Nearly half a century after Thorsten Sellin (1928) first introduced the topic for research, the issue of discrimination in judicial sentencing is still very much with us. Thus, Richard Quinney (1970: 142), among the more provocative critics of our system of criminal justice, observes that

This paper examines the impact of Turkey's radical introduction of Western law codes and secular courts by analyzing a portion (1950-67) of the docket of a rural district court, located in Bodrum, Turkey. We are particularly interested in whether a transplanted formal legal system can influence the countryside, and we ask: (1) To what extent are rural district law courts being used, and is this use increasing? (2) In what domains are rural courts used, and to what degree do these coincide with domains formerly covered by religious and/or customary law? (3) How is the use of the courts distributed between settling disputes (including disputes between the state and citizens) and processing routine, undisputed formalities, and is this distribution changing? (4) To what extent are women and other non-powerful groups (rural, poor, ethnic minorities) using the courts, and has this use changed over time? (5) To what extent is the government using the courts for social control purposes, and how does this use compare with non-governmental use of the courts? (6) How does the use of the courts relate to abrupt shifts in political power and ideology?

Richard Fenno (1962: 315) has suggested that: “[I] f one considers the main activity of a political system to be decision making, the acid test of its internal integration is its capacity to make collective decisions without flying apart in the process.” In the context of the Congress, Fenno (1962: 310) defined committee integration as: “the degree to which there is a working together or a meshing together or mutual support among its roles and subgroups. Conversely, it is also defined as the degree to which a committee is able to minimize conflict among its roles and its subgroups, by heading off or resolving the conflicts that arise. A concomitant of integration is the existence of a fairly consistent set of norms, widely agreed upon and widely followed by the members.”

The mass public is often depicted as indifferent to and unaware of many facets of political life which elites deem essential to understanding the political process (Converse, 1964: 209-14, 231-41; Key, 1964: 182-85, 199-202). Yet despite its indifference to political reality as defined by elites, the general public does hold its own version of political reality - albeit a more emotional, more symbolic, and less concrete reality than elites view (Prothro and Grigg, 1960: 276-94; Edelman, 1967: 1-7, 12-19, 178-81; Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 31-34). Popular perceptions of the United States Supreme Court follow this pattern: on the one hand, most observers take for granted that the public appreciates the Court on a symbolic or mythical plane while, on the other hand, most research concludes that the masses lack factual information on this institution.

James Q. Wilson (1971: 4-5) has observed that militant police unions may constitute the greatest obstacle to reform and innovation in contemporary American police practice. To date, most social science studies of the police have focused on the analysis and consequences of individual officer behavior and not on collective actions by policemen to influence law enforcement policy. The absence of in-depth studies of police from a group perspective is significant in view of research (Horton, 1970; Kaufman, 1969) which indicates that municipal agencies in larger cities are moving toward a joint management-labor determination of goals and administration under the prodding of activist employee associations.

Only a small fraction of the criminal cases in the United States are decided by adversary trial processes. The vast majority are settled by guilty pleas; many of these pleas occur after some form of plea bargaining — either explicit negotiations over the entry of a guilty plea in exchange for a reduced charge or a lenient sentence, or tacit bargaining, as when the defendant pleads guilty in anticipation of lenient sentencing. The most frequently cited reason for plea bargaining is administrative expediency or “its utility in disposing of large numbers of cases in a quick and simple way” (Enker, 1967: 112). While caseload pressures are doubtlessly important, they may be overemphasized in the current literature.' Frequently both the prosecutor and the defendant want to avoid a full jury trial because of the risk and uncertainty involved. The prosecutor is under administrative and/or political pressure not to lose his case; a negotiated plea of guilty, even if on a reduced charge, is a sure conviction, while conviction by trial is never certain. The defendant's risk at trial is that his sentence on conviction may be much stiffer than if he had pleaded guilty.

In making his televised announcement on the nominations of Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist for seats on the Supreme Court, Richard Nixon observed that he was merely fulfilling a campaign promise. For, he said: “… during my campaign for the Presidency, I pledged to nominate to the Supreme Court individuals who shared my judicial philosophy which is basically a conservative philosophy. … As a judicial conservative, I believe some Court decisions have gone too far in the past in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces in our society” (New York Times, 1971: 24C). In 1968, Mr. Nixon said: ”We need more strict constructionists on the highest court of the United States. In my view, the duty of a Justice of the Supreme Court is to interpret the law, not to make the law, and the men I support will share that view“ (U.S. News & World Report, 1968: 42).

Why study the legal systems of other times or places? Are there reasons beyond an antiquarianism or exoticism that seeks stimulation for a palate jaded by preoccupation with the minutiae of American law? The increased understanding to be gained by such intellectual exploration seems to me similar in origin to the pleasure any of us takes in travel. Differences of physical environment, modes of social intercourse, or patterns of culture awaken us to phenomena which at home are so familiar as to be almost invisible. When we resume our mundane round, the residue of such impressions compels us to recognize the contingency of our own ways, and leads us to look for explanations.

United States courts of appeals were created over four decades ago to help the Supreme Court enforce the supremacy' and uniformity of federal law. Until recently, however, their actual operations and functions in the American polity have received scant description and analysis (Carington, 1969: 542; Dolbeare, 1969: 373-404; Goldman and Jahnige, 1971; Richardson and Vines, 1970; Schick, 1970). This paper is a preliminary report of data gathered to assess the roles of the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Second, and Fifth Circuits in the federal legal system.' The report will: (1) describe the business of the three tribunals, (2) compare decisional patterns among them and the Supreme Court in the same cases, and (3) explore relationships among trial courts, intermediate courts, and the Supreme Court in the flow of federal litigation.

People and organizations make demands on the civil courts to settle their disputes, enforce the performance of obligations, and direct the redistribution of resources. Although the potential number of users of civil court proceedings would seem to be as numerous as individuals and organizations in a society, only some individuals and some groups use the civil courts. Furthermore, from the entire catalogue of remedies provided by law, users differentially present matters for litigation. Not all types of legal actions are demanded. Nor are the most frequent plaintiffs the most frequent defendants; some litigants predominate as plaintiffs, while others appear most often as defendants. Because of this nonrandom appearance of litigants and subjects of litigation, civil courts of first instance are daily exposed to claims of some, but not all of the people. The object of this paper is to locate and describe the principal users of the civil court system and the matters these users want adjudicated.

The avoidance of the stigma accompanying court appearance was one of the reasons for the development of a specialized court for children. Treatment-oriented reformers had been concerned for many years about the potentially harmful effects upon individuals of arrest, court appearance, and incarceration. As a result, they made efforts in the juvenile court to minimize stigmatization by having informal procedures, hearings closed to the public and press, and limited access to court records. More recently the avoidance of stigma has been used to rationalize the diversion of youths away from the juvenile justice system before they have any contact with it. This heightened concern about stigmatization through juvenile court exeprience flows in part from a growing interest in labeling theory among social scientists.