The role of the bench as the sponsoring organization of trial judges largely remains a mystery to political science. Borrowing from organizational theory the metaphor of loose coupling, a characteristic of many American political institutions, this article explores the tension between elements of loose and tight coupling within the sponsoring organization of judges (the bench) and the consequences of that tension for the distribution of services to clients of trial courts. The article identifies three sets of consequences: (1) The locus and style of innovation is acutely circumscribed by these tensions; in the court that is studied, assertive leadership and punctuated change are less likely than conciliar leadership and incremental change. (2) The juxtaposition of loosely and tightly coupled elements promote responsiveness to powerful clientele interests. (3) Responsiveness to powerful clientele interests leads to a distribution of resources that short-changes less influential clients of the court.

This essay presents three accounts or narratives of globalization. Each narrative describes the triumph of a central character or institution (science, markets, law) against its challenges or enemies (ignorance, regulated or planned economies, human caprice and unreason). The stories convey moral tales about what justice might look like and how social relations might be justly organized and governed. I argue that under the dominant accounts of globalization, the dynamics of power are obscured so that social relations seem to be produced by invisible or natural forces. When the operation of power is masked, I argue, justice, and efforts to confine and regulate power, is made less probable. Law and society scholarship can contribute to a critique of globalization by continuing to identify the ways in which law and power are mutually implicated and embedded in social relations. Rather than describe current forms of international social exchange as globalization, a seemingly neutral terms, the essay urges scholars to identify the role of power by naming global social exchanges as “postmodern colonialism.”

This article, based on an analysis of 30 community mediation sessions, provides a theoretical frame for tracking the emergence and domestication of violence stories in the sessions themselves. Challenging the Cartesian distinction between mental and physical violence, I use Scarry's 1985 work to identify the presence of violence stories as stories in which speakers (1) objectify pain through the discursive production of weapons and wounds, (2) describe the loss of voice itself, and (3) describe attempts to reappear as agents in the elimination of pain itself. Drawing on Minow's 1987 analysis of rights discourse, I offer a definition of the “domestication” of violence as a movement from “rights” to “needs” in the discourse of the session. With this framework, and consistent with Silbey and Sarat's 1989 research, I found that violence stories were domesticated in 80% of the sessions in which such stories emerged. Finally, drawing on Foucault (1979), I describe this domestication process as a function of the “microphysics of power” and track the rules of transformation through which violence is subducted into the discourse of mediation itself. I argue that the mediation process contributes to erase any morality that competes with the morality of mediation and, in the process, disappears violence.

This study analyzes Chicago lawyers' networks of relationships with a selected set of prominent practitioners, drawing on 1994–95 interviews with 788 randomly selected respondents. Since the same technique was used 20 years earlier, the research sheds light on the extent to which the constituencies of elite Chicago lawyers have changed. The network is organized in three principal sectors—liberals, trial lawyers, and corporate lawyers. The structure implies a lack of integration within the bar. Minorities and women are now more widely dispersed across the segments of the network than they were in 1975, but they still have relatively few connections in the corporate sector of the bar.

Sociologists have long been interested in how reactions to deviance influence social order and consensus. However, classic statements on this subject present contrasting hypotheses. This article extends previous work by examining how the extensive media coverage of an interracial homicide influences public attitudes toward the criminal justice system. Initial results indicate that race, education, and police contact directly effect perceptions of criminal injustice. Perceptions of injustice are especially high among well-educated blacks who have had recent contact with the police. Further analysis reveals that the media coverage of the homicide seems temporarily to consolidate public confidence in the police and criminal courts. However, this effect varies by race and education. We discuss the theoretical implications of these findings.

Drawing on interviews with birth and adoptive parents who have remained in contact with each other following placement of an adopted child, this article examines the dynamic of motherhood that emerges in these relationships. Moving back and forth from legal and social event to women's subjective experiences of these events, it argues that open adoption constitutes a “potential space” where two familiar “truths” about motherhood—as an experience of identity and of connection, and as an experience of contingency and separation—converge in powerful ways. Focusing on the double vision of mothers who feel both “real” and “not real” at the same time, it explores the tendency of open adoption to resolve into familiar dichotomies of nature and law and its potential to produce new subjectivities that defy legal categories. The article suggests that analysis of the sociolegal world and of the possibilities for its transformation must work along the unstable boundary of different subjective worlds, moving between them to expose the exclusions and injustices upon which each is premised.

This study examines why the public supports the punishment of rule breakers. It does so within the context of a recently enacted California initiative mandating life in prison for repeat felons (the “three strikes” law). Antecedents of three aspects of people's reactions to rule breakers are explored: (1) support for the three strikes initiative, (2) support for punitiveness in dealing with rule breakers, and (3) willingness to abandon procedural protections when dealing with potential rule breakers. The results of interviews with members of the public suggest that the widely held view that public punitiveness develops primarily from concerns about crime and the courts and is primarily linked to public views about risk and dangerousness is incorrect. While these factors do influence public feelings, they are not the central reasons underlying public punitiveness. Instead, the source of people's concerns lies primarily in their evaluations of social conditions, including the decline in morality and discipline within the family and increases in the diversity of society. These concerns are about issues of moral cohesion—with people feeling that the quality and extent of social bonds and social consensus has deteriorated in American society.

There is an interest among scholars working on cause lawyering to “globalize” the subject by studying professional and political networks that span national boundaries. The globalizing scope of human rights provides a particularly relevant perspective, complementing the more narrowly attenuated focus on the roles and activities of cause lawyers. The subjects of this article are Israeli and Palestinian cause lawyers who have worked in the Israeli military court system in the Occupied Territories. This study adopts a transnational perspective both because the context itself (Israel/Palestine) is composed of relations that span national boundaries (statal and ethnonational) and because it befits a consideration of the international networks of human rights. Following an introductory discussion of transnationalism and a brief background on Israel/Palestine and the military courts, I turn to three aspects of cause lawyering: the political motivations inspiring lawyers to engage in such work; a comparative assessment of the legal and extralegal strategies pursued by lawyers; and the influence of human rights on the politics of lawyering in this context.

