When Ralph Nader addressed the 35th Annual Meeting of the State Bar of Michigan in September 1970, he said, “Anybody who talks to law students today sees a tremendous difference between their concepts, aspirations, and indignation levels and the law students of yesteryear.” Nader's views on this occasion have been shared by other members of the bench and bar as well as by social and political commentators whose opinions appear regularly in the mass media. They claim that one of the by-products of the social turmoil and the subsequent new politics that emerged at the end of the sixties was a shift by a large proportion of the recent law graduates into careers that involved protection of civil rights and civil liberties, defense of indigents, protection of consumers, and affiliation with inner city citizens' groups that seek basic changes in welfare policies, taxation, housing, and so forth. For a fuller discussion of this issue by members of the legal profession, see Yale Law Journal (1970), McGovagle (1970), and Riley (1970).

On the basis of data dealing with the processing of labor grievances by state institutions in Chile in the period of 1970-1972, the author argues that litigiousness—the propensity to pursue grievances—was growing during that time. This increased litigiousness may be traced to the overall process of rapid sociopolitical change, in particular the growing political awareness of certain sectors of wage earners. The Labor Inspectorate responded positively to increased demand for justice, and encouraged socially well-focused grievance behavior by providing more adequate remedies. The labor courts, in contrast, were insensitive to the process of change. They showed no interest in developing an institutional assertiveness, either favoring or impeding aggrieved workers filing suit. Developments in litigiousness and litigation rates are analyzed in the light of the macro-social process of change that took place at the time.

The local political economy links courts to society. A consideration of this linkage helps explain why so few of New York City's nineteenth-century homicides resulted in punishment. Their punishment requiring both state and local governments' cooperation and expenditures, high homicide rates manifested fiscal contradictions imposed by local voters, who desired high service but low taxes. Thus trials for homicides did not index homicides but were complex, indirect outcomes of fiscal, political, and soical processes.

Using insights from poststructuralist literary theories, writings on ideology, and theories of practice, this article develops an interpretive perspective on political tolerance for nonconformity. Viewing Supreme Court expression doctrine as ideology, it suggests that legal discourse, in combination with intersecting social, political, and scientific discourses, socially constructs political difference and constitutes a political spectrum. Research indicating differences in tolerance between elites and the public is interpreted as arising from dual ideological strands within legal discourse that are appropriated depending on one's location in social relations. The theoretical approach is used to situate law and legal institutions in American culture and extend previous work on legal doctrine as ideology emerging from the Critical Legal Studies movement.

The major aim of this article is to examine how migrations affect private governance, taking as a case study the Prud'homie de pêche, a private order that has governed the fishery of Marseille for the past six centuries. Scholarship generally argues that social norms guarantee the efficiency of private orders and their ability to resist the arrival of newcomers. My data suggest that the Prud'homie has failed to accommodate social changes prompted by migratory flows, not despite but because of its social norms. This paper suggests that social norms are not only powerful tools of governance for private orders, but also forces of inertia that can prevent these orders from accommodating social changes.

Historiography and epistemology are two subjects not often brought together in sociolegal studies. This article takes reconstructions of legal history as a subject of sociological investigation. The institutional “acceptability” of any historical representation is a complex social achievement since there are no objective criteria for verifying historical accounts. I juxtapose two competing reconstructions of Fourteenth Amendment history, by legal scholars Charles Fairman and William Crosskey, and examine how both reconstructions took place with reference to preexisting interpretive frameworks. I also examine the social and institutional settings in which these histories interacted and competed for credibility. The Fairman/Crosskey dispute served to socialize future participants in Fourteenth Amendment debate. With the Fairman/Crosskey exchanges, battle lines were drawn and topics of debate were established.

Law and globalization studies have documented how Global South lawyers compete over the adaptation of international norms. Yet, little is known about how this adaptation legitimates worldviews beyond the law. To advance this literature, this paper proposes a discourse-centered field analysis of the legal globalization of anti-corruption ideas in Brazil. It examines Brazilian lawyers' disputes over a 2016 anti-corruption bill. The bill supporters mobilize global anti-corruption discourses that are exogenous to the legal field to defend harsher criminal law. Their critics counter the reform by mobilizing endogenous legal ideas against criminal law expansion. In so doing, they do not challenge reformers' ideas about corruption. I show how this discursive mismatch leads to a form of globalization by stealth, whereby local dynamics allow global ideas to remain unchallenged in local fields.

While a large body of literature emphasizes the importance of judicial reform in new democracies, few scholars have examined the reform of military justice systems in these settings—despite the potential for these courts to compete directly with civilian courts and subvert the rule of law. This article focuses on Latin America to empirically examine how the process of reforming military courts has played out in each democracy following authoritarian rule. We outline two distinct pathways: (1) unilateral efforts on the part of civilian reformers, and (2) strategic bargains between civilian reformers and the military. Within the unilateral category, we further distinguish efforts driven by civilian courts, those pursued by politicians, and those undertaken in the context of larger political transformations. Ultimately, we find that, absent a dramatic defeat of an authoritarian regime and its armed forces, reform efforts that do not engage and bargain with the military directly often fail to achieve long-term compliance and improvements in human rights practices. The success of such reform efforts, therefore, may come at a cost in other areas of democracy and civil-military relations. We conclude the article by summarizing our findings and reflecting on the lessons they provide for ongoing military justice reform efforts around the globe.

Almost two decades ago Reisman (1951) published an article in which he criticized the lawyer for his ethnocentric view of law and invited the anthropologist to study the organization and functions of American legal institutions and the activities of lawyers. Very few anthropologists have done so. In fact, few anthropologists have made the general study of law their special area of research. In this country, there are perhaps a dozen or two. However, the field is now beginning to attract more people. As a look at the tables of contents and the indexes of ethnographic monographs published in recent years will show, most anthropologists still neglect to report on the law of the people they have studied—yet rarely fail to have chapters on social organization, economy, religion, and the remaining traditional categories with which we “domainize” the culture of a society. Legal scholars, on the other hand, often in cooperation with sociologists and political scientists, have increasingly turned to the kind of research which Schubert (1968) has called, “behavioral jurisprudence.” Outside the United States, this interdisciplinary focus in the study of law and society has been very productive in Scandinavia (see Blegvad 1966).

Following both Pritchett and Gibson, we thought we were, in “Authoritarianism and the Functions of Courts” (Tate & Haynie 1993), extolling the virtues of an infrequently grown, but potentially beautiful or even useful, floral species: falsifiable, reproducible research on the role of courts outside the United States of America. Indeed, because our bloom grew outside the well-cultivated plots of the industrialized democracies, we thought it might be of still greater interest to the horticultural community of sociolegal studies. Thus we urged the members of that community to try their own hands at growing this rare blossom.

It is obvious that overpopulation is the most critical social problem of our time. As such, it is necessarily the greatest legal problem of our time and the greatest challenge which faces the legal profession today. Since the population problem is fast becoming the population crisis, it is essential that our laws and our legal order must now be subject to reexamination. We dare wait no longer in studying, formulating, and augmenting the proper and precise laws and legal machinery both to help restrain the population growth and to alleviate the ills inherent in overpopulation and unwanted population.

But we must, in our quest for the best laws, be wary of the trap of talking solely in terms of population curtailment. We must take as our guiding principle the words of population expert, John D. Rockefeller, III: “Our constant goal is and must be the enrichment of human life, not its restriction.” In other words, our new laws on the population problem must at the same time make for a better society.