One of the stated objectives of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa was the creation of a political culture respectful of human rights. Thus, part of the “reconciliation” sought by the truth process was nurturing a set of cultural values among the populace that would make the gross human rights abuses that characterized the apartheid regime difficult if not impossible to reimplement in the future. Those creating the truth and reconciliation process assumed (hoped) that knowledge of the truth about the country's apartheid past would somehow contribute to the development of such a culture.

The purpose of this article is to investigate whether a culture respectful of human rights has been created in South Africa. Based on a survey of roughly 3,700 South Africans (concluded early in 2001), I begin by conceptualizing what it means for cultures and individuals to be supportive of human rights. This conceptual approach then provides guidance for operationalizing support for human rights—and in particular support for universalism in the rule of law—within the survey context. Thus, the first objective of my article is descriptive: To what extent has a human rights culture been created in South Africa?

But this article is about far more than describing the human rights culture of South Africa. The truth and reconciliation process hypothesizes that “truth” can contribute to this culture. But does it? With measures of the degree to which individual South Africans accept the truth about the country's apartheid past, this hypothesis can be rigorously tested. In addition, I explore a variety of additional explanations of support for human rights values, ranging from experiences under apartheid to attitudes toward South Africans of a different race. I conclude that whether a South African prefers a universalistic approach to the rule of law depends upon truth acceptance, interracial attitudes, and support for strong majoritarianism. Still, even with controls, racial differences in attitudes toward the rule of law persist in contemporary South Africa. Perhaps the most important contribution of this article is its evidence that the truth—participation in a country's collective memory—can affect the values that individual citizens hold.

Using Alien Tort Claims Act suits against multinational corporations as an immediate context for discussion, this article explores the emerging field of corporate social responsibility. The article argues for an understanding of concrete legal struggles as part of broader competing strategies for regulating corporate obligations to a multitude of stakeholders. By identifying and analyzing the positions of concrete actors who operate in the field, the main thesis of this article is that the field strongly tilts in the direction of voluntary and self-reliant models of corporate responsibility. The article identifies this process as consistent with the privatization of regulative structures in general and with extant modeling of corporate governance in particular, and points at the correlation between these trends and the interests of multinational corporations.

This research addresses affirmative and negative motivations for compliance with social and environmental regulations. Affirmative motivations emanate from good intentions and a sense of obligation to comply. Negative motivations arise from fears of the consequences of being found in violation of regulatory requirements. The relevance of these is examined for data concerning the motivations of homebuilders to comply with requirements of building codes. The findings highlight the importance of affirmative motivations for situations such as homebuilding for which regulation is better characterized as fulfillment of a social contract than solely as compliance with enforced directives.

In their interactions with citizens, police officers are prohibited from (1) using unnecessary Force, (2) Abusing their authority, (3) speaking Discourteously, or (4) using Offensive language, all captured by the acronym FADO. However, acts of police misconduct are complex social phenomena that involve both following legal guidelines and responding to extralegal or mitigating circumstances. Using a factorial survey of police-civilian interactions that introduce various dimensions of FADO and surrounding circumstances, respondents are asked to rate from zero to ten the seriousness of police misconduct in an encounter. Findings show that respondents' judgments of the seriousness of misconduct consider both legal and extralegal dimensions. On the legal side of the ledger, officers' unnecessary use of force and use of offensive language significantly increase judgments of serious misconduct; on the extralegal side of the ledger, civilians' confrontational demeanor significantly reduces judgments of serious misconduct. The findings suggest that citizens expect officers to behave professionally, or by the book, but with a recognition that “street-level” discretion has a place in an officer's toolkit. Citizens' expectations that street-level discretion has its place is also demonstrated by findings for the dimension abuse of authority: Abuse or threatening behavior by officers is not a significant predictor of serious police misconduct. In addition, characteristics of the respondents explain propensities to observe different degrees of police misconduct. Controlling for the social status, political orientation, and prior experience of respondents with the police, we find that (1) blacks rate police misconduct significantly higher than their white counterparts, and (2) liberals rate police misconduct significantly higher than their conservative counterparts. Differences in judgments by blacks and whites and by liberals and conservatives concerning judgments of police misconduct have important implications for the legitimacy of police authority.

