We investigate the causes of protracted violent conflict by examining the dynamics of a so-called family feud in one Appalachian county in the 19th century. Using data from the civil and criminal court docket and sociohistorical sources, we find that protracted local violence was neither an alternative to dispute resolution through the courts nor a simple function of economic development. Rather, feud violence reflected the social and economic relations and cleavages that accompanied local state building. We discuss the implications of these findings for a historically specific understanding of the relation between local governance and protracted disputing.

Rights in American society present a paradox—critics increasingly assert that proliferation of rights is undermining Americans' sense of community, yet scholars continue to document Americans' reluctance to assert formal legal rights. We explore the meaning of rights in American society by describing the intersection between the evolving civil rights of a previously excluded minority, culminating in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and the personal histories of two individuals who might potentially invoke or benefit from such rights. Tracing the life stories of “Sara Lane” and “Jill Golding” from childhood through adolescence to adulthood and employment, we relate the everyday relevance or irrelevance of law to important elements of the reconstructed past—the development of self-concept and of one's place in relation to the social mainstream. The article, which is part of a larger project involving a more broadly based interview sample of adults with disabilities, analyzes life stories to critique familiar assumptions about the perceived conflict between rights and social relationships and about the mobilization of law. It also offers an innovative approach to the study of law and legal consciousness by involving Sara Lane and Jill Golding in the analysis of successive drafts and by including their reactions to what the authors have written.

This article focuses attention on “official graffiti” or regulatory signs typified by highway signs and the most invasive and emblematic piece of official graffiti, the prohibition circle with its diagonal red slash used in the iconic representation No Smoking. Establishing the range and pervasiveness of official graffiti in everyday life (as prohibitions, warnings, advisories, instructions, etc.), the authors approach these visual manifestations from the standpoint of the sociology of governance and analyze them as important instances of government at a distance. They explore the varieties and forms of such regulation and trace their expansion from public space to quasi-public space and to the private realm. Locating the texts and icons of official graffiti within implied or express discursive frameworks, the authors point to the construction of objects and subjects of regulation and to regulatory agents as “absent experts” and address the key role of the construction of danger and the link to insurance principles in a “risk society.” They also examine resistance through actions of defacement and avoidance that result in the complex order and disorder of surfaces and spaces. Official graffiti manifests a distinctive form of hegemony that is exercised through the small, daily acts of everyday governance.

This article demonstrates the legal consequences that flow from the conceptualization of the Bedouin as rootless nomads and from the imposition of certain legal categories of land ownership as means for solving disputes across the indigenous/nonindigenous divide. I argue that the law works by imposing conceptual grids on time and space and that this conceptual ordering, in turn, gives rise to a series of binary oppositions that affirm the distinctions between “us” (Progressive Westerners) and “them” (Chaotic Oriental nomads). Once the Bedouin are placed on the side of nature, judicial practices tend, on the one hand, to objectify the denial of Bedouin claims of land ownership and, on the other hand, to facilitate state policies of forcing the Bedouin into urban setdements.

Recent “alternatives” to law assume diverse forms and include various community mediation programs. Proponents see these programs as a triumph of empowered individuals and communities over the state. By contrast, early critics—in their various ways—view such programs as an expansion and intensification of state control. Against both, and working with “new informalist” insights, this article focuses on the political logic of community mediation practices. Drawing on Foucault, it explores mediation as a governmentalization (cf. expansion) of state dispute resolution which marshals both techniques of discipline and self in an attempt to produce peaceful individual selves. A case study is used to analyze community mediation as a confessional institution that deploys sociocultural pressures in search of nondisputing self-identities. The article concludes that the search for fixed notions of individual, self, or even community empowerment may entrench, rather than resist, current forms of regulation in dispute resolution arenas.

The authors set out two key hypotheses. To address these hypotheses, (1) that inmates (deviants) reject the rules of the conventional order and (2) that they consciously do so as part of a subcultural group, the authors examine offenders' ideals about sanctions for rule breaking. The prison culture literature emphasizes the existence, most prevalent in custodial-oriented institutions, of an inmate subculture characterized by opposition and solidarity. These generalizations are primarily sustained by examining inmates' conformity with staff rules and expectations. This leaves open the question whether this solidary opposition and rejection of conventional norms extends beyond prison walls to broader societal norms regulating deviance. To measure the overall pattern and the relative importance of legally relevant and irrelevant criteria, the researchers obtained responses from a random sample of incarcerated offenders to vignettes describing criminal acts and other potential determinants of sanctions. Neither hypothesis was supported. Inmate sanctioning ideals most nearly resemble, in quality and quantity, those that they individually attribute to the contemporary judiciary. Yet most inmates believe that the other inmates, in contrast with themselves, would reject a coherent system of legal sanctions. The authors discuss the implications of the resulting (collectively self-contradictory) myth of inmate lawlessness.

