This study of bail reform in a large urban court employs an interrupted time-series research design spanning a six-year period, and examines case data for over 38,000 defendants. Two reforms—creation of a pretrial release agency and adoption of deposit bail—are evaluated to determine whether they had statistically significant impacts on the likelihood of pretrial release, the probability of financial losses for defendants, and the avoidance of bondsmen in the pretrial process. Weighted regression analysis was used to compensate for the possibility of autocorrelation in the time-series data. The reforms proved a mixed success. Explanations for these findings emphasize the role of previous policy patterns and procedural rules in restraining the scope of bail reform and the political forces encouraging the use of bail for preventive detention.

This special issue of the Law & Society Review grows out of a unique intellectual encounter: an attempt by the Association to reach beyond its usual geographical horizons and to listen to and engage in conversation with a group of scholars from a region of the world—Southeast Asia—that has received little attention within the law and society community. This conversation is significant for the Association in several ways. First, as our scholarly community becomes more aware of the globalization of our field and the interconnections between our interests and developments in other regions of the world, it behooves us to make new efforts to broaden our understanding of sociolegal issues that are important to the scholars and peoples of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other world regions. Second, if the Association is to realize its aspirations to internationalize its membership, we should at the same time attempt to understand the scholarly interests and commitments of new colleagues with whom we seek to share our community. We must therefore find ways to listen to the voices of scholars in regions of the world whose work may not yet be familiar to the Review's general readership. Third, the infusion of new perspectives, new research issues, and new voices can enrich the dialogue among sociolegal scholars in many ways. Familiar topics—legal pluralism, the family, crime, the environment, civil rights—can be seen in a new light; and topics that now receive somewhat less attention among North American and European sociolegal scholars—indigenous peoples, law and religion, land rights—emerge as fundamentally important and deserving of renewed research interest.

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.

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

A generation ago, one professor at Harvard Law School used to greet his students at the beginning of the semester with an offer to debate them on any subject so long as he was allowed to “state the question.” Any review of the crime, law enforcement, and criminal justice literature produced during the last ten years indicates that there is still as much disagreement over how the “relevant” questions should be stated as there is over the answers to these questions. Despite a strong public demand to “stop crime,” there is little consensus within the research community as to the questions (if any) which, if answered, would assist in the prevention of crime or the improvement of police, court, and correctional processes. Much of the literature “states the question” in terms of the narrowly defined “efficiency” of law enforcement and criminal justice agencies; a second group asks questions concerning the functions assigned to the criminal justice system; and a third set of critics are concerned with the implications of decisions made by the police, judges, and correctional officials for a democratic system of government. While I cannot attempt to review the literature which has been generated under these three models, I will describe each briefly and suggest some of the problems that have risen in research on law enforcement and criminal justice.

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.

This exploratory article relies upon a historical-interpretive approach to understanding the relationship between legal narrative and popular consciousness in particular historical moments, focusing especially on “troubled times,” in which the legitimacy of a hegemonic worldview embodied in law comes under challenge from a newly ascendant ideology in the popular domain. To discern the nature of that relationship and its implications, I offer a three-pronged analysis, drawing on two original data sets. Initially, each data set is analyzed individually to elaborate the nature of, and changes in, (1) representations of homosexuals circulating in popular culture, and (2) constructions of homosexuals in defendants' narratives in “homosexual advance” homicide cases between 1946 and 2003. Findings from these two analyses are thereafter combined to explore the relationship between the two constructions of homosexuals across that time period. In combination, these three analyses provide empirical evidence that, rather than mirroring changes in popular discourse about homosexuality, the changes revealed in the defense narratives actually opposed them. I use these findings to argue that, in what Swidler (1986) has called “unsettled times,” ideological pluralism is pronounced and may be discerned in the complex and sometimes counterintuitive relationships that exist within and between legal narrative and popular discourse.

Taking as our starting point Renato Treves's book on sociology of law (1977), we try to give an overview of the way in which a sociological perspective developed in Italy. We deal with sociology of law as an example of this process, insofar as it reflects the ambiguities and contradictions confronting the social sciences in Italy. These disciplines are torn by contradictory forces: on the one hand, they are “naturally” attracted to and stimulated by projects for planning, rationalizing, and modernizing society; on the other, they often find themselves unable to cope with the limitations, precariousness, and abstraction of these projects, and therefore tend to seek refuge within the academic world. However, the urgent need for analyses of Italian social reality has spurred research activity and debate over the role of the social sciences, especially since the end of the 1960s, compelling them to expand their scope beyond traditional academic and scientific boundaries.

In one of many traditions of critical race scholarship, this review opens with a first-person narrative. When I was asked to review Austin Sarat's new compilation of introductory readings on law and society at the “Change” breakfast of the 2004 annual Law and Society Association meeting in Chicago, I responded affirmatively but with rather tepid enthusiasm, which reflected—as I recall—the level of enthusiasm I felt for the conference overall, despite (or perhaps because of) it being my third year in attendance at the notoriously large and panel-packed meeting. When I was asked further to review the compilation specifically from a “critical race perspective,” my lack of enthusiasm quickly transformed to discomfort, and I wanted to immediately revoke my acceptance of the offer to do the review.

Courts and legislatures often grant rights to clients of social programs so that the clients can protect their own interests in the programs. Previous research has questioned whether rights provide effective protections for clients' interests. In this study, I examine parental rights of school choice in Britain, showing that rights can provide effective protections for clients' interests under some conditions. However, this study also reveals the dilemma of rights: rights that are effective in protecting individual client interests can also undermine a social program's ability to serve the collective interests of all clients.

