualizing time also factor into the exercise of power over cultural products. I further argue that the Ghanaian case provides resources for radically rethinking intellectual property law.

In the process of nation building, the new African nations are confronted with the need to establish legal systems which would perpetuate some selected traditions while, at the same time, are appropriate enough to solve the current untraditional problems. Under colonial rule. Western legal concepts dominated some areas of life while customary laws dominated the other spheres. Criminal law, the law of torts, contracts, administrative laws, taxation, company law, road traffic and copyright laws, were dominated by Western legal concepts. Customary legal concepts were operative in the fields of land tenure, marriage, divorce, succession and guardianship. The dual legal system served respectively the colonial and the native social order. With the demise of colonial rule, African legal systems now suffer from a schizophrenic posture, torn between tradition and modernity. The schizophrenia is more painful now that the new indigenous rulers, raised in the traditional ways, use modern, often colonial government structures to govern a population still tradition-directed. In this process of governing, the dictates of a modern state often clash with tradition. One such clash occurred in April 1968, when Kenya law makers used a modern legislature to pass a Limitation of Action Act (Kenya Gazette Supplement Acts, No. 34, 1968: 310), an act which proved unpopular despite the convincing arguments in its favor. This paper explores the conflicts between modernity and tradition engendered by the passage of the Act and exemplified by the effects of the Act on the Luo social structure, especially with regard to land ownership and status relationships. The question posed is: How appropriate is law as an instrument of social change, especially in a traditional cultural milieu? Can the nation state rely on law to change its tradition-oriented rural localities? Evidence elsewhere (Massell, 1968: 179) reveals that the law as an instrument of change often yields unintended and unpleasant consequences.

This article uses the history of the National Tax Association (NTA), the leading twentieth-century organization of tax professionals, to strengthen our empirical understanding of the disciplinary encounter between law and the social sciences. Building on existing sociolegal scholarship, this article explores how the NTA embodied tax law's ambivalent historical interaction with public economics. Since its founding in 1907, the NTA has changed dramatically from an eclectic and catholic organization of tax professionals with a high public profile to an insular, scholarly association of mainly academic public finance economists. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence, we contend that the transformation in the NTA's mission and output can be explained by the increasing professionalization and specialization of tax knowledge, and by the dominant role that public economics has played in shaping that knowledge. This increasing specialization allowed the NTA to secure its position as a bastion of scholarly tax research. But that achievement came at a cost to the organization's broader civic mission. This article is thus a historical account of how two competing professional disciplines—tax law and public economics—have interacted within a particular organizational field, namely the research and analysis of tax law and policy.

Virtually unstudied and largely unobserved, the police employee organization has evolved over the last fifty years into a strong economic and political institution. The rapid growth of militant police unionism as a new political and economic force in the society has raised serious problems for the police agency administrator in the exercise of his professional responsibilities in the area of law enforcement and his executive responsibilities in the area of personnel management. It has also raised serious public policy questions as to whether the protected right to organize and to bargain collectively which is being extended to all other public employees ought to be extended to the police without limitations. Underlying all these questions is the basic issue of whether official sanction should be extended to another entrant in the competition for control of local police operations.

The paper examines certain legal changes in eighteenth-century Connecticut, primarily in the area of debt litigation, and links them with economic development and with changes in the nature and meaning of community. The legal changes proceeded in the direction of greater rationality as expanding economic activity disrupted the multiplex ties that had once characterized communities and paired people instead in single-interest relationships. Max Weber's concept of rationality provides a theoretical base for the historical study of legal change.

A number of writers have observed that legalism is a social phenomenon which is found only in certain kinds of legal systems and then only in certain historical periods. Perhaps it was Weber who first gave the concept a theoretical importance by associating a legalistic or “formally rational” legal system with the development of capitalism. Later writers such as Selznick have seen legalism as a complex ideal embracing certain kinds of standards to which legal systems might aspire. (Selznick, 1961). Most recently, Friedman has commented on the decline of legalism (Friedman, 1966). While the contributions of these writers are useful in elaborating the meaning of the concept of legalism, the phenomenon itself has received virtually no empirical analysis. It is the purpose of this paper to show that one possible component of legalism, viz., predictability, is by no means unique to legalism and that a nonlegalistic adjudicatory system can be as predictable if not more predictable than a legalistic system would be.