By requiring that police issue fourfold warnings to silence and appointed counsel prior to any custodial questioning, Miranda v. Arizona (1966) created universalistic criteria for the legal regulation of police interrogations. While Miranda appears to be partly responsible for the dramatic decline in violence in the interrogation room in the 20th century, American police have become skilled at the practice of manipulation and deception during interrogation. Drawing on more than 500 hours of participant observation fieldwork in three police departments, I argue that the sequence, structure, and process of contemporary American police interrogation can best be understood as a confidence game based on the manipulation and betrayal of trust. Understanding interrogation as a confidence game, I argue, goes a long way toward explaining (1) the paradoxical observation that criminal suspects continue to provide police with incriminating statements, admissions and confessions in the majority of cases; (2) the nature of the social interaction during interrogation more generally; and (3) how contemporary police interrogators both exercise and mystify their power inside the interrogation room.

Sociolegal scholars have become increasingly interested in comparative legal cultures, largely under the hypotheses that what people think about the law and the values embedded therein has something to do with how they behave and, ultimately, some consequences for the larger political and legal systems. For instance, attitudes toward the rule of law no doubt influence (though they do not determine) people's willingness to comply with laws. Most agree that one cannot understand the role of law in society without understanding something of legal cultures. We present an investigation into the legal cultures of the countries of the European Union. Drawing on mass surveys conducted within each of the countries (including a separate sample in East Germany), we explore popular attitudes toward various dimensions of law: support for the rule of law; perceptions that law is a nonneutral, repressive force; and support for individual liberty. Although our analysis focuses on national differences, we also explore within-system variation (e.g., across various socioeconomic strata). Ultimately, our purpose is to document cross-national differences in legal cultures and to take some tentative steps toward explaining the origins of these differences.

This article reports data that contrast with an extended tradition of viewing litigation as incompatible with ongoing relationships. Within the regulatory process at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), nongovernmental actors having the most sustained relationships with EPA are the ones most likely to engage in litigation against the agency. Litigation within regulatory relationships is not explained by existing theory, which treats litigation largely as a function of relationships. A disturbance theory of disputing, which focuses on how litigation interacts with existing relationships, provides a more robust account of litigation generally and of its compatibility with ongoing regulatory relationships.

Researchers and policymakers have long been concerned about the extent to which such sociocultural factors as ethnicity and gender determine access to organizational rewards and constraints within legal systems. Scholars have also wondered whether less formal processes, such as those found in alternative dispute resolution, are especially susceptible to bias. To test these arguments, we studied the impact of disputants' ethnicity and gender on monetary outcomes in 312 adjudicated and 154 mediated small claims civil cases in Bernalillo County (Albuquerque), New Mexico, in 1990–91. Multivariate analysis including case characteristics showed that much of the effect of disputants' ethnicity and gender on outcomes—especially in courtroom hearings—was accounted for by the kinds of cases in which women and minorities were involved. Controlling for case characteristics eliminated ethnic and gender differences in adjudication, but some ethnic differences remained in mediated case outcomes. Specifically, cases including at least one Anglo mediator resulted in higher monetary outcomes for Anglo claimants, and minority female claimants received lower monetary outcomes in mediated cases in which both mediators were women.

Historiography and epistemology are two subjects not often brought together in sociolegal studies. This article takes reconstructions of legal history as a subject of sociological investigation. The institutional “acceptability” of any historical representation is a complex social achievement since there are no objective criteria for verifying historical accounts. I juxtapose two competing reconstructions of Fourteenth Amendment history, by legal scholars Charles Fairman and William Crosskey, and examine how both reconstructions took place with reference to preexisting interpretive frameworks. I also examine the social and institutional settings in which these histories interacted and competed for credibility. The Fairman/Crosskey dispute served to socialize future participants in Fourteenth Amendment debate. With the Fairman/Crosskey exchanges, battle lines were drawn and topics of debate were established.

Given that democratization is an ongoing, dynamic process, what explains the emergence and maintenance of some types of political institutions and the decline of others? The answer, we argue, lies not in the intentional design of long-run constitutional principles but rather in the short-run strategic choices of political actors. While many would agree with this vision as applied to legislative or executive institutions, we claim that it is equally applicable to courts. After laying out our argument—a theory of institutional emergence and maintenance—in some detail, we test it by applying game theory to a critical moment in American history: the defining sequence of events for American presidential-court relations that played out between President Thomas Jefferson and Chief Justice John Marshall in the early 1800s. Our analysis allows us to assess factors fundamental to most explanations of the Jefferson-Marshall conflict: the political and institutional preferences of the actors (especially Jefferson's preferences over judicial review) and the larger political environment in which the conflict took place. It also provides important insights into how we might study other interinstitutional interactions, be they of historical moment or of future concern.

A citizen's judgment of wrongdoing in an organizational setting may depend on characteristics of the citizen, of the accused, or both. In 1993, random sample surveys exploring judgment of corporate wrongdoing were carried out in Washington, DC (N = 602), Tokyo, Japan (N = 600), and Moscow, Russia (N = 597). Respondents heard hypothetical vignettes about wrongdoing in organizations and were asked to judge the actor's responsibility and related issues; they also provided demographic information and recounted their attitudes toward corporations. Education was more powerfully related than social class to responsibility judgments. In the United States, education's effects on responsibility were indirect, operating through attitudes toward obedience and toward corporate accountability. Russian and Japanese results were unmediated by attitudes. It appears that responsibility is primarily a function of sociolegal factors (such as aspects of the case) and secondarily a function of social characteristics and the sense of similarity or difference they engender. The article concludes by discussing general issues in accountability within corporate settings across cultures.