Several years ago we conducted surveys in one American (Detroit) and two Japanese (Yokohama and Kanazawa) cities exploring the nature of responsibility and sanctioning judgments. Recently we were able to replicate a portion of those surveys in Moscow, and here we compare the results of the Moscow survey with the earlier findings. The fundamental question is whether socialist societies, at least as they have existed in the republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, have created a contextual legal culture like that of Japan, or whether their legal culture is more like the individualistic model of the United States. Our data indicate that when presented with situations of wrongdoing, Moscow residents' punishment preferences more nearly resemble the individualistic preferences of Detroit residents than they do the contextual preferences of Japanese residents. However, unlike Japanese and U.S. residents, the Moscow residents also expressed a preference for quasi-criminal educative sanctions.

In his presidential address to the Law and Society Association, Joel Handler describes recent changes in the character of social protest and the scholarship that seeks to understand these resistant practices. In his description, Handler depicts a world in which all that was once collective and effectual is now fragmented and futile. Not that long ago, he suggests, we had real (ideological/class-based) social movements and vital communities that were documented by scholars in optimistic stories of resistance and protest. But time passed and we became postmodernized: destabilized and uncertain, ironic and listless. Where once we challenged oppression and power en masse to the flourish of trumpets, now we are just so many flatulent individuals.

Using a combination of hypothetical scenarios and survey-type questions, this study investigates the effect of the context of the offense, formal sanctions, informal sanctions, and moral beliefs on self-reported projections to commit sexual assault. Male college students read and responded to five scenarios each describing a hypothetical sexual assault by a male. Respondents were asked to estimate the certainty of formal and informal punishment for the scenario male, the extent to which they believed the male's actions were morally wrong, and the likelihood that they would do what the male did under the same circumstances. We found that projections to commit sexual assault were affected by two circumstances of the incident, the likelihood that the male would be formally sanctioned (dismissed from the university or arrested) and the respondent's moral beliefs. The significant deterrent effect observed for formal sanction threats was not invariant, however. The fear of formal sanctions had no effect when respondents were inhibited by their moral evaluation of the incident. The deterrent effect of formal sanction threats did not vary by the level of social censure for the scenario male's actions. The implications of these finding for previous and subsequent deterrence research are discussed.

Theory linking litigation onset, process, and outcome in jail reform lawsuits has been scarce. The author proposes a four-stage, comparative model: (1) conditions of surrounding legal and political environments, in concert with contextual factors (e.g., type of legal representation), set the stage for litigation in the trigger stage; (2) specific legal claims, defendants named, and litigation strategies shape litigation process at the liability stage; (3) the nature and degree of remedies crafted is shaped by complex interactions between litigants and judges at the remedy stage; and (4) judicial methods and litigant behavior shape negotiations, modifications, and compliance efforts in the postdecree stage. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods, the researcher examined hypotheses linking the four stages. All general-conditions lawsuits against California county jails between 1975 and 1989 (N=43) were coded and analyzed. Critical factors identified at each stage significantly influenced litigation incidence, process, and legal outcomes. The author discusses implications of a multimethod, comparative approach for studying court-ordered reform of public institutions.

Questions about the relation of court caseloads to plea bargaining practices generate much controversy but little sophisticated empirical research. Here we examine the effects of a 1975 felony plea bargaining ban in the Texas district courts in El Paso. Relying on a quasi-experimental interrupted time series model with annual data for 1968–83, we test the hypothesis that the discontinuance of plea bargaining negatively affects court caseloads, specifically the proportion of cases going to jury trial and the disposition rate. We also examine conviction rate, exploring whether the existence of plea bargaining encourages prosecutors to accept weak cases. We find a considerable increase in the proportion of cases going to jury trial immediately after the ban's implementation and a substantial but gradual decrease in the disposition rate. The jury trial rate contributed substantially to the disposition rate decline. The conviction rate was generally unaffected by the ban, although it became more consistent after the ban. Overall our findings suggest that the ban on explicit plea bargaining did affect the district courts' ability to move the felony docket efficiently.

Research into the effects of legal representation is rare because in many settings in which people might have lawyers, legal representation is either so common or so unusual that it cannot serve as a variable. Moreover, such research as exists is often poorly controlled or otherwise methodologically deficient. Our data set, derived from the case files of a public housing eviction board, allows us to overcome most of the difficulties that plague prior studies because it is relatively large and unusually rich in information about individual cases. We model the effects of various tenant and case characteristics on lawyer involvement as well as the effects of legal representation on case outcome. We find that lawyers tend to handle more difficult cases and that the likelihood that legal representation will aid a tenant depends on case type and changes over time. Our results, though likely to be context dependent, suggest how the effects of legal representation may be studied in other settings and the kinds of variables that may condition such effects.

Joel Handler's presidential address to the 1992 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association examines the intellectual debates that animate recent studies of social change. This talk is his attempt to understand and question these studies of transformative politics which, Handler claims, are deeply influenced by a turn toward postmodernism. After ruminating over the postmodernist argument and its broader intellectual currents as well as its impact on studies of what he calls “protest from below” (e.g., Ewick & Silbey 1992; White 1990), he compares this work to earlier, more structurally informed approaches (e.g., Genovese 1974; Stack 1974; Piven & Cloward 1977). Handler believes that this earlier work remains more persuasive. Because the work of the 1970s is firmly rooted in an analysis of politics and economy that forms the basis for a theory of progressive social change, he concludes that it is more compelling, provocative, and socially meaningful. Handler is skeptical about the current research that is influenced by strains of postmodernism, although he does not seem to advocate a wholesale return to the earlier, social-structural approach. Thus, he does not take the difficult step of outlining a more useful and progressive analytical and political strategy.

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.

Usually, one thinks of nostalgia as the characteristic vice of the conservative. When Republicans bandy slogans like “family values,” progressives are quick to recognize the dangerous sentimentality that yearns for a status quo ante in which men were men and women were women and minorities were seldom seen and never heard—the age, as Ronald Reagan so callously put it, “back before we knew we had a race problem.” In contrast, one thinks of Utopian romanticism as the characteristic weakness of the progressive. The radical's longing for revolutionary change is seen by conservatives as the dangerously naive and quixotic yearning for human perfection in a flawed and tragic world.

In his review essay on three recent books on pornography, harms, and politics in Law & Society Review, Steven Childress (1991) has transmitted false information about my criminological research on pornography. Since such misinformation is, in part, responsible for considerable confusion about the outcome of aggregate studies of the effects of pornography on sex crimes, redress is necessary. Misinformation about crucial pornography research may have serious consequences for pornography politics and makes one wonder about the politics of pornography research.

Apparently there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and then Childress's review essay. My essay has “transmitted false information,” as Dr. Berl Kutchinsky puts it (1992:447), as well as fomenting “considerable confusion” about the outcome of various population studies on pornography and violence (ibid.). Yet since Kutchinsky points to no erroneous figures or data that I cited, other than assuming I misunderstood his own studies, at bottom the misinformation is a “false inconclusiveness verdict on the criminological pornography research” (p. 453). Worse, my essay is censorial because it calls for further study when, apparently, such testing wastes everyone's time as the matter has been definitively settled by Kutchinsky's own research.