Prior research has speculated about, but has not provided systematic empirical data on, how officers use their prior knowledge to interpret wife assault situations and how these interpretations shape their responses. Our findings challenge claims that officers' reluctance to pursue formal arrest stems primarily from their proclivity to blame victims. By manipulating whether or not a wife exhibited abnormal behavior, we show that experienced officers do not focus on whether wives can control their “provoking” actions and are to blame; instead they consider the relative credibility and dangerousness of the husband. Prior experience with handling wife assault situations thus shifts the focus of decisionmaking from normative considerations such as blameworthiness to efficiency considerations such as substantiating claims for successful prosecution. However, both novice and experienced officers base their arrest decisions on prior beliefs about whether wives provoke their husbands when wives have alcohol problems. Our findings indicate that future research can profitably examine how prior knowledge shapes interpretations to gain a better understanding of police decisionmaking.

Despite the great varieties of imperial relationships, most scholarship has focused on law as an instrument of imperial domination. This article invites greater attention to the motives and actions of the subject population. In the Middle East, the pattern of legal change suggests that imperial control affected the outcome of elite efforts but did not supplant them. In Egypt, legal reform was largely the fruit of efforts undertaken by a centralizing elite that sought to circumscribe foreign influence even when it collaborated with it. This elite used law to preempt imperial penetration and strengthen the administrative capacity of the Egyptian state. The Egyptian population subject to the new legal system shaped its development still further.

In western Europe as well as in the United States, litigation often operates as a means of political contestation. This article draws on a study of land use disputes in similar U.S., French, and west German metropolitan areas to analyze cross-national differences in the way local political actors employ courts. More an extension of pluralist policymaking patterns in the United States, political litigation in the European settings occurs as part of starker challenges to corporatist and statist patterns. The contrast between centralized and federal governmental arrangements helps to explain why the political consequences of litigation in the French and the German settings also differ.

The metaphors Santos (1995) affords us for orienting a postmodern subject no doubt emerge from a substantial body of empirical research and theoretical deliberation. Having only been provided with a very brief summary of his remarks upon which to base my own, I risk an insistence upon sociohistorical contextualization that may well be more appropriately attended to in Santos's aggregated agenda. So be it. My point, in any case, is simply to suggest that rather than privilege any formulation of the subject, postmodern or otherwise, in a progressive reimagining of the law, we put the subject at risk by continuously interrogating its privileges. I might begin by disputing Santos's claim that “we” are in a period of “paradigmatic transition” by virtue of having to acknowledge other knowledges and “rival epistemologies” by asking for whom the exhaustion of modernity's certainties is a “deep and irresolvable crisis.” Similarly, one could argue that, far from being exhausted, modernity's categories continue to provide many of the conceptual resources for a truly profound expansion of democratic politics—one that is only now realizing its potential by virtue of the failure of Enlightenment universal-isms and the proliferation of identities, epistemologies, and new social movements (Botwinick 1993; Laclau 1993, 1994; Lefort 1988; McClure 1992; Mouffe 1992a, 1993, 1995). Such politics, of course, are very likely to be enacted in struggles to expand the inclusiveness of common law and legislative categories—in courts, legislatures, and administrative tribunals, at local, national, and international levels. I will briefly return to the potential politics of postmodernity in my conclusion, for it is there, perhaps, that we might find more promising resources for a new conception of law.

Even in this “adapted and simplified” package, Boa Santos (1995) makes a powerful case for a new legal theory able to survive and prosper in “the forthcoming paradigmatic competitions” (p. 574). I have not yet read the extended argument in Santos's book, but I am already persuaded that his cosmopolitan learning and encompassing synthesis has the power to inform and challenge legal scholars in all parts of the globe. His argument is admittedly utopian, and he is well aware of the possibilities that what he offers will require some remarkable societal changes—and can, in any event, be “coopted.” But that does not detract from the power of the vision. Rather than comment on the vision itself, however, I will use his analysis to focus on a slightly different research agenda and theoretical perspective. I think the approach discussed in this comment is complementary, but it requires that I begin with a disagreement about the framing of the issue.

Community standards for sexually explicit and violent depictions were measured using a representative sample of Western Tennessee residents. The residents were randomly assigned to view sexually explicit films charged in an obscenity case, violent materials, or control materials. The results showed that residents believe the sexually explicit films charged in the case did not appeal to a self-reported shameful, morbid, or unhealthy (prurient) interest in sex, and are not patently offensive. Community members indicated they would be substantially less accepting of the sexually explicit materials if they contained rape and bondage, and they showed virtually no acceptance of materials including children actors under the age of 18. Despite acceptance of sexually explicit films, there was no evidence that a majority of members of the community accepted violent “slasher” films. However, participants believed that the majority of others in the community tolerated the violent films they had viewed. These findings are discussed in light of an obscenity standard that presumes to take into account conventional morality and community opinion and the discrepancy between the obscenity code and community standards.

Research examining the relative effectiveness of mediation and adjudication has raised questions about whether the apparent benefits of mediation can be attributed to differences in the two dispute resolution procedures or, instead, are due to differences in the characteristics of the disputes or disputants. Litigants in four small claims courts provided multiple comparison groups that enabled us to examine case and process effects. Disputes and disputants in mediation and adjudication differed on few attributes. The process, outcomes, and impact of mediation and adjudication differed in ways generally consistent with their theoretical differences. Although the degree of liability admitted by the defendant played a role, overall, differences in the effectiveness of mediation and adjudication were due more to differences in the processes themselves than to differences in the disputes and disputants using each procedure.

What happens when the occupiers abandon the city but the forces of liberation fail to show up? What should we do when the rebels lose the people in a thicket of doctrine and become terrorists, but the empire can't imagine how to strike back except with more terror directed at the same people?

The authors apply recent work on regulation to anthropological analyses of community. In Ontario, Canada, the Provincial Police, community leaders, and the traveling show industry itself regulated shows, albeit to different ends and through different means. For rural Ontarians, invoking the law to combat crooked American carnivals articulated and reinforced local and national identity. Distinctions between insiders and outsiders were amplified because circus folk were quintessential others—itinerants and even “freaks.” Unlike most outsiders, however, carnies reveled in their difference and saw through the moral hypocrisy of regulation.