It is, I suspect, no accident that it was a breakthrough in physics that caused Kitty Calavita (2002) to reflect on the need for law and society scholars to engage in acts of public discourse and aspire to become public intellectuals. Substantively, physics may be an unlikely source of theoretical help to law and society scholarship, but no discipline better epitomizes the role of science as a practical aspect of power and governance since the mid-20th century. I would suggest that we follow Calavita's meditation not to develop our envy of the methods and theories of physics, but to develop our reflexivity concerning the dangerous role of physicists as “enablers” of power. (Think J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, not Einstein and the General Theory of Relativity.)

Joel Handler would have had big problems with Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, It is an auteurial tour-de-force by way of a postmodern fable for the ages that is self-consciously perplexing and inconclusive. While focusing on the competing imperatives of the pacificism of Martin Luther King's assimilationist politics and the violence of Malcolm X's cultural nationalism, Lee poses the more general and debilitating dilemma that faces those committed to decisive action in an opaque world. In a pivotal scene, the flip and up-and-coming Mookie is harangued by a local and elderly busybody. In hushed and conspiratorial tones, he advises Mookie to “Always do the right thing.” The exasperated Mookie complains, “That's it? Do the right thing? O.K., I got it. I'm gone …” As the film advances to its climactic and chaotic denouement, Mookie is forced to confront the excruciating accuracy and infuriating elusiveness of this absolutely trite piece of sage advice. Determined to “do the right thing,” he acts in a way that both he and almost everyone else will forever question and second-guess. In this appropriately cryptic manner, Lee suggests the fecundity and fragility of political action in a postmodern world.

This article examines the role of social insurance law in the survival strategies of factory workers in Vietnam, especially when they are faced with pressing family needs and an uncertain future. Despite the official discourse of the law which encourages employees to accumulate social insurance for their pension benefits, workers in this study have considered their social insurance fund as a form of saving and opted to gain early access to it when they are in desperate need of money. Workers understand and use the law in a way that answers to their needs; however, such action simultaneously puts them outside the protection of the law. In workers' daily struggles, law generates a moral tension between rights and needs, and ultimately perpetuates their precarious, vulnerable condition. The article demonstrates how workers' legal consciousness varies according to their perception of their precariousness, a precariousness generated by the fragile nature of their work and underpinned by their traditional familial moral obligations. This research advances our understanding of the way state law in postsocialist regimes informs social action and consciousness in ways that oftentimes contradict the spirit of the law.

Civil legal problems are common in everyday life, but the costs of obtaining legal representation create barriers to legal action and contribute to disparities in access to justice. Some individuals, however, may have informal access to legal assistance through personal network ties with lawyers, enhancing their responses to justiciable problems. In this study, we draw from theories of social capital and network formation to examine the distribution and mobilization of network-based legal expertise. Using nationally representative survey data, we find that network-based access to lawyers is widespread, and most people who have ties to lawyers expect to informally mobilize legal assistance when facing a problem. But people who are most likely to afford formal legal representation are also most likely to have informal access to lawyers. Thus, while informal access to lawyers may shape responses to legal problems, it may also exacerbate inequalities in experiences with civil justice events.

Nowhere is this general tendency expressed by Brandeis more prominent than in the area of criminal law. In spite of the reasoned warnings of some writers, we are greeted by a continuous stream of books and articles from psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (and their judicial followers) with one common theme: Criminal punishment is an unscientific survival of barbarism and must be replaced by a system of individual and social therapy. To believe otherwise is to be unscientific and (if the distinction is recognized) immoral.

That the legal profession is not monolithic, but consists of a group of specialties, is well-known. In this respect, the legal profession's structure is similar to that of other professions that have been studied. The structural conditions conducive to the growth of specialties arise from the inability of any individual to master all the techniques and knowledge of a complex occupation. In law, the specialties are usually organized around a field of legal doctrine, such as probate; tasks, such as litigation and legal research; or client relationships, such as house counsel and government lawyers. A given law practice or career, of course, may and typically does include more than one specialty. Public office-holding is another prominent part of the work that lawyers do, but it has so far hardly been taken into account by the legal profession as part of its work. Indeed, many discussions of lawyers' work barely mention their involvement in politics, except for offhand references. Yet the evidence shows that public office-holding figures importantly in the lawyer's world of work. Even beyond occasional office-holding, evidence to be cited in this paper suggests that for some lawyers public office-holding takes on some characteristics of a career, perhaps amounting to another specialty within law. Admittedly, the uncertainties and risks of public office mean that few men who go into politics give up their other means of livelihood entirely. Yet some men become sufficiently involved in public office-holding for both them and observers to think of it in career terms.

This article traces a panoramic picture of the changes in family law in Italy during the last decade, with special reference to: the problems of adoption, divorce, abortion, and family counseling; the profound innovations introduced into the Civil Code in 1975 concerning relationships between spouses, between parents and children, and between children born in and out of wedlock; and the consequent problems of inheritance.

The transformation of positive law is analyzed from a sociological point of view that explores both changes in the socioeconomic environment in which, and the political debate through which, they occurred.

On the basis of a broad examination of relevant empirical research and theoretical studies, the authors conclude that, even though the reforms may represent normative innovations in the context of the plurality of family models in contemporary Italy, their practical efficacy is limited by the amount of social and economic support, which until now have been inadequate.