This paper reports on research focused on measuring perceptions of justice vis-a-vis an examination of consensus in perceptions of appropriate punishments for convicted offenders. We used a factorial survey design to measure and analyze both the global judgments formed by individuals as well as the judgment-making principles that characterize the race by gender segments of the general population of one jurisdiction.

A proximity-to-crime perspective leads us to expect structured similarities and differences in judgments of appropriate prison sentences. A global judgment agreement indicator suggests consensus across the race by gender segments of the Boston metropolitan area over which crimes are serious and trivial. The same indicator, however, shows dissensus within the general population regarding perceptions of appropriate levels of punishment.

The research findings suggest that perceived or subjective proximity to crime has stronger implications than objective proximity for judgments of punishments for convicted offenders. The paper concludes that a sense of injustice in regard to punishments prevails for some segments of the general population.

The significance of apology after serious injury depends on social and cultural factors that appear to be understood differently in Japan and America. As a consequence, what is considered a sincere apology is not the same in the two societies. Moreover, the role of an apology as an ingredient in the formal resolution of legal disputes diverges. Salient legal aspects of apology are discussed, along with the possibilities that an apology may be a defense to a claim, that it may be an admission of another's claim, and that an apology may be a legal remedy for injury. The role in Japan of the formal letter of apology, shimatsusho, is described. It is suggested that apology may be an underdeveloped aspect of dispute resolution in America. There are some injuries when an apology alone surely is inadequate compensation, but there are other injuries when traditional common law remedies are unsatisfactory and an apology may be a crucial element in the recognition and restoration of human relationship.

This paper is a case study of the occupational safety and health provisions of the Italian Workers' Rights Law of 1970, which gave Italian workers the broad right to regulate safety and health conditions at the shop level. The paper traces the political history of this controversial legislation and workers' and employers' responses to it. It then provides evidence that the law was neither the mere “symbolic gesture” nor the tool to “open new horizons” that observers variously predicted. The paper argues that to account for the formulation of this law and its ambiguous impact, the economic and political contradictions into which it was inserted must be placed at the center of analysis. It thus challenges the kind of legal determinism implicit in many analyses of the sociology of law that make the state and legal phenomena the central actors.

Professions are historically specific institutions for organizing the production and distribution of services. American lawyers constructed the contemporary legal profession between the 1870s and the 1950s by forming local, state, and national bar associations through which they sought, with considerable success, to control the production of and by producers of legal services. In the last two decades, these structures of control have significantly eroded. Lawyers exerted no restraint over the threefold increase in law students since the early 1960s or the changes in the composition of that student body. Restrictive practices taken for granted for half a century have been summarily eliminated by judicial decisions and executive action. To the extent that lawyers have responded by seeking to create new demand, they run the risk of intensifying competition, becoming more dependent on the state, and organizing hitherto atomistic consumers into collectivities that can challenge professional dominance. The image of the profession as a homogeneous collection of independent practitioners is harder to maintain. The proportion of employees is growing, solo practitioners are declining in the face of a hostile economic environment, and units of production are growing in size and becoming more bureaucratic. Divisions of race, gender, age, and class, superimposed over the differentiation of lawyers among structures of practice and the stratification of private practice into two hemispheres, make professional unity increasingly problematic. For similar reasons, self-regulation is being undermined from within while it is challenged from without. These cumulative transformations demand that we reconsider whether it is useful to continue thinking of the practice of law as a profession.

In this comment the author argues that Wagatsuma and Rosett correctly identify a critical cultural influence on the role of law and legal process in Japan. He suggests, however, a broader view of the implications of apology, notably for the United States in both civil and criminal suits.

Beer has been prohibited in Iceland since 1915, but wine has been legally imported since 1922, as have all other alcoholic beverages since 1934. Since 1932, ten unsuccessful attempts have been made to repeal the beer prohibition. Using the records of parliamentary debates, newspaper reports, opinion poll results, and interviews, we examine the degree of fit between this legislation and Gusfield's model of linkage between status politics and symbolic legislation (Gusfield, 1955, 1963, 1967). We also identify the type of demographic and economic settings that appear to create an environment that encourages symbolic politics.

