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.

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.

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.

This study examines the interim and final dispositions of 379 criminal cases involving mentally disordered defendants. The findings indicate that a history of mental health problems tends to elicit a lenient penal sanction, even in the face of a criminal history. Furthermore, these findings show that the court used its authority to impose mental health treatment on criminal defendants as often as it imposed punishment.

Social scientists have long been skeptical of the power of the threat of legal sanctions, as invoked by enacted laws, to control behavior. This skepticism has been supported by the failure of empirical studies, especially those based on official records of crimes and of the apprehension of offenders, to provide convincing evidence of the deterrent effect of legal penalties. The possibility that an experimental design might avoid the defects of other studies of deterrence has been suggested, and for this purpose, traffic law and its enforcement are especially salient. This paper reports on such a field experiment, which resulted in the conclusion that an increased threat of legal punishment, albeit a relatively small fine, reduced by one-half the number of customary offenders.