This article addresses the debate about the significance of gender differences by analyzing patterns of interaction between lawyers and clients. It examines features of the language of lawyers and clients associated with the dominance and difference paradigms that are at the center of feminist theory. Talk characterized by dominance includes the control of discourse space, interruptions, topic control, and challenges. Features associated with a particular female “voice” include cooperative responses, affiliative requests, indirection, politeness, and the expression of emotion. Results show that women lawyers' talk is role behavior rather than gendered behavior, with little difference between men and women lawyers. Clients' speech is tempered by gender considerations, with both men and women clients expressing greater deference to men lawyers and women clients expressing cooperation and solidarity with all lawyers. It was mainly in reference to the occasional willingness to grant legitimacy to the clients' emotional concerns, as well as the stress on professional identity, that marked women lawyers' specific style of lawyering.

This study examines the sociolegal underpinnings of the “temporary help” relationship as one kind of contingent work arrangement and explores how it became institutionalized in the post-World War II United States. While the American literature on contingent work suggests its tremendous growth has been merely a result of changing “human resource” strategies on the part of business managers, the focus here is on the specific role played by courts, state legislatures, and government administrative bodies in ratifying the temporary help arrangement as legal and legitimate. The article details the obscure history of the campaign waged by temporary help firms to win their claim as the legal employers of workers they send out to client firms, a central premise of the arrangement. It shows that statutory and policy changes supporting the increased use of “temporary work” were in place by the early 1970s, in time for its expanded use to play a key role in the restructuring of U.S. employment relations since that time.

Studies of legal decisionmaking have focused traditionally on how social influences, particularly the relative social standing of competing parties, affect case outcomes. More recently, sociolegal scholars have directed their attention to the significance of cultural categories in shaping case-based decisionmaking. We here examine how both social and cultural factors shape judicial decisions and their meanings for a “congregation” of court cases precipitated by the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Our logistic regression analysis of the opinions of 181 AIDS-related cases decided in the early years of the epidemic (1983-89) finds that two social factors, the relative social standing of parties and the types of claims brought to the court, and two cultural factors, the court's use of negative AIDS metaphors and references to individual rights, are significantly related to case outcome. Finally, in line with Galanter's (1990) notion that case congregations have histories that involve development and change over time, our temporal analysis reveals the emergence of two case congregations and suggests how each serves to bolster the legitimacy of the judiciary amidst social crisis.

Contemporary crisis in the idea and practice of corporate governance prompts a consideration of future resolution based on historical imperatives. We review periods of analogous crisis in corporate governance in the mid-1800s, 1930s, and 1960s to evaluate the catalyst, process, and outcome of paradigmatic change. Framing our analysis are the rulings made by the Court of Chancery of Delaware during those times of change. The Chancery Court's historical role as the legitimator of governance norms grounds our consideration of its recent opinions. Recent case law, we conclude, signifies the advent of a multifiduciary model of governance. Measurement of shareholders' reaction to dilution of their fiduciary status corroborates the state of crisis and underscores the normative code of the emergent multifiduciary governance model. We close by discussing the implications of the multifiduciary model for shareholders, executives, and society.

This article examines the recent failure of formal constitutional amendments in the United States and Canada by closely analyzing the institutional environment in which constitutional modification takes place. I focus first on the instrumental objectives of constitutional reform to develop an institutional design model of constitutional modification and identify the structural factors that affect the level of controversy generated by proposed amendments. I then revisit the failed ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to demonstrate more explicitly how these institutional factors affected the amendment's fate. Finally, I extend the analysis by undertaking a comparative case study of the recent politics of constitutional modification in Canada. In particular, I focus on the failure of comprehensive constitutional change between 1987 and 1992. I argue that the same institutional design model, which focuses on institutional rigidity, interpretive flexibility, and litigation potential, enhances our ability to understand both the U.S. and Canadian cases of amendment failure.

This article is part of a larger study about the factors shaping the exercise of discretion by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) inspectors. It focuses on an infrequently examined topic: how agency behavior is affected when government depends on private enterprise to help enforce legal requirements. My examination of the INS's relationship with international airlines reveals that airlines are part of a third-party liability system. Airlines are mandated by law to screen foreign travelers prior to transporting them to the United States, in order to ensure foreign travelers' admissibility to the country, as well as required to remove all inadmissible travelers at airline cost. The study shows how third-party liability requirements generate a complex system of exchange relations and dependence between the INS and international airlines, a system that affects in important ways how the INS handles the cases of suspected inadmissible travelers.

Building on job satisfaction, occupational segregation, and life course literatures, I analyze temporal dimensions of career mobility within the legal profession with a sample of Canadian lawyers. I use a continuous-time stochastic model of the underlying processes of movement across work settings to examine factors accounting for gender differences in career paths. The findings suggest that women's integration into the legal profession remains marginal: women continue to be underrepresented in law firm partnerships, moving significantly more slowly than men toward these positions. In addition, women exit law firm practice at a rate significantly higher than that of their male counterparts. Empirical evidence also suggests that the rapidly increasing size of entry cohorts to the legal profession has restricted the number of partnerships available to aspiring associates and has hastened the departure of lawyers from law firm practice. I document emerging paths from law and examine causal factors “pushing” lawyers out of law firm practice, as well as those “pulling” them toward other more attractive options.