This article reports the results of a qualitative study of personal injury lawyers in Connecticut. Building on the results of an earlier study of lawyers in Florida, “Transforming Punishment Into Compensation: In the Shadow of Punitive Damages” (Baker 1998), the Connecticut study describes and explores the implications of professional norms and practices that govern tort settlement behavior. In particular, it examines the moral and practical barriers to collecting “blood money” (money from individual defendants, as opposed to liability insurance companies), as well as explanations for victims' apparent ability to partially trump the claims of subrogating workers' compensation and health insurance carriers. The results pose a challenge to the conventional understanding that tort law in action is a simpler, more streamlined version of tort law on the books. In addition, the results suggest that compensation and retribution figure far more prominently in tort law in action than does the deterrence emphasized in much of the theoretical and doctrinal literature.

This is an essay about public memory and about the ways in which the law selects and shapes our recollections of the past to fit the purposes of those who dominate the present.

Variation in sentencing outcomes represents the actions of a number of members of the criminal justice system. To isolate the part of the variation that is due to the discretion of the judge (or other sentencing agent, such as a prosecutor), one can model the sentencing guidelines themselves. Such a model captures any non-linearity in the sentencing grid. In practice, modeling the guidelines rather than legal factor scores (as is common in the literature) means that more of the variation that race and legal factors share in common will be attributed to the racial status of the offender. Using data from Maryland, we find that African Americans have 20% longer sentences than whites, on average, holding constant age, gender, and recommended sentence length from the guidelines. We find more judicial discretion and greater racial disparity than is generally found in the literature. Moreover, when we begin to try to explain this discretion, we find that judges tended to give longer sentences (relative to those recommended by the guidelines) to people in the part of the guidelines grid with longer recommended sentences (who are disproportionately African American) than they gave to people in the part of the grid with lower recommended sentences.

An interesting irony of human rights is that the nation-states that are most susceptible to claims of human rights abuses may not be the most repressive nation-states. Pursuing this modern paradox, the purpose of this research is to determine the factors affecting the number of human rights claims brought by citizens in the international arena. We base our theory on an extension of theories of state strength and test it using a pooled time-series analysis of petitions filed with the European Commission on Human Rights between 1976 and 1993. We find that polity strength, measured through government openness to political minorities and participation in nongovernmental organizations, is positively linked to claims-making. In contrast, a state's tendency to act internationally, represented through participation in international governmental organizations, had a negative effect on the number of claims to the European Commission on Human Rights. Although levels of human rights abuse were positively associated with claims, other factors relating to political organization were equally or more important.

Since 1980, District Court Judges, designated pursuant to federal statute, have helped decide over 75,000 court of appeals cases—nearly one of every five merits decisions. Although scholars and judges have warned that the presence of these visitors on appellate panels may undermine consistency, legitimacy, or collegiality, little empirical evidence exists related to such concerns. Working with an especially complete data set of labor law opinions, the authors found that district court visitors perform in a much more diffident fashion than their appellate colleagues. They contribute notably fewer majority opinions and dissents. In addition, their participations do not reflect their professional or personal backgrounds to nearly the same degree as their appellate colleagues do when voting on labor law matters. The authors' findings and analyses regarding the behavior of designated district judges should be of interest to appellate courts considering the challenges of caseload management and to scholars studying processes and outcomes in the courts of appeal.

Two events in the past twelve months have made me think about the law and society field and activism—two events and many years of telling myself that our field is about more than research.

Police reformers in the early 21st century place great importance on the development of police-community partnerships, but they have not recognized the deep obstacles that these relationships face. This study argues that the central problems of working in partnership involve conflict over values: Different organizations advance different social values, and when the partners who cling to them try to collaborate, conflict flares up at the point of contact. I draw on several case studies to describe how these conflicts surface and potentially undermine partnerships, and I analyze the strategies that police agencies have developed to respond to them. This analysis reveals that community policing has fundamental (and probably desirable) implications for police practice because it forces police to attend to many neglected dimensions of their mandate. The article thereby offers a new interpretation of community policing's implications for practice and a new interpretation of its value as a reform movement.

This article explains how minority women in rural China managed to use state legal and political institutions to obtain a divorce, despite numerous obstacles. Beginning with a legal controversy over why women from the Yi minority were going to court for “fun” and then divorcing their husbands, I proceed to look at the many factors that may have contributed to divorce in rural China, such as state ethnic policy, generational empowerment, culture, and the role of community in mediation and collective action. While such factors were influential, I argue that women's divorce in Yunnan was largely the result of a particular, time-bound confluence of revolutionary political forces that were unique to China, and not the direct product of the law or ethnic culture and status.

This study examines the effect of case-processing time on judicial sentencing decisions of economic crime in Taiwan. Studies have been conducted with cases involving misdemeanors and felony homicide, but not with serious economic offenses committed in countries outside of North America. As economic crime becomes increasingly an international problem, research from other countries will be more important. The hypotheses considered were as follows: as the time between the decision to prosecute and the judicial sentencing outcome decreases, both the likelihood of being sent to prison and the likelihood of receiving a longer prison sentence increases. Our findings indicated that case-processing time is not only an indicator of offense severity but also a factor in judicial sentencing decisions.

This article undertakes an empirical investigation into the development and persistence of college hate speech codes, asking why so many elite institutions of higher learning either retained or created speech policies that contradicted a national series of court cases. The method is both quantitative and qualitative, looking for broad patterns of response among the schools and also explaining why individual institutions did or did not comply with the court decisions. In the end, the article not only teases out the why of compliance decisions but also provides a greater understanding of the relationship between legal compliance and judicial impact.

In his presidential address, Frank Munger (2001) asks us to consider a reconciliation between inquiry and activism. Although Munger uses the broader and more inclusive term “social inquiry” as his counterpoint to activism, I would like to focus on a particular type of inquiry, one that has deep roots in the Law and Society Association (LSA) and one that is most opposed to activism: social science inquiry. In short, I would argue that tensions that historically have kept the projects of inquiry and activism separate emerge out of a particular brand of inquiry known as empiricism and, among other things, its commitment to value freedom.

This article evaluates two basic issues about dockets and case outcomes in American appellate courts. First, what determines the extent to which a court devotes its docket to civil cases involving asymmetrical power relationships between litigants? Second, in civil cases in which the “have-nots” are pitted against the “haves,” which forces determine the extent to which courts favor the less privileged? To answer these questions, we identify power asymmetric civil cases and the size of each court's docket by examining all 6,750 cases decided in state supreme courts in 1996. Results reveal that contextual factors are formidable in shaping both agenda space and win rates in civil disputes involving conflicts between advantaged and disadvantaged litigants. Institutional features of supreme courts and state court systems, the supply of legal resources, and public preferences all emerge as critical influences on the willingness of the states' highest courts to decide have/have not conflicts and on the ultimate disposition of these cases. In sum, a comprehensive understanding of the ways in which courts treat cases involving the disadvantaged and, more broadly, function as agents of redistributive change cannot be achieved without focusing beyond the ideological preferences of judges and the skill of the litigants.

The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence was an erosion of the waqf system's legitimacy. In any case, legally questionable adaptations proved no substitute for the legitimate options available to corporations. As it became increasingly clear that the waqf system lacked the flexibility necessary for efficient resource utilization, governments found it ever easier to confiscate their resources. In the 19th century, the founding of European-inspired municipalities marked a formal repudiation of the waqf system in favor of government-coordinated systems for delivering public goods.

This comment responds to Frank Munger's Law and Society Association Presidential Address on scholars as activists. It argues that scholarly research can both constitute and fuel activism. Activist scholarship is, however, not confined to scholars in any one part of the political spectrum. Deeply held values can motivate exceptional work but also raise the danger that political commitments will unduly influence purportedly “objective” findings. Value-infused research should be true to research values even if inspired by political ones.

In 1992, the National Law Journal (NLJ) published a study claiming that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discriminated against minorities in its civil judicial enforcement actions by penalizing environmental law violators in minority areas far less than in white areas. NLJ claimed that this differential showed a lack of commitment to protecting the environment and public health in minority areas. This article augments, reexamines, and analyzes in a more sophisticated manner the available data. My empirical analyses demonstrate the unreliability of NLJ's methods and conclusions and indicate that minorities have not been discriminated against in these enforcement actions.