The Magistrate Act of 1968 (Pub. L. 90-578, tit. I, § 101, 82 Stat. 1113) introduced a new tier of judicial officers into the federal district courts. As a result of this act and two amendments (Pub. L. 94-577, § 1, 90 Stat. 2729 (1976); Pub. L. 96-82, § 2, 93 Stat. 643 (1979)), magistrates may now work on a wide variety of civil and criminal pretrial tasks at the discretion of Article III judges; indeed, with the consent of both parties, magistrates may hold jury trials in civil cases. In addition, the act and the amendments encourage courts to delegate “additional duties” to magistrates with a view toward developing innovative work relations between two tiers of judicial officers.

Since both groups are lawyers, magistrates and Article III judges share the same formal training and professional expertise. Organizationally, however, magistrates work for federal judges. There is the potential, therefore, for a wide variety of work relations between these two tiers of judicial officers. The history of magistrates' “professional project” (Larson, 1977) to expand their formal duties, their autonomy and control over decision making, and their organizational status provides a useful entry point for analyzing recent developments in judicial work relations, the subject of this article.

I will first report the results of a study of U.S. magistrates. These findings suggest a typology of three distinct patterns of response to these new judicial officers: additional judge, bureaucrat, and team player. I next consider why courts opt for the occupational models they do. Finally, I speculate about the implications of the variations for understanding contemporary developments in judging and judicial process.

This study draws on a qualitative study to examine, using the attitudes of high school male and female students, the possibilities for change in current practices concerning women's rights to inherit property and to take the custody of children in the event of divorce. The results show that male participants view their sisters as temporary residents in the family, and believe her inheritance may benefit her husband and her children who do not belong to her father's clan. Therefore, they strongly contest her inheritance right. However, a minority of boys were receptive to certain notions of women's rights and quite ambivalent about the gender status quo. Female participants, on the other hand, perceived the customary laws and patrilineal attitudes as a hindrance for women and girls to claim their inheritance's rights although the Congolese Family Code grants them such a right. Although the law grants both husband and wife this right, socio-cultural norms and customary law render women victims of violence. Both male and female participants also mentioned that in case of divorce, women are denied child custody.

This article explains how minority women in rural China managed to use state legal and political institutions to obtain a divorce, despite numerous obstacles. Beginning with a legal controversy over why women from the Yi minority were going to court for “fun” and then divorcing their husbands, I proceed to look at the many factors that may have contributed to divorce in rural China, such as state ethnic policy, generational empowerment, culture, and the role of community in mediation and collective action. While such factors were influential, I argue that women's divorce in Yunnan was largely the result of a particular, time-bound confluence of revolutionary political forces that were unique to China, and not the direct product of the law or ethnic culture and status.

In no domain of global health has there been more talk of rights than in HIV/AIDS, yet little is known about how the right to HIV/AIDS care is mobilized at the clinic level. Drawing on interviews and field observations in the United States, South Africa, Thailand, and Uganda, we analyze the legal consciousness of caregivers in five HIV clinics. We identify three organizational factors—clinics' focus on the distribution rather than the adequacy of existing resources, the duties for caregivers that patients' rights create, and the dominant norms of exchange in healthcare—that help to explain the low penetration of formal rights talk into clinics despite its prevalence outside them. However, we also observe that within clinics, rights may accrue differently than public discourse about rights might lead us to expect. We find that patients often benefit from highly localized, tacit de facto rights that develop gradually over time with the support of state health infrastructure, clinic resources, and professional norms and commitments. These rights would be unlikely to stand up in a court of law but nevertheless have substantial impact on patients' access to care.

The growth of research in psychology and law during the last decade is easy to document. The Annual Review of Psychology has included two chapters on the subject, the first in 1976 and the second in 1982. In 1981 the American Psychological Association approved a new Division of Psychology and Law and selected that theme for the 1982 Master Lecture series at its convention. New journals (e.g., Law and Human Behavior) and collections of articles (e.g., Sales, 1981; Kerr and Bray, 1982; Konečni and Ebbeson, 1982) have reported on the burgeoning literature.