This article focuses on constitutional developments and legal policies in Central Europe since 1989 and elaborates on their temporal analysis with special emphasis on the distinction between demos and ethnos in the political and legal discourse. Using various social theories of time, identity, and codification of social traditions, I argue that the difference between civility and ethnicity does not involve simply a conflict between liberal democratic aspirations and ethno-nationalist myths of authoritarian politics, but rather represents two distinct traditions manipulated by political agents and codified in the process of recent constitution-making. The process of selecting different traditions and political manipulations of the past is reflected at the level of both constitutional symbolism and specific governmental policies in post-Communist Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and the Czech Republic. The final part of the text analyzes relations between the abstract symbolic language of constitutional documents and concrete, “ethnos-” based legal policies implemented in these countries of Central Europe.

In this article, I analyze two cases where the Turkish Constitutional Court dissolved political parties during the 1990s. Specifically, I examine the cases against the Islamist Refah (Welfare/Well-Being) Party and the pro-Kurdish Halkin Emek Partisi (People's Labor Party). While the former was charged with threatening the secular basis of the national social order, the charges against the latter were around its allegedly separatist character. I engage in an in-depth analysis of the lines of argument in the indictments, arguments of defense deployed by the parties, and their ultimate contestations as they appeared in the final decisions by the Court. I see the Court as engaging with a medley of themes and tendencies, [trying to resolve them for the case at hand]. I argue that despite the differences in the construction of the alleged threats, in both cases the Court deployed a similar image of the ways in which social, political, and judicial terrains interact. A rather arbitrary boundary between the political and cultural domains informs these decisions. The Court operates with the understanding that once this boundary is transgressed, what may be harmless when an issue is cultural—such as the use of the headscarf or of the Kurdish language—may turn into a political symbol threatening the basis of the united, democratic, and progressive nation-state. In this vision, the concepts of democracy, progress, and unity are intimately tied together such that the threat to one of these concepts almost simultaneously constitutes a threat to the other two. The Court imagines itself as protecting the boundary between the political and cultural domains in an effort to uphold the right of a democracy to protect itself. This line of thought also enables the court's rather routine involvement in the political domain—which has brought about eighteen decisions for political party dissolution since 1980.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have signaled the need for sound empirical studies of the secondary effects of adult businesses on the surrounding areas for use in conjunction with local zoning restrictions. This study seeks to determine whether a relationship exists between adult erotic dance clubs and negative secondary effects in the form of increased numbers of crimes reported in the areas surrounding the adult businesses, in Charlotte, North Carolina. For each of 20 businesses, a control site (matched on the basis of demographic characteristics related to crime risk) is compared for crime events over the period of three years (1998–2000) using data on crime incidents reported to the police. We find that the presence of an adult nightclub does not increase the number of crime incidents reported in localized areas surrounding the club (defined by circular areas of 500- and 1,000-foot radii) as compared to the number of crime incidents reported in comparable localized areas that do not contain such an adult business. Indeed, the analyses imply the opposite, namely, that the nearby areas surrounding the adult business sites have smaller numbers of reported crime incidents than do corresponding areas surrounding the three control sites studied. These findings are interpreted in terms of the business mandates of profitability and continuity of existence of the businesses.

This article examines the determinants of judicial behavior in the context of transition. It tests two assumptions: first, that the judges with experience from the pretransition criminal justice system behave differently from the judges with no such experience; second, that minorities are discriminated against due to their dominant position in society before the transition and stereotypical attitudes after the transition. Using evidence from trial-level courts in Estonia, we find no statistically significant effects between case outcomes, the experience of the judge, and the ethnicity of the suspect.