The Contract Buyers League (C.B.L.), a group of middle-aged black people claiming to have been over-charged and exploited in the purchase of their homes, emerged on Chicago's west side during the winter of 1967-68. From 1968 to 1971 C.B.L. gained considerable publicity and support for its claims by the use of such tactics as picketing, withholding housing payments, and resisting attempts at eviction. In addition, the members of C.B.L. have had a complicated set of encounters with the legal system which continue at the time of writing (August 1974). This paper uses the most significant of these encounters to explore in a more theoretical way certain aspects of litigation involving poor and minority groups.

This paper examines a controversial area of legal activity—the enforcement of drug laws. It focuses on the experiences of the young, white drug user for whom arrest and processing for drug law violations commonly represent the first serious involvement with the legal system.

It is within the interactions and institutional experience of legal processing that the young drug user alters, reconstructs or solidifies a meaning structure which defines and justifies his behavior (Blumer, 1969). This shaping of definitions and perceptions takes place primarily within a particular institutional setting—narcotics court. The purpose of the court (as it is perceived by the regular actors within the court setting) is to publicly identify the "deviant" thereby setting an example for potential or undetected lawbreakers and to punish the perpetrators of deviance in order to deter them from engaging in further deviant activity (cf., Schwartz and Skolnick, 1962:133).

Social facts about a profession are usually treated by sociologists as dependent variables—phenomena to be explained (e.g., Carlin, 1962, 1966; Becker, et al., 1961). I propose to analyze the features of the legal profession in a society which uses such services mostly in the pursuit of litigation. While the facts about the Indian legal profession are no doubt interesting in themselves, my purpose is to examine what can be learned about the process of litigation from a study of the profession. The relationship between lawyers' careers and work styles on the one hand and the demands for law work on the other has been presented in general terms by Rueschemeyer (1973: Ch. 1). The data I shall discuss deals with this relationship in more detail, and can, I submit, yield important support for a critique of the various analyses of litigation which assume that its function is dispute settlement.

Discussion of the distribution and delivery of legal services usually turns on the problem of civil justice for the poor. Our attention is so dominated by the problems of distributive justice for the poor that we ignore the more general problem of civil justice for the public.

In Western society the primary function of law has been the protection and regulation of property. Indeed, the earliest liberal conceptions of public life are founded on the premise that men gave up an utterly private life in order to enjoy the utilities provided by public protection for their persons and, even more important, the fruits of their labors—in Locke's (1689: Art. 123) phrase, "their lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name property." In the earliest liberal tradition, the holding of property is the foundation for participation in public life; accordingly, the principal end of the civil law is the definition and protection of property rights.

Recent research on the functions of imprisonment has begun to provide quantitative, empirical knowledge of its rehabilitative and deterrent effects. Much less is known, however, about the incapacitative effect of imprisonment. While it has long been understood that the physical segregation of prison inmates prevents them from engaging in some criminal activity (as well as much non-criminal activity) during the period of their confinement, quantitative estimates of the size of this effect have been lacking. Leaving aside all deterrent or rehabilitative and counter-rehabilitative effects, it is of some interest to know whether the incapacitative function of imprisonment is large or small.

Accounts of the legal scene in Asia often refer in passing to the activities of a shadowy set of backstage characters encountered in the peripheries of the law. The assessment of the peripheral figures has varied. Only very recently have they received much direct attention from students of Asian social life and those concerned with planning social change. Earlier accounts came mostly from colonial administrators, law officers and occasionally from the local intelligensia (Morrison, 1972b: 327). These reports were invariably derogatory. They blamed these peripheral figures for a socially and economically destructive proliferation of litigation, and depicted them as swarming at the courts where for ill-gotten personal gain, they encouraged and facilitated lawsuits among the peasantry. But these figures were never described in much detail and their work seems rarely to have been observed at first hand. A variety of European terms were used to characterize them: “sea advocates,” “bush lawyers,” “touts,” and the like. Both lay and semi-official roles seemed to be included.

For a half century or more it has been understood that the services of attorneys are not equally available to all who need them and a body of research has gradually been assembled which casts light on a number of factors relevant to how clients find attorneys and pay for their services. Among issues which have been probed are: the nature and extent of the public's need for legal services, the reasons for the failure of the poor to refer their problems to attorneys, the effect of OEO and legal aid offices on availability of legal services and the need for improved legal services for the middle class (Christensen, 1970). With few exceptions, however, the role of individual practicing attorneys in making legal services more widely available by occasionally working for a reduced fee, or for no fee at all, has never been systematically studied.

Crime and its prevention has become a much debated issue. Claims and counter claims are made as to the real extent and the possibility of controlling crime. Law makers are considering legislating heavier sentences, which raises questions about the role of prison sentences in crime prevention. Most discussions of crime and its prevention lack a way of generating quantitative estimates of what alternative policies would achieve and what they would cost. A recent paper by one of the authors (Avi-Itzhak and Shinnar, 1973) attempts to develop a mathematical model simple enough to make approximate quantitative estimates based on available statistical information. In this paper we try to simplify the model further and to present it in a way that will make it more accessible to the policy maker and social scientist. We also try to apply it to conditions in New York.

Two of the major insights of the sociology of law are that legal rights in contemporary society are most often determined by bureaucratic actors and that the results differ systematically from those predictable on the basis of formal law alone (Mayhew, 1966; Ross, 1970; Skolnick, 1966; Whitford, 1968). The decision-maker who determines in practice the extent of legal rights and duties is most often a low-level employee of a bureaucracy—a patrolman, a tax auditor, a building inspector, or an insurance adjuster. He is usually untutored in academic law and possesses discretion because of his isolation from supervision, rather than by design. The decisions in theory may be removed from the bureaucracy and tried in a court of law. Critical attention, however, has recently focused on the fact that most claims based on legal rights are too small to warrant the cost and inconvenience of a formal trial. There has been less attention paid to the fact that bureaucracies typically offer internal means of appealing the decisions of low-level employees. These appeals procedures permit review and modification of initial decisions by higher-level employees, and furnish the claimant with a less expensive and more convenient alternative to the removal of his claim to the courts. Where the claim is small the internal procedure is usually the only avenue of appeal from an adverse decision that is realistically available to the claimant. In these cases, the internal procedure is in fact the ultimate means by which legal rights and duties are determined. This paper reports a study of the functioning and outcomes of one such procedure, the handling of complaints about claims by a typical insurance company, hereafter called Acme.