The Contract Buyers League (C.B.L.), a group of middle-aged black people claiming to have been over-charged and exploited in the purchase of their homes, emerged on Chicago's west side during the winter of 1967-68. From 1968 to 1971 C.B.L. gained considerable publicity and support for its claims by the use of such tactics as picketing, withholding housing payments, and resisting attempts at eviction. In addition, the members of C.B.L. have had a complicated set of encounters with the legal system which continue at the time of writing (August 1974). This paper uses the most significant of these encounters to explore in a more theoretical way certain aspects of litigation involving poor and minority groups.

A survey of a random sample of attorneys in the New York Regional Metropolitan Area reveals that they have a lukewarm attitude toward newer, more businesslike client-getting strategies—advertising, prepaid legal plans, nonprofit plans, and closed legal plans; respondents also strongly agree that these techniques have a negative impact on the public's image of the profession. Do structural factors of the profession explain attitudes toward professional practices? To find out, I examined the effect of three dimensions of the profession: organization of work, geographical location of organization, and demographic factors. The findings show both persistent intraprofessional tensions around the impact of these new practices on the image of the profession and tension between older and younger attorneys over advertising and development of legal plans. Also these analyses document a structural dimension of the legal profession not identified in earlier research: suburban practitioners are much more skeptical about the newer client-getting practices than are their urban colleagues.

The Japanese Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB) was created to promote individual rights but evolved into an organization that mediates disputes between private parties. Unlike comparable institutions in other societies, the CLB is able to mediate large numbers of cases effectively. Although the conditions under which the agency was created and continues to flourish may be unique to Japan, the ability of the CLB to function in a complex, urbanized society should not be attributed to Japanese tradition and culture alone. Instead, institutions like the CLB play an important role in the shaping of that culture, helping the Japanese to settle disputes without litigation and enabling them to perceive their society as one with little need for litigation. The experience of the CLB should make us rethink some of our commonly held assumptions about how the Japanese deal with disputes.

Lawrence Friedman is a rare and remarkable phenomenon. He is a counter who thinks and a thinker who counts. He is aware of paradoxes such as the fact that “Everybody is an individual; everybody is also a conformist” (1985b: 102). More specifically, Friedman is particularly knowledgeable about the limitations and unpredictable consequences of efforts at legal reform. Yet, surprisingly, he seems somehow to be able to escape transforming his healthy skepticism into cynicism.

The teacher-scholar enjoys the opportunity to contribute to the development of public intellectualism and, particularly, to a concern for social justice and the democratic process. As teachers, we have the opportunity to share with students the skills of critical questioning, which is the fundamental grounding for thinking about what a commitment to social justice and democratic processes means. As scholars, even when we conduct policy-driven studies, we have the opportunity to contribute to progressive social change, as long as we remain independent of the client and engaged with basic theoretical and conceptual questions of the social sciences. In response to Calavita's call for a commitment to engaged research, I propose that we begin our work at work.

Early neoinstitutional theory tended to assume institutional reproduction, while recent accounts privilege situations in which alternative models from outside an organizational environment or delegitimizing criticism from within precipitate institutional change. We know little about institutions that persist despite such change conditions. Recent advances in sociological field theory suggest that interfield ties contribute to institutional change but under-theorize how such ties may reinforce institutions. Extending both approaches, I incorporate self-reinforcing mechanisms from path-dependence scholarship. I elucidate my framework by analyzing the student-edited, student-reviewed law review. Despite its anomalous position relative to the dominant peer-reviewed journal model of other disciplines, and despite sustained criticisms from those who publish in them, the law review remains a bedrock institution of law schools and legal scholarship. I combine qualitative historical analyses of legal scholarship and law schools with quantitative analyses of law-review structures and field contestation. The analysis covers law review's entire historical trajectory—its emergence, its institutionalization and coherence of a field around it, and its current state as a contested but persistent institution. I argue that self-reinforcing mechanisms evident in law review's ties to related fields-legal practice, law schools, the university, and legal periodicals—both enabled its emergence and have buffered it against change.

In this article, I consider how a second face or dimension of covert political power was used to deny legal immigration status to Vietnam War military resisters who sought refuge in Canada during the early years of the largest politically motivated migration since the American Revolution. Recently declassified historical records and interviews with former politicians and administrators reveal that the Canadian Immigration Department and its minister misled the public in advancing an official myth about the evolution of this migration. Until successfully exposed by persistent and innovative investigative journalism, the backstage use of political power kept American Vietnam military resisters who were seeking to legally immigrate defensively framed in a symbolic package that defined them as culturally unsuitable. Several thousand American military resisters lived illegally in Canada until conflict about their plight was successfully broadened and transformed into an effective collective grievance and claim under Canadian immigration law. Once the gap between Canadian immigration law and its practice was fully exposed, the conflict about this policy grew rapidly to include a number of cultural elite groups and a master framing of these American servicemen as unexpected symbols of Canadian sovereignty. A fully elaborated explanation of the collective transformation of sociolegal grievances into successful legal claims requires combined attention to the macrolevel interaction of political power and cultural symbolism.

“Like it or not — and many from Plato to Marx have disliked it — law is a central concept in human society; without it, indeed, there would be no society.” The truth of this statement from the jacket of Lloyd's The Idea of Law (1966) is implicitly borne out by the fact that, prior to the emergence of social science as a discipline, an empirically minded member of Western society, interested in the function and structure of his civilization, had to turn to the study of law as the only avenue to this knowledge. This was my experience (there was little of modern social science in Czechoslovakia in 1945), and that of many social scientists of the past. It is then no surprise that many anthropologists of the nineteenth century were either practicing lawyers or had a solid legal education, as, for example, Adolf Bastian, Lewis Henry Morgan, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Johan Jakob Bachofen, and John Ferguson McLennan, to name a few. It is only interesting to note that Morgan's epochal Ancient Society (1877) was preceded by Maine's famous treatise Ancient Law (1861), which he wrote rather than one on ancient social structure, ancient religion, or some other cultural specialty.