This paper assesses the impact of changes in products liability law by measuring liability insurance expenditures. Expenditure for liability insurance premiums is used as an index of resource redistribution from sellers of defective products to individuals who have been harmed by such products. Using multiple regression, comparative state data are analyzed for the period immediately prior to the enactment of the Consumer Products Safety Act in 1972, when doctrines concerning manufacturers' liability for defective products were changing in the direction of stricter negligence standards and thus greater liability for the manufacturer. Three types of products liability policies were in effect among the 50 states at that time. They were strict liability in tort, negligence plus warranty with no privity requirement, and negligence plus warranty with privity of contract required. Data from states with strict liability policies are compared with data from states where the negligence plus warranty standards were used. In states where manufacturers were subject to greater liability for defective products, more money was spent on liability insurance. This example from one area of tort law shows that common law decisions can have important social effects, and suggests a method for measuring those effects.

Courts that perform well are the cornerstone of the rule of law and democratic development. When courts are perceived as legalistic, fair, impartial, and independent of the influence of extrajudicial actors, aggrieved individuals are more likely to pursue litigation over other, potentially unlawful, alternatives. Using original data from surveys of more than 1,800 randomly sampled lawyers in 12 Russian cities, we investigate the effects of perceived government funding and power diversification on a variety of indicators of perceived judicial performance. We find that, according to lawyers, financial dependence on the national government has no independent effect on judicial performance, but financial dependence on local governments has consistently significant negative effects. We also find that diversified political power has consistently significant positive effects on perceived judicial performance, probably because the diversification makes courts seem less vulnerable to unified pressure from political actors.

This review essay integrates applicable elements of scholarly perspectives that in quite different ways deal with political and economic power, legal imperialism, and dependency. Representative examples of scholarly treatments of these subjects were chosen from analyses of families of law, critical legal studies, comparative legal systems, world system and dependency theory, and legal history. Most are modern or contemporary works, but a few were chosen from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publications to trace changing modes and emphases upon the central theme of law and power.

Neo-Marxian critiques of Max Weber's theory of rationality have stressed the ideological role of legal formalism. At the analytic level, however, Weber's theory points to sources of potential conflict between legal formalism and economic rationality. This paper critically reconstructs Weber's perspective for analyzing the boundary maintaining categories of legal discourse. A case study of the 1971 federal loan guarantee to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation demonstrates that while both market ideologies and administrative principles partially bounded the debate over the legislation, this debate did not resolve the question of which businesses should potentially receive government support. This substantive issue raised problems of legal particularism that undermined the universal claims of legal rationality and required an expansion of boundary categories beyond legal formalism, yielding a more economically and politically open discourse.

To what extent has the exercise of administrative power been directed during the course of American history toward highly political ends, such as repaying political debts or furthering the particularistic interests of rich or powerful individuals and groups? Even a cursory review of the facts reveals that the administrative process has not always been highly politicized. When the United States became independent some two centuries ago, magistrates generally sought to use their power to further non-political religious and ethical ends in which nearly all their fellow subjects believed. More than a hundred years later, at the close of the nineteenth century, the ideology of administrative decision-making was similarly an apolitical one, in which administrators sought to resolve disputes and decide upon policies by reasoning deductively from abstract, general principles which nearly all of the nation accepted. The administrative process in the late nineteenth century differed from that of the mid-eighteenth not in the degree of politicization, but in the substantive standards from which administrators reasoned: In the mid-eighteenth century, as I have already suggested, the standards were ultimately religious and ethical, whereas by the end of the nineteenth century they had become basically scientistic and utilitarian.

The Recognition and Accreditation Program (R&A Program) authorizes certain non-lawyers, or “Accredited Representatives” (ARs), to practice immigration law out of non-profit or faith-based organizations. Drawing on interviews with practicing ARs, I describe how, at the center of this group's approach to legal practice, is a firm commitment to their clients. ARs report being particularly attuned – thanks to their social position and life experiences – to the hardships many of their clients confront at the hands of a punitive U.S. immigration system. I find this translates, on one hand, into an anti-formalist legal practice: ARs describe performing emotional labor in order to take the edge off of formalism's rigidity for their clients. Yet at other times, cognizant of the high costs associated with a legal error, ARs describe being much more formalistic, prioritizing legal tedium. The picture becomes more complex when considered in the context of devolution and immigration governance, where it seems the emotional and bureaucratic work ARs do to protect their clients may also be providing ancillary benefits to the state. I conclude by reflecting on the implications this research has for scholarship on the legal profession, for research on “access to justice,” and for understandings of immigration governance.

The reasons for the termination of plea negotiation in El Paso County, Texas, are explained. The statistical consequences of doing so are discussed.