Pollution control today is a favorite topic for campaign promises by American politicians. If the present public interest in the environment and problems of overpopulation continues, it may one day replace motherhood as the single safest subject for political rhetoric. Everyone, including polluters, is against pollution. But once that philosophical belief has been passionately embraced, the problem of achieving this highly desirable public policy goal remains. On that subject many politicians and all polluters are much less articulate. So many different opinions exist as to the best method for achieving air pollution control, water pollution abatement, and sanitary, efficient solid waste disposal, that one begins to understand why it is that little progress has been made despite the seemingly universal belief in a clean environment.

Understanding pollution is only partly a matter of becoming informed about technical variables and processes. It is also — or even predominantly — a matter of gaining knowledge about social and economic systems. As is the case with many other issues, we need to know why these systems “produce the results they do and how we can use understanding of them to produce more desirable ones” (Kneese, 1970: 190).

The current emphasis on environmental problems has resulted in the passage of new legislation and increasing public pressure upon individual companies seen as polluters. However, the factors which influence organizations to change their ways are rather hazy. In the absence of clear market controls, particular businesses may fight environment-oriented legislation, complying only when political and legal avenues have been exhausted. Other businesses may announce their intent to help clean up the environment and initiate action in this regard with relatively little prodding on the part of the public, state and federal bureaucracies, or conservation groups.

Interest in contemporary disruptions of human services administrations by involuntary clients, from welfare recipients to draft inductees, warrants an empirical investigation of prison rioting for two reasons. First, interest derives from a crisis of normal services involving such key foci of recent administative research as informal organizational behavior, the nature of professionalization of roles, and the ambiguities of clientelism. Second, the prison, while certainly not a microcosm of society, is a self-contained unit more amenable analysis than more diffuse social service milieus such as “the ghetto,” another prime locale of involuntary clientelism. The present exploratory study reviews alternative theories of the disruption of prison administration in the light of data collected on over a hundred inmate disturbances in the period from 1863-1970.

A number of writers have observed that legalism is a social phenomenon which is found only in certain kinds of legal systems and then only in certain historical periods. Perhaps it was Weber who first gave the concept a theoretical importance by associating a legalistic or “formally rational” legal system with the development of capitalism. Later writers such as Selznick have seen legalism as a complex ideal embracing certain kinds of standards to which legal systems might aspire. (Selznick, 1961). Most recently, Friedman has commented on the decline of legalism (Friedman, 1966). While the contributions of these writers are useful in elaborating the meaning of the concept of legalism, the phenomenon itself has received virtually no empirical analysis. It is the purpose of this paper to show that one possible component of legalism, viz., predictability, is by no means unique to legalism and that a nonlegalistic adjudicatory system can be as predictable if not more predictable than a legalistic system would be.

Students of the judicial process have focused considerable attention on the relationship between judges' background characteristics and their voting behavior on collegial courts. The argument for such a focus is that background characteristics are usually indicative of particular socialization processes and that these processes produce certain attitudes which are often responsible, directly or indirectly, for the judges' votes. Thus these characteristics can be viewed, in the aggregate, as predictive of judges' behavior — at least in certain types of cases.

Today, few would deny that some relation exists between firearms and violent death and crime:

Newton and Zimring of the Task Force on Firearms point out that 63% of all homicides, 37% of all robberies, and 21% of all aggravated assaults involve the use of a gun (Newton and Zimring, 1970: 39). In turn, 76%) of gun homicides are committed by handguns; similarly, 86% of aggravated assaults involving guns and 96% of robberies involving guns are committed by handguns (Newton and Zimring, 1970: 49). In short, although approximately 27% of all firearms in the United States are handguns, they are the predominant firearm used in crime (Newton and Zimring, 1970: 49).

The federal trial judge works in a court system which is rapidly modernizing by developing central administrative structures and procedures to monitor and expedite his tasks. The new structures are creating new expectations for the federal judicial role. For the incumbent judge the demand to change his role definition and his pattern of action breeds tension and resistance. The Chandler case (1970), involving the sanctioning of a trial judge by his circuit judicial council, which Justice Douglas characterized as “the most controversial contest involving a federal judge in modern United States history,” epitomizes the stress upon a trial judge, nurtured in a period of mild bureaucracy, finding himself at the end of his career in an organization with new norms and stronger instruments of enforcement.

There has recently been a growing concern within political science with the public's support for governmental institutions. To date, the research in the judicial realm — focusing extensively on the United States Supreme Court — has measured support primarily in terms of the public's evaluation of court outputs and has attempted to explain support through variables believed to function as important bases or references for these evaluations, e.g., policy orientations, political party identification, and race (Murphy and Tanenhaus, 1968a and 1968b; Dolbeare and Hammond, 1968; Dolbeare, 1967; Hirsh and Donohew, 1968). Yet the public is not especially cognizant of court decisions and the low “visibility” of judicial bodies (Dolbeare, 1967; 198-201; Barth, 1968; Jacob, 1966) would suggest that the basis of support might well be more diffuse than specific. An analysis of diffuse support might be concerned primarily with the public's general willingness to comply with judicial decrees or with its willingness to maintain judicial institutions as bodies appropriate for resolving conflicts, and only secondarily with outputs.

Political scientists now agree that the Supreme Court is a major institutional policy maker in the American political system. But they have done little to relate that conclusion to democratic theory. Nor have they bothered to draw the implications for structural reform of the Court that seem to flow from such a relationship. Specifically, we have been less concerned with holding Supreme Court justices accountable to those they govern than seeing to it that legislators and executives provide acceptable policies. Such a discrepancy becomes increasingly diffiult to justify as we dilute the traditional role distinctions between judicial and other policy making institutions of government.

Generally speaking, accountability is promoted through two devices. The first is access to the policy maker—i.e., the opportunity to be heard, to express oneself, to communicate one's preferences effectively to those whose policy actions are directly relevant. If these preferences are not sufficiently heeded, then we reserve the right to replace the incumbent with one who will provide greater satisfaction in that regard. For executives and legislators, free expression and frequent elections are appropriate means to insure accountability. But since Supreme Court justