Official and unofficial forms of social control are usually considered substitutable responses to individual acts of deviance. This analysis of the lynching and execution of blacks in North Carolina indicates that these two forms of social control, one official and the other unofficial, served not simply as substitutes, but also as complements during much of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Only after the disenfranchisement of the black population did the relationship between official and unofficial killing begin to imply substitution. This relationship, and its transformation following disenfranchisement, are more easily understood from a social conflict perspective than from an approach that emphasizes social control as a response to individual deviance. These results imply that future inquiries into relations among forms of social control might profit from an increased sensitivity to the dynamics of macrosocial conflict.

This article details the history and philosophy behind attempted major changes in police tradition and organization that were fostered by women between 1920 and 1931 in Germany. Women police, led by Josefine Erkens and influenced by their background as social workers, tried to develop a social-work–oriented policing. Erkens held successive leadership positions in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. With each new position she pioneered ways of thinking about the role of women in police work and about the relation between social work as a profession and policing as a profession. She became a controversial figure and was finally dismissed from her position in Hamburg. The case examined in this paper shows the influence on police of gender role uncertainty, interest group pressures, the political environment, and conflicting views of police professionalism. The article also discusses the difficulties involved in trying to integrate within one organization two disparate professional paradigms: that of law enforcement, with its emphasis on deterrence, and that of social work, with its emphasis on rehabilitation.

This paper tests the hypothesis that financially and organizationally stronger parties tend to prevail in litigation against weaker parties, either because the normative structure of the American legal system has favored “the haves,” or because judges' attitudes do, or because stronger parties have strategic and representational advantages in litigation. The study is based on a sample of 5,904 cases from sixteen state supreme courts, 1870–1970. According to our data, stronger parties, especially larger governmental units, did tend to achieve an advantage over weaker parties, but the advantage generally was rather small. The stronger parties' edge recurs in subsamples for different types of cases, time periods, and types of legal representation. It is attributed in part to the greater litigational capabilities of stronger parties.

This is a comparative study of legal mobilization that shows how various patterns of legal representation and layperson participation affect the scope and pace of mobilization. These patterns do not emerge from whole cloth during a particular legal mobilization but rather develop according to preexisting trends of representation and participation.

The author first discusses this analytic framework and then presents four case studies. Ultimately he presents a comparative analysis of these cases to generalize about the relationship between the patterns and the scope and pace of mobilization. He argues that patterns of legal representation and layperson participation are powerful determinants of the style and outcome of legal mobilization.

A number of contemporary scholars have argued that Max Weber sought to establish a positive relationship between the highest form of rationality in legal thought—logically formal rationality, and the most advanced type of economic rationality, that embodied in capitalism. Since capitalism actually developed first in England, where no such logically formal legal system existed, these scholars conclude that Weber's sociology of law suffers from various contradictions that are frequently referred to as the “England problem.” This paper rejects the idea of the “England problem” and argues that Weber actually identified formal justice and guaranteed rights, rather than logically formal legal thought, as the features of modern law that directly facilitated the rise of capitalism. It also challenges Habermas's claim that Weber ignored the normative dimension of modern law and argues that he considered the “rightness” of law to be an important factor in the rise of capitalism but found that with the disenchantment of law this normative dimension has weakened.