This article challenges the prevailing scholarly belief that women have always been at the periphery of crime and argues that a central issue for those studying the criminal process should be the decline over time of women as criminal offenders and defendants. Our argument rests on examination of criminal cases in the Old Bailey in London for 1687–1912, as well as of data drawn from English and some American courts for this period. For much of the eighteenth century women made up a substantial portion (over 45 percent at times) of all those indicted for felony offenses, in sharp contrast to contemporary levels of less that 15 percent. We conclude that the change is “real”—it cannot be explained away as an artifact of selective reporting, shifting jurisdiction, short-lived idiosyncratic enforcement policies, etc. We argue that these changes parallel and may be explained by significant shifts in the roles accorded women in the economy, the family, and society, and we conclude that the vanishing female in the criminal process may reflect a shift to more private forms of social control brought on by shifting social attitudes and the rise of industrialism.

In an influential article, Schwartz and Orleans (1967) reported that emphasizing normative obligations to obey the law had a greater positive impact on tax compliance than did emphasizing deterrence factors. In this article, we report the results of a conceptual replication of that earlier experiment, within the context of a dynamic model of tax schema change.

Prior to filing the 1987 tax year return (the first affected by the 1986 Tax Reform Act, TRA), taxpayers viewed one of two videotapes, one emphasizing the social consequences of the TRA and normative duties, the other emphasizing the personal consequences of the TRA and strategies to reduce tax liability. A control group of taxpayers did not receive information about the TRA. Data on attitudes, beliefs, and self-reported compliance were collected at three points during the tax season. Tax return data from the IRS were also obtained. The results indicate that the normative and personal consequences messages had predictable and persistent effects on tax-specific attitudes. However, these effects did not translate into changes in basic values or compliance, as reflected by either the self-report or the official tax return data. Possible explanations for the discrepancy between the results reported by Schwartz and Orleans (1967) and this experiment are considered.

This article reports on the first quantitative perceptual deterrence study of corporate (rather than individual) deterrence. The study is based on interviews with 410 chief executives of small organizations and their officially recorded compliance with regulatory standards. We find partial support for the certainty of detection as a predictor of both self-reported and officially recorded compliance but no support for the certainty or severity of sanctioning. The narrow range of sanctions available in the particular regulatory domain studied (regulation of nursing home quality) has enabled a fuller specification than was possible in previous studies of an expected utility model for all available sanctions. Managers' expected corporate disutility from all sanctions fails to explain compliance. Deterrence does not work significantly more effectively for chief executives (a) of for-profit versus nonprofit organizations, (b) who are owners compared with those who are not owners, (c) who say they think about sanctions more (sanction salience), (d) who may better fit the rational choice model in that they are low on emotionality, (e) who have a weaker belief in the law. Nor is deterrence more effective when compliance costs are low.

This article reports field research on Papua New Guinea's land courts, which decide property disputes in customary law. Customary law did not contemplate exchange of real property outside the kin group. Changing conditions have created an irresistible pressure for markets in land, which require extending law to encompass exchange with outsiders. The freehold solution is to give absolute, unitary ownership over land to individuals and end the kin group's role in resource allocation. Alternatively, the kin group can be reconstituted as a cooperative with ownership rights. If imposed by legislative fiat, either of these solutions will disrupt the customary economy by displacing its incentive system. A better solution allows custom to evolve and modernize itself through the common law process.

Apparently naive, but in fact not, is the question: What do lawyers do? Many scholars assume the central role of the lawyer is that of the advocate, but among lawyers working in law firms advocacy consumes little of their time. Similarly, the term lawyer provides hardly any meaning in itself. The research presented here is based on a participant-observation study of a corporate law firm. The central thesis proposed, in the light of case studies of the selling of shopping mall and the arranging of a bank loan, is that business lawyers are engaged in managing uncertainty for both their clients and themselves. Managing uncertainty is accomplished through interaction rather than appeals to the law.

Injury is common in all societies. Americans are perceived as quick to respond to injury by turning to the legal system. This article compares compensation seeking by Americans and Canadians, examining the degree to which cultural factors shape the response of injured parties in the two countries and the extent to which resources and experience influence individual action. Drawing on two large-scale telephone surveys, one conducted in five federal judicial districts around the United States and one conducted in the Canadian province of Ontario, the article looks at the factors that influence claiming and seeking legal assistance. The overall patterns indicate that residents of Ontario are somewhat less likely to claim but more likely to seek legal assistance than are residents of the United States. Moreover, while cultural variations (e.g., religion, type of residence) are good predictors of claiming in Ontario, these factors have little influence on claiming in the United States. As for seeking legal assistance, few predictors are found to influence behavior in the United States while a variety of factors (community size, type of problem, stakes, gender, and education) influence behavior in Ontario.

In this article we clarify and modify Marxian and postindustrial predictions about the structural transformation of the legal profession, especially as they relate to gender differences in the law firm. In doing so, we utilize the concept of cultural capital and highlight the changing gender stratification of legal practice. We find that there is a growing centralization and concentration of cultural capital in law firms, so that both men and women are losing their proportionate shares of partnership positions in the profession, but with women losing more than men. The greatest growth in the profession has been at the middle and lower levels of larger firms, and women are especially likely to be represented in these locations. Women experience their worst partnership prospects in smaller firms, which suggests that male-dominated smaller firms are especially resistant to modifying the work roles assumed by men and women in the profession. We conclude that gender stratification is an important part of the structural transformation of legal practice.

Civil damage awards in wrongful death cases and experimental data from jury simulations reveal that male decedents are typically awarded substantially higher monetary damages than are similarly situated female decedents. These differences in treatment may arise because female decedents are perceived as worth less, female survivors are perceived as more needy, and/or male decedents are perceived to have a longer lost income stream than any female decedents. Mock jurors received written summaries of wrongful death cases stipulating to the liability of the defendant. They were asked to award an appropriate sum in damages and about the factors they considered in making these awards. Male decedents received higher awards in two separate studies. While mock jurors were sensitive to the perceived needs of the surviving spouse, the disparity in awards was primarily attributable to differences in the estimated lost income of the male and female decedents.

Researchers use a variety of approaches in analyzing dispute processing outside of adversarial court proceedings. Some emphasize disputant decisionmaking, while others, who generally take a more critical view of these alternatives, approach dispute processing alternatives from the perspective of the state and its interests. In this article I use a third approach which focuses on the political behavior of actors involved in the organization, administration, and staffing of these alternative mechanisms. The approach is applied to a relatively new alternative to adjudication in the courts in India, the lok adalat.

Repeat players and plaintiffs seem to have an advantage in the negotiation phase and in the trial phase of civil disputes. We suggest that their advantage may turn to a disadvantage after the court's judgment, when the award has to be collected. We contacted attorneys for all cases in three trial courts in The Netherlands in which the plaintiff's claim had been granted in whole or in part in a final decision three years earlier (N=970). We asked them to what extent the defendant complied with the judgment. The results show that plaintiffs have difficulty in collecting their awards. On average, only a little more than half the award is collected after three years. Repeat players continue to prevail if they are plaintiffs, but are worse off than one-shotters if they are defendants.

Criminal justice systems have been described as fragmented and decentralized “nonsystems,” but sudden changes in the environments of criminal justice organizations may affect the loose coupling that normally characterizes such agencies. Court orders against county jails create pressures to tighten the loose coupling among local organizational subsystems: the jail, law enforcement, courts, probation, and county government. Using interviews with key officials, court documents, and other archival data, we examined changes in interorganizational relations in three California counties under court orders to reform local jails. While court orders eventually resulted in tighter coupling of the subsystems and more proactive interagency responses, the more reactive mode of response characteristic of loosely coupled subsystems initially led to increased interagency conflict. Adaptations were influenced by the legal, political, and organizational environments of each jurisdiction.