Existing scholarship finds that having an attorney in immigration legal proceedings increases the chances of a favorable outcome. This work, however, often acknowledges that the representation effect is underexplained: selection may explain outcomes, and variation among attorneys is difficult to assess. Through 103 interviews with attorneys who practice immigration law in three organizational environments (nonprofit legal services, private firms, and corporate law firm pro bono programs) in two East Coast areas, this paper argues that attorneys' sorting of clients between different types of legal organizations helps explain the representation effect. Attorneys define what type of case is a “good fit” for their representation, selecting cases they think they can help increase the probability of a favorable outcome. However, what they define as a “good fit” varies by attorneys' practice environments, and centers not only on the facts or characteristics of a client and their case, but also attorneys' organizational constraints. By documenting the central role of practice environment variation and its organizational constraints on attorneys' case selection, this paper helps explain the representation effect and its implications for increasing vulnerable immigrants' access to legal representation in the United States.

When Kermit requested that I write an essay for this Review, an ambiguity in his letter led me to inquire whether he wanted me to write about legal history written in the twentieth century or legal history written of the twentieth century. Unraveling that ambiguity had the queer effect of deflecting my attention from the fact that I was in the process of agreeing to write about a subject that seemed to me to be close to nonexistent. To check out that perception, I sent my super-diligent research assistant out to search the relevant periodical literature published during the last fifteen years. A bit to my surprise he came back with a longer bibliography than I had expected and the observation, “I had a difficult time deciding where to draw the line between history and casenote.” It seems to me that this observation just about sums up the problem and perhaps it is important to discuss that problem as we look at this largely nonexistent field in the hope that by the time there is a field there may no longer be a problem.

The call for studies of the social impact of particular judicial, legislative, administrative and executive rules, decisions and practices is sounded sporadically and acted upon but rarely. To read the recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States overruling established precedents in many areas of our constitutional law is to catalogue a long list of missed opportunities for social scientists. As an example of the cause for this lament, I shall present Keyishian v. Board of Regents which for all practical purposes overruled Adler v. Board of Education.

At the very least, Wilson and Boland and we agree on the complexity of the relationship between governmental actions and social effects. Thus we believe as they do that it is not an easy task to disentangle the effects of policing on crime. We do differ on analytic strategy. We believe that time-series analyses tell us more than cross-sectional analyses do about causal patterns.

This book by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, both a major empirical and theoretical contribution, has arrived at a propitious time for law and society scholars. If our discipline is not in crisis, it is certainly in a period of transition. As “globalization” has monopolized the attention of policymakers, journalists, futurists, politicians, and the business elite, scholars in law and society have not been far behind. Meetings of the Law and Society Association have become notably more international in their objects, if to a lesser extent in membership and attendance. As our scholarship ventures with more regularity over, under, and beyond the boundaries of nation-states, we encounter new conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges, as well as the exacerbation of some more familiar difficulties. The work of Dezalay and Garth represents one of the most advanced and concerted efforts in our discipline to rise to this array of new (and old) challenges. The book's scope and ambitions are such that a reviewer is compelled to ask whether the authors have presented us with a new paradigm for research in sociology of law in the context of globalization. As I am only presumptuous enough to pose but not to answer that question, this review essay will document both the considerable promise and some possible limitations of the approach developed by Dezalay and Garth, in the hopes of using their work to spark a wider debate on the future of law and society scholarship in conditions of globalization.

The members of the U.S. Supreme Court have different ideas about what constitutes good judicial policy as well as how best to achieve that policy. From where do these ideas originate? Evolutionary psychology suggests that an answer may lie in early life experiences in which siblings assume roles that affect an adult's likely acceptance of changes in the established order. According to this view, older siblings take on responsibilities that make them more conservative and rule-bound, while younger ones adopt roles that promote liberalism and greater rebelliousness. Applying this theory to the Court, I show that these childhood roles manifest themselves in later life in the decisions of the justices. Birth order explains not only the justices’ policy preferences but also their acceptance of one important norm of judicial decisionmaking, specifically their willingness to exercise judicial review.