In July 2005, a Delhi lawyer filed suit with the Supreme Court of India seeking to ban “sharia courts” (dar ul qazas) and Islamic legal opinions, arguing that they constitute a “parallel judicial system” that undermines the state's legal institutions. The Supreme Court decided in 2014 that dar ul qazas are not parallel but appropriate alternative forums. In this article, I analyze several divorce cases in Delhi and Patna dar ul qazas to show that, rather than being alternative or parallel, dar ul qazas intersect with state courts. Attending to this intersection, I argue, has implications for how we understand legal pluralism, secularism, and the relation between them. Specifically, I argue that because of how cases travel between dar ul qazas and state courts, dar ul qazas help to consolidate the oppositions between religious and secular law, kin relations, and rights upon which secularism relies.

The continued relevance of customary law for the regulation of the daily lives of Africa's citizens poses serious governance challenges to sovereign states, such as how best to regulate customary dispute settlement. While confronted with largely similar problems, the South African government proposed to enhance and regulate the position of its traditional courts, whereas Malawi has opted for the creation of hybrid local courts that combine characteristics of regular state courts and customary fora to be the main avenue of customary law cases. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches and displays how the two countries’ historical and political contexts enable and constrain their regulatory choices in the field of customary dispute settlement, as well as influence the risk and benefits of the various options. In this respect, the political power of the traditional leaders is a significant determinant.

Although the Thai government's 1986 Land Titling Project was designed to enhance security of tenure, promote efficient use of farmland, and increase agricultural productivity in Thailand, a study of villages in Chiang Mai province suggests that the project-in conjunction with population growth, rising land prices, and increases in commercial crop production-may have stimulated conflicts among villagers, encouraged rural indebtedness, increased small farmers' risk of losing their lands, and exacerbated economic differences between rich and poor. In order for the Thai government to realize the expected benefits of land titling, it should also prevent the accumulation of large estates by limiting the size of landholdings and should provide security for small farmers by guaranteeing prices for agricultural commodities.

While a large literature establishes the racial and ethnic disparities in sentencing, we know comparatively little about the role of race and ethnicity in prison release. Using data from the National Corrections Reporting Program contextualized in California's political and legislative atmosphere, this article explores the role of race and ethnicity in prison release between 1985 and 2009 by studying components of sentencing and release. Limiting the evaluation of disparities to sentencing or time served in prison at release may inadvertently mask racial and ethnic inequities in the judicial process because events and actors can introduce circumstances between sentencing and release from prison that ultimately influence time served. The analysis confirmed that the measures used at the time of sentencing do not provide enough information to determine the differential experiences of groups in the real amount of time served in prison.© 2014 Law and Society Association

The American legal profession has experienced dramatic change in the late 20th century. Attorneys have witnessed vast growth in new entrants (Curran 1986; Curran & Carson 1991; Sander & Williams 1989), the abolition of restrictions on new methods of finding clients and price competition (Abel 1989; Reidinger 1987; Seron 1992), changes in the delivery of legal services and law firm organization (Nelson 1988; Seron 1992; Van Hoy 1995, 1997), the growth of large law firms (Galanter & Palay 1991), and an increase in employed lawyers (Abel 1989; Spangler 1986).

This research note examines the relationship between fee arrangements and negotiation in civil litigation. Data collected by the Civil Litigation Research Project suggests a strong tendency for lawyers working on a contingent fee basis to focus their negotiation on monetary goals. While this finding should not be surprising, it has significant implications for recent discussions of negotiation and settlement.

This article uses a study of a public housing eviction board over a thirty-year period to illustrate the ambiguities and difficulties that attend longitudinal court docket research. It argues that these problems can never be eliminated but that they may be minimized by strategies that complement quantitative court docket data with qualitative contextual information. Several such strategies are mentioned.

Research has shown that direct experience of legal authorities' unfairness or rudeness lowers unfairly treated individuals' support for legal authorities in general and fosters noncompliance with laws. Many people, however, get information about legal authorities and institutions indirectly through conversations with others. To highlight the possible ripple effects of specific enforcement contacts on the general population's support for authorities, we compare what taxpayers said happened in their tax audit interviews with what they tell other members of their social network. Because people are most concerned about others' image of them, this motivation for communication often weakens a bias toward negative messages. Our findings demonstrate that messages about fairness of decisionmaking, favorability of outcomes, and dignity more closely approximate the distribution of the sample of audited taxpayers' perceptions. We found support, however, for a bias toward negative messages in two situations: messages about instrumental quality and in the rare circumstance when taxpayers received undignified treatment and favorable outcomes. In this circumstance, the message does not have connotations for one's own image. We discuss the implications for legal socialization and the reservoir of societal support for legal authorities and institutions.

McDowall, Loftin, and Wiersma (1996) avoid our criticisms of the univariate interrupted time series design (ITSD) by misstating our criticisms, by addressing what they claim we “implied” rather than what we plainly stated, and by ignoring crucial points in our article in this issue (Britt et al. 1996). We reiterate: McDowall et al.'s (1992) conclusions regarding the alleged efficacy of the Washington, D.C., handgun ban (mislabeled by McDowall et al. as a licensing law) collapsed once any of three improvements were made to their analysis: (1) use of a more appropriate control series, (2) use of a more appropriate, theoretically based specification of the intervention model, and (3) use of an alternative, extended time series beyond the period studied by McDowall et al. (1992). Nothing McDowall et al. (1996) write has rebutted our assertions.