It has been a central assumption in bankruptcy policy debates that financially troubled persons faced with bankruptcy will respond to economic incentives and disincentives. Two provisions of the Bankruptcy Code (Chapters 7 and 13) are most commonly used by individual debtors. Under Chapter 7 debtors agree to give up all their property (n excess of state-determined exemptions) to a trustee for sale and distribution to creditors. Under Chapter 13 debtors keep all their property but agree to pay all or part of their debts over three to five years. This empirical study of fifteen hundred consumers in three states explores whether economic incentives and disincentives are in fact the chief factors influencing choice of chapter. The analysis demonstrates that while economic factors play a part, noneconomic factors are also significant, among them intra- and interstate migration, marital status, self-employment, state of residence, and local legal culture. We conclude that to explore fully how individual decisions are made, the simplistic economic model must be replaced by a more sophisticated model that accounts for both economic and noneconomic factors.

In March of 1900 several cases of bubonic plague were discovered in San Francisco's Chinatom. In response the health authorities, at the instance of the Surgeon General of the United States, sought to implement a series of extraordinarily coercive measures aimed at the city's Asian inhabitants. The measures provoked an uproar among the Chinese, and they determined to challenge them in the federal Circuit Court for the Northern District of California. This essay, based on extensive research in court records, the archives of the U.S. Public Health Service, and press accounts in English and Chinese, documents the complex events that gave rise to the cases of Wong Wai v. Williamson and Jew Ho v. Williamson and the cases themselves as they unfolded in the courts. The cases raised new and dificult questions of fact and of law and tested as few other cases have before or since a court's capacity to act as arbiter between individual rights (and the rights of an ostracized minority at that) and the public interest in a period of acute health emergency.

The French, American, and English legal professions are compared in terms of four common goals: to control admission and training, to protect their jurisdiction, to regulate the behavior of their members, and to enhance their cooperative status. The varying ways in which revolutionary attacks affected their capacity to realize these goals is traced. It is argued that these attacks, and the way lawyers in these societies recovered from them, largely explain the differences between the three professions in the modem world.

American federalism is nothing more-und nothing less-than a metaphor.

This was how lames Wilson, the most prominent lawyer at the Philadelphia Convention, came to approach the novel problem of understanding and conveying what federalism in a modern republic should mean. The Federal Republic created in 1787 was, for Wilson, more than a mutter of ingenious political design, more than a mutter of the “new science of politics,” and more than a mutter of constitutional law or constitutionalism itself-unless the Constitution were seen to “comprehend” the moral purpose and moral promise of the new nation.

To Wilson, this view of the importance of the moral content of republican federalism was entailed by the “knowledge” that he took to be the necessary foundation of the Republic. It was this knowledge of certain fundamental principles- of “moral science,‘I human nature, and the nature of language, and, more generally, of “cultivation” us a political and social process that was also an end in itself-that ultimately justified “the People” us the “sublime” metaphor governing American constitutional theory.

Yet, for all Wilson's faith in figurative “comprehensiveness,” his distinctive approach to securing the New Republic through a federal union of the American People seems to have proved less and less compelling to his contemporaries the more he tried to pursue it as far us his vision of a politics of cultivation directed.

Civil suits for damage awards against police officers alleged to have engaged in illegal searches have long been suggested as an alternative to the exclusionary rule as a remedy for police misconduct. A review of empirical literature on the incidence and outcomes of such suits suggests that defendant officers often prevail and that the awards do not seem large enough to produce the punishment and deterrence effect often claimed by proponents of the tort remedy. Using an experimental technique involving simulated trials and adults called for jury service as subjects, we examine the effects of two procedural aspects of such suits on juror awards. The extent of municipal liability and the substitution of the U.S. government as plaintiff do not appear to affect the incidence or size of compensatory or punitive damage awards. Denying jurors information about the outcome of the search does appear likely to increase damage awards. The article both explores factors affecting juror decision-making in these cases and illustrates the utility and limitations of the experimental method for testing suggested policy innovations.

An issue of continuing debate in the legal and social science literature is how best to control and validate the exercise of essentially legislative powers by administrative agencies. This study examines one mechanism of control, administrative de novo review of agency decisionmaking. It explores how this device functions in immigration bail administration, a system where there is a broad and vague delegation of detention and bail powers to government officials in an area of law where there is no set of preferences as to how conflicting policy claims are to be weighed in decisionmaking. The study shows a system in turmoil. The de novo review body—the immigration court—frequently and substantially modifies the Immigration Service's initial bail decisions. Because there is no agreement on the norms to guide decisionmaking, these changes have little effect on ongoing agency activity and policies. Pronounced interagency conflict and extreme decisional disparity persist given limited institutional and political arrangements for dealing with this dissensus. The study explores in detail the institutional cultures and conflicting legal and social values that shape the practice and patterns of de novo review in this field of law and discusses the implications of such conflict for the full functioning of this external review device.

The relatively greater numbers of young, female, and salaried lawyers are said to have diminished the legal profession's control of the market for its services, and hence of its income and status. This article examines the effects on lawyers' real earnings attributable to the rapid change in size and composition of the legal profession in Canada during the 1970s. An analysis of the components of inter-temporal earnings differences, which takes account of changes in composition and in the remuneration or pay structure, shows that the unprecedented growth in lawyer supply was responsible for most of the decline in lawyers' real earnings. But lawyers who were young, female, salaried, or in government service avoided this negative market effect, while lawyers who were male, self-employed, or outside the major financial centers, bore most of the negative economic impact of the rapid supply growth.

Throughout the 19th century, lawyers in France were deeply involved in political action to pursue an overriding goal–to become recognized as spokesmen for the public. This strategy governed their history; it explains their brilliant social ascent and their subsequent slow decline. As long as the conflict between state and civil society raged, lawyers were able to we assets–political mobilization, the power of the word, the esteem enjoyed by law–which had allowed them faithfully to embody public opinion in its struggle to limit state powers. From this embodiment of public ideals they derived independence, prestige, and a dominant position in the state. But when the nature of the political regime ceased to be a bone of contention and when public life became organized around other cleavages, lawyers were gradually deprived of their representative function. This marked the beginning of a social decline that became visible between the two world wars and lasted until the 1950s.

The courts, with some important qualifications, have been reluctant to uphold tax assessments based on a review of only a sample of all transactions. In this article we argue that audit assessments based on appropriately drawn and analyzed statistical samples do not suffer from the defects that the courts have correctly concluded mar assessments based on nonstatistical samples. We do, however, argue that because of the inherent imprecision of assessments based on a less-than-complete review of all records, the calculation of the assessment should include a factor to take into account the risk that the taxpayer has been overassessed. We suggest an assessment rule that does just this and also recommend guidelines for the use of statistical sampling in tax audits.

This article analvzes referral practices among lawyers. The hypothesis is that the market for legal services is “efficient,” that is, market forces enable plaintiffs in personal injury cases to maximize their recoveries, given the quality of lawyers representing defendants. If this market is indeed efficient, one would expect that legal claims which would benefit most from high-quality legal services would be assigned to high-quality lawyers. The evidence shows that referrals enable claims to be matched with lawyers in just that way. That is, through the mechanism of referrals, claims of greater intrinsic value are assigned to lawyers of higher quality.

The paper also provides a model of the decision a generalist must make: to litigate a case himself or refer it to a trial specialist. The implications of the model support the hypothesis that this market is efficient in the sense defined above.