It is three minutes of ten on a Monday morning. A long buzzer sounds. Quickly sweeping papers and books aside, climbing the 40 steps in a score of bounds, crossing the wooden barrier to enter by a side door, one slips into a chair in the extreme back and side of the courtroom, at the foot of one of the great columns of Italian marble, in time to hear Al Wong, the Marshal, intone “Oyez, oyez….”

The formal announcement of the Judicial Fellows program which appears annually in PS and other professional journals, and the posters which are seen outside placement offices, convey little of the essence of the experience. Since the Judicial Fellows Program is not only the younger sibling of the Congressional and the White House Fellows, but much, much smaller—with only two or three Fellows selected annually—relatively little is known about it.

The city, it seems, acted as inspiration for the meeting. 330 panels, meetings, and receptions, an increase of 17 over any previous year, mirrored the surrounding variety. And, regardless of the opinion of a rather prominent editorialist, some of the Big Apple's excitement and activism infiltrated the atmosphere of our Annual Business Meeting. I know a number of political scientists who felt that it was a pretty good way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Participants, at an all-time high of 1,457, represented almost 50 percent of those in attendance. Political Philosophy took its place again as first in attendance at the 74th Annual Meeting, with the second ranked section a good 14 points behind (see Table 1 for further details). Significantly, only three panels were reported to have over 100 persons in attendance (Table 2).

The National Science Foundation provides support for basic social science research on law and legal institutions through the Law and Social Sciences Program. The primary emphasis of the program is on research that will enhance understanding of the nature and sources of variation in legal rules and institutions and their consequences. Proposals directed to developing methodologies for the social scientific study of law are also considered. Proposals concerning criminal aspects of the law will be considered if they relate primarily to theoretical questions in the social scientific study of the law. However, the central focus of the Law and Social Sciences Program is on noncriminal aspects of the legal system.

Those who anticipate submitting proposals might keep in mind the broad concerns that are central to the program:

1. The capacity of law, through statutes, administrative regulations, and court decisions, to affect individual and organizational behavior, its limitations in regulating action, conditions which enhance or diminish the impact of law, and the processes by which that impact is achieved or diminished.

2. The use of alternative methods, both formal (legal) and informal (extra-legal), for dealing with disputes, and factors that contribute to the selection of the alternatives used.

3. Change in the legal system, its causes and the processes by which it occurs, with particular emphasis on factors affecting the use of law as an instrument of social control.

In 1969 PS published the findings of APSA's first survey on the status of women in the discipline. The author concluded: “Tokenism is the prevailing pattern.” More than half of the departments had no female faculty members. Among 18 of the “distinguished” departments women comprised only 4.3 percent of the aggregate faculty. Female faculty were concentrated in undergraduate departments, in small departments with 15 or less faculty members and in part-time jobs. Has the status of women in the profession improved since 1969? To the extent that numbers can tell, this report examines the effects of a decade of affirmative action.

Like the leading edge of the hurricaine, the first signals of the approaching depression in the academic job market are upon us. The change in expectations from 1968 to 1978 is hard to overstate. Departments that assumed their students would get “appropriate” jobs without help must now organize to get any employment for some of their graduates. It is not uncommon for graduates from second-level institutions to find that there simply are no academic jobs in their specialty anywhere in the country. Increasingly, departments are haunted by the fear of being “tenured up,” so even tenure-track junior positions may not lead anywhere. Already we are seeing the first consequences of this, as people rejected for tenure compete with new Ph.D.s for entry-level positions. All this is merely prelude, however, since the first actual population decline in the 18–22 year age bracket will not occur until the early 1980s, just about the time that people now entering graduate school will come on the job market.