James Bohman's review (1994) contributes to an important goal for the American legal academy: bringing to us the recent focus on the role of law in society of Jürgen Habermas and, by extension, contemporary Frankfurt School social theory. These comments attempt to locate Habermas broadly in three discursive contexts. My purpose will be to suggestively examine whether and how the American legal reception of Habermasian ideas has been limited—the implicit rationale being that the reception is overdue. With almost all discussion of Habermas and law taking place in Europe, it seems we must ask, Why is there no [German] social theory in America, or at least in American law? After all, the United States became the home in exile for the Frankfurt survivors, and Habermas has been writing influentially in philosophy and political theory for more than 30 years. Yet, for reasons not altogether different from the revision and partial rejection of the other American exceptionalisms (socialism, labor politics, class formations, etc.), perhaps the question in fact should be more about the particularity of American treatment of the role of law in the reproduction of society than about Habermas and his ideas.

Racism has become more covert in post-civil rights America. Yet, measures to combat it are hindered by inadequate general knowledge on what “colorblind” race talk says and does and what makes it effective. We deepen understanding of covert racism by investigating one type of discourse – racial code words, which are (1) indirect signifiers of racial or ethnic groups that contain (2) at least one positive or negative value judgment and (3) contextually implied or salient meanings. Through a thematic analysis of 734 racial code words from 97 scholarly texts, we develop an interpretive framework that explains their tropes, linguistic mechanisms and unique roles in perpetuating racism, drawing from race, linguistic and cultural studies. Racial code words promote tropes of White people’s respectability and privilege and Racial/Ethnic Minorities’ pathology and inferiority in efficient, adaptable, plausibly deniable and almost always racially stratifying ways, often through euphemism, metonymy and othering. They construct a “colorblind” discursivity and propel both “epistemic racism” (racism in knowledge) and systemic racism (racism in action). We further strengthen applications of Critical Race Theory in sociolegal studies of race by presenting a “racial meaning decoding tool” to assist legal and societal measures to detect coded racism.

Prison laws and policies often do not explicitly state the rights and privileges for the individuals residing there. This space is a unique example of where the law-on-the-books meet the law-in-action—a place where “law-in-between” operates in the hands of street-level workers. Using data collected from interviews with restricted housing unit residents and staff in four men's prisons, this paper examines how the law-in-between operates in a highly structured and punitive environment. Findings reveal agreement among residents and staff regarding general definitions and perceptions of rights, with some similarities regarding what rights are broadly. However, divergence exists in discussion of how rights are accessed in practice.

When I was a child, I had a book called The Chosen Baby. Originally written in 1939 by Valentina Wasson, the edition I was given had been revised and updated in 1950 (Wasson 1939). It is the book I, as an adoptee, was given to understand adoption— my origins. It is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who had everything they could ask for, except one thing—they needed a baby to make their happiness complete (Patton 2000).

The most frequent and visible sources of judicial policy are decisions in court cases in which judges create new solutions to problems and conflicts presented to them. Sometimes important policies are established in a single case or policy may develop gradually in a series of cases dealing with similar situations. This form of policy-making frequently occurs without much direct interaction between courts, legislatures, and executive agencies. Though the implementation of court policies may depend on the cooperation of other officials, the initiation and early shaping of a particular policy may be done almost exclusively by the courts.

Sociolegal research focused on equal protection and the death penalty faces an impasse as the result of recent Supreme Court decisions limiting the admissability of social science research in general and of aggregate data on bias in the application of capital punishment in particular. This impasse, however, provides an opportunity to renew investigation and analysis of the deeper meaning and implications of the death penalty in contemporary societies, not in abandonment of but as a complement to equal protection–oriented research.