Using case studies and interviews with lawyers and representatives in class actions, this article explores the contribution that class actions make to their ostensible beneficiaries. The article first distinguishes the major types of class actions in terms of the roles of lawyers and class representatives, ranging from very passive representatives to individuals intensively involved with the dispute that gave rise to the litigation. The article next seeks to evaluate the class actions. On the basis of the results of the class actions, the article finds that class actions cannot be proclaimed major contributors to social change. The focus on results, however, is somewhat misleading. The class action plays a much more significant role through its impact on the parties as litigants and as individuals involved with a dispute. To understand this dimension, which has applications beyond the class action, the article suggests that the dispute transformation perspective should be modified to go beyond the metaphor of a dispute that changes form as it goes through different processes. Disputants in the class action can be thought of as an audience that interprets itself—and is empowered or disempowered—in part by what it learns from watching a legal dramatization of the dispute.

To achieve institutional goals, public agencies commonly rely on the political support of interest groups, the executive, and the legislature. While much is written about public agency vulnerability to pressures from these sources, little is known about how influence and agency behavior are linked. This article provides an in-depth look at one agency's response to an important segment of its environment. Drawing on an empirical study of administrative discretion, the study explores the Immigration and Naturalization Service's dependence on the support of politicians and pragmatic response to their “casework” on behalf of constituents. The article highlights a neglected feature of the influence process—how it affects the behavior of front-line public officials, particularly through their anticipation of the possibility that there will or might be casework complaints. It describes the inspection context as understood by front-line immigration inspectors, the asymmetric risks posed to them by casework, and the strategies they “rationally” employ to deal with these risks—strategies that promote accommodation as well as responses based on the perceived power of violators. The article suggests that a lack of countervailing incentives in certain kinds of cases underlies a cultural-political environment of accommodation to outsiders.

Classical Islamic law apparently constitutes an exception to the finding that legal systems in complex societies invariably possess hierarchical appellate structures. The prevailing wisdom among Islamicists for over a half-century has asserted that there are no appellate structures in Islamic law, that the decision of a judge is final and irrevocable, and that a judgment may not be reversed under any circumstances. The exceptional nature of Islamic law has been explained by Martin Shapiro as a function of the absence of hierarchy in the Islamic religious community. In this article, I argue that Shapiro has been poorly served by Islamicist scholarship. On the basis of a reexamination of Islamic legal theory and an analysis of 14th-century Islamic court practice, I demonstrate that a judicial decision was reversible by the issuing judge himself, albeit under limited and precisely defined conditions; that hierarchical organization was a regular feature of Muslim polities; that the court of the chief judge of the capital city served as a court of review for the decisions of local judges; and that Islamic law also developed a unique, nonhierarchical system of successor review. My conclusions will be of interest both to Islamicists and to social scientists who study the relationship between judicial institutions and social organization.

Using a combination of hypothetical scenarios and survey-type questions, this study investigates the effect of the context of the offense, formal sanctions, informal sanctions, and moral beliefs on self-reported projections to commit sexual assault. Male college students read and responded to five scenarios each describing a hypothetical sexual assault by a male. Respondents were asked to estimate the certainty of formal and informal punishment for the scenario male, the extent to which they believed the male's actions were morally wrong, and the likelihood that they would do what the male did under the same circumstances. We found that projections to commit sexual assault were affected by two circumstances of the incident, the likelihood that the male would be formally sanctioned (dismissed from the university or arrested) and the respondent's moral beliefs. The significant deterrent effect observed for formal sanction threats was not invariant, however. The fear of formal sanctions had no effect when respondents were inhibited by their moral evaluation of the incident. The deterrent effect of formal sanction threats did not vary by the level of social censure for the scenario male's actions. The implications of these finding for previous and subsequent deterrence research are discussed.

In his review essay on three recent books on pornography, harms, and politics in Law & Society Review, Steven Childress (1991) has transmitted false information about my criminological research on pornography. Since such misinformation is, in part, responsible for considerable confusion about the outcome of aggregate studies of the effects of pornography on sex crimes, redress is necessary. Misinformation about crucial pornography research may have serious consequences for pornography politics and makes one wonder about the politics of pornography research.

Apparently there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and then Childress's review essay. My essay has “transmitted false information,” as Dr. Berl Kutchinsky puts it (1992:447), as well as fomenting “considerable confusion” about the outcome of various population studies on pornography and violence (ibid.). Yet since Kutchinsky points to no erroneous figures or data that I cited, other than assuming I misunderstood his own studies, at bottom the misinformation is a “false inconclusiveness verdict on the criminological pornography research” (p. 453). Worse, my essay is censorial because it calls for further study when, apparently, such testing wastes everyone's time as the matter has been definitively settled by Kutchinsky's own research.