In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in “Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience.” He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is “impoverished theoretically” and “often not worth reading” (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the policy audience. He contrasts current scholarship with a golden age of police inquiry, the 1960s, in which theoretical breakthroughs were common, and scholars were driven by their critical instincts rather than by material interests. His review of current works is narrower than most published in the Review, covering only two monographs published in the 1990s, and holding out but one (Bayley 1994) as evidence of all that is wrong with contemporary, sociolegal inquiry of policing.

Conventional wisdom assumes that the public wants judges that will simply interpret and apply the law as it is written. However, existing evidence shows a substantial portion of the American population supports the doctrine of popular constitutionalism. Using two experiments involving the use of social science in legal decisions, we show that popular constitutionalists evaluate the judiciary using a different set of criteria than legal traditionalists. For legal traditionalists, using social science in legal decisions is perceived as an undesirable nonlegal influence and reduces acceptance of a court decision. For popular constitutionalists, social science is perceived as objective evidence that can be used to understand the practical effects of a decision and increases acceptance. We conclude by discussing the need for more research on popular constitutionalists, as little is known about how this group evaluates the judiciary and interprets its actions.

This study empirically investigates how courts define sexuality of disabled persons in the absence of a formal right to sexuality. The focus of the study is tort law, a field ungoverned by direct disability rights legislation, assuming that tort law is the law of disablement as it concerns the transformative process of becoming disabled. The study investigates the types of damages courts have awarded for harm to sexual functioning, inquiring to whom and under what conditions have they been awarded. Additionally, it examines the discourse that characterizes each type of damages, and the legal, social, medical, and healthcare policy developments that have affected courts' rhetoric and reasoning. Our findings reveal shifting trends in scale, content, and inclusiveness of beneficiaries in terms of gender and age. Over time, courts have adopted a more hopeful and dynamic approach to disabled persons' sexuality while remaining within an individual-medical framework. We suggest that these shifting trends can be linked to the slow diffusion of the social-affirmative approach to disability, the limits of tort law as a field, and the role of healthcare policy in shaping the landscape of tort claims.

In this article, I examine whether divided government has any meaningful impact on the type of judges appointed to the lower federal courts. Specifically, I compare the voting behavior of Clinton judges confirmed before and after the Republicans took majority control of the Senate as well as the voting behavior of judges appointed by President Reagan before and after the Democrats took control of the Senate in the 1980s in order to detect whether judges appointed under divided government are more moderate than those under unified government. Believing that the Senate lacks the resources to have a meaningful impact in shaping judicial ideology on the lower federal courts—as hundreds of judges must be confirmed during the course of a presidential administration—I hypothesize that there is no difference in voting behavior between judges appointed under united and divided government. Consistent with my hypothesis, I find that there is no difference in voting behavior between judges appointed during united and divided government in three critical issue areas: search and seizure cases, race discrimination cases, and federalism cases. This was true of judges appointed during the Clinton and Reagan presidencies, and was true in all three issue areas tested.

Longitudinal trial court studies lack a simple model of system litigation. This essay advances the argument that models which attempt to explain either trial court behavior or changes in civil litigation have little explanatory power. Rather, a system mobilization model is needed that has the following paradigms: (1) a perception paradigm that produces awareness of matters that might be the subject of a conflict or dispute; (2) a paradigm that explains how these detected matters are socially constructed as potentially legal matters; (3) a legal mobilization paradigm explaining how legal agents or some legal subsystem is mobilized to handle some legal matters; (4) a process paradigm explaining how matters that enter the trial courts become matters for trial; (5) a trial court mobilization paradigm followed by (6) an appellate process paradigm. The development of such a model of system litigation will resolve some of the methodological as well as conceptual problems that currently beset research on trial courts. A number of these problems relating to the longitudinal study of trial courts are discussed.

This article investigates beliefs concerning the legitimacy of the traditional customary practice of payback in the New Guinea Islands; a practice that has been illegal for more than a century. The practice of payback is described and contextualized and a conceptual framework of norm internalization in a legal transplant society is developed. The empirical results highlight a stark urban–rural divide in attitudes. Yet, against expectations, those in urban environments (and in closer proximity to the state criminal law) are more likely to agree with the use of payback. An expected relationship is found between the ability to speak English and not agreeing with the use of payback. The empirical results suggest that the criminal law may be a weak force and that non-legal channels may be more effective in transforming society.