Joel Handler is a friend, and I have appreciated his work for almost 30 years. I had dinner with him two nights before he gave his presidential address in Philadelphia. He knew that he was taking a chance by doing something different, and he hoped that he could bring it off. He did. Even if those he challenged raise valid objections to his position—and I'm not the one to judge this—he raised important questions and started us toward important answers.

A presidential address at a professional association is an odd art form. Beginners and those completely outside of the group's tradition don't get to be president. Nonetheless, if all you do is celebrate the mainstream, you put the audience to sleep. You must give the speech during a lunch. You compete with dessert and waiters removing plates. You talk after awards and other ceremonies have taken more time than planned. Entertainment may be more appropriate than challenging thought." Despite all these hazards, Joel Handler flattered his audience by demanding our attention and offering ideas clearly worth it.

This structural analysis of the relationships among participants in a criminal justice system, viewed in its political context, pursues John Hagan's suggestion that criminal justice theory adopt a “structural-contextual approach.” Drawing on data from a survey of 211 criminal justice administrators, interest group leaders, and news reporters in Cook County, Illinois, we examine networks of contact among the various governmental elites and private groups, using smallest space analyses to depict the patterns of relationships. Although the literature suggests that the police and the judiciary are often closely entwined with local political elites, we conclude that the judiciary is a relatively distinct or autonomous set in the Chicago context. The police, however, are found near the political elites. The news media are strongly oriented toward enforcement agencies rather than toward the judiciary or corrections, and the public and private organizations representing less powerful constituencies, such as minorities, juveniles, and the mentally ill, are found on the periphery. Contrary to some suggestions in the literature, government officials are not found in the center of these networks. Rather, the core of the structure is hollow, indicating an absence of central brokers or mediators.

Law's saliency in the development of West Indian societies began in the earliest days of settlement and has remained critical and constitutive. The author examines the transformation of Caribbean law over time as an instrument of class, kinship, and gender relations and investigates ethnographically the repeal in 1986 of illegitimacy as a legal category in Antigua and Barbuda. In contrast to the colonial era, working-class ideas about gender and family and actions by married women played a pivotal role in banishing bastardy and reconstituting the relationship between families and the state. This struggle reveals lawmaking as a deeply contextualized and gendered practice.