A basic tenet of communist legal theory is that the judicial function should be socialized, that is, executed by laymen rather than by professional judges. Social courts have been created in all of the Eastern European socialist countries to fulfill this mandate. However, the little empirical evidence available on the use of these courts indicates that they are rarely used voluntarily by individuals, but rather are primarily instruments of state social control over individuals.

The major exception to this pattern of use is exhibited by the Yugoslav version of social labor courts, the Courts of Associated Labor (hereafter CAL). These courts are heavily used, and over 90 percent of their cases are brought by individual workers. This paper discusses why the CAL are attractive to individual workers, drawing on ethnographic research in the trial CAL in Belgrade and on the political arguments surrounding a 1982 parliamentary effort to “reform” the CAL out of effective existence. The basic conclusion is that the CAL are successful in attracting individual workers as litigants because they are not really social courts. Further, it is suggested that the idea of social courts is contradictory: Such courts can offer little to most members of society, but instead are even more prone than regular courts to be used as mechanisms for social control by politically powerful elites.

The size of the lawyer population in the United States has increased dramatically in the last fifteen years. The rate of growth has substantially exceeded that of the general adult population. With the entry of a large number of young adults into the profession, an increasing proportion of whom are women, the age distribution of the profession has shifted downward and the representation of women among young lawyers has rapidly risen. The absolute number of lawyers working in each employment sector has increased significantly. Although the majority of lawyers continue to engage in the private practice of law, the proportion working in firm settings has grown as the proportion in solo practice has declined. Employment patterns of men and women continue to differ, with both younger and older women less likely to engage in private practice than men and more likely to be engaged in salaried employment. Moreover, even among private practitioners, differences persist as women continue to gravitate to solo practice or employment in large firms and remain under-represented in intermediate-sized firm practice.

The juvenile court in Italy was established many years after those in the United States and other European countries. Even after its creation problems of differentiation and staffing remained, and delays plus ineffective services continue to complicate day-to-day operations of the juvenile courts. I propose that the juvenile court in Italy has been a spurious development, reflecting contradictions between the culture of legal certainty and familism, and the adoption of a pattern of discretionary justice based on the positivism of Ferri. Operations of the juvenile court resemble rituals aimed to satisfy conflicting values. Signs are that its legitimacy has been weakened and that other forms of social control have emerged or reemerged.

During the 1960s and 1970s the American social movement for equal employment opportunity (EEO) succeeded in getting Congress and the courts to prohibit discrimination in employment on the basis of race, religion, national origin, and sex. We believe that the effectiveness of EEO laws depends not just upon their passage, however, but also upon their continuing successful mobilization. This is the first article to describe quantitatively the extent and outcomes of the mobilization of EEO laws at the appellate court level. It shows that mobilization is increasing; that the federal government and various interest groups are actively involved in the enforcement process; that much is at stake in many EEO cases; that alleged victims of discrimination win their court cases over half the time; and that reverse discrimination in EEO does not seem to be a serious problem.

This paper employs data from the United States Census to raise questions about the historical demography of the legal profession in the United States between 1850 and 1980. I describe in turn (1) national lawyer population trends, (2) regional shifts in the number and ratio of lawyers to population, and (3) changes in the gender composition of the profession. The paper then considers issues concerned with demand theories of lawyer population dynamics, monopoly and supply theories, and theories of gender segmentation.

Determinate sentencing reform in Minnesota aimed at enhancing sentencing uniformity and neutrality. According to official reports by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, both of these goals were largely (although not completely) achieved during the first year of guideline implementation. However, methodological shortcomings in these reports question the true effectiveness of sentencing reform. Moreover, Minnesota's felony sentencing guidelines do not encompass the full range of sentencing options available to the courts. Our study reanalyzes the Commission's data to evaluate the degree of sentencing uniformity and neutrality achieved under regulated and unregulated sentencing decisions. Our results generally confirm the Commission's reports that regulated sentencing practices were significantly more predictable and neutral than unregulated practices. We conclude that Minnesota's reform efforts have succeeded where those other states have failed because of the presumptive (i.e., legally mandated) nature of their sentencing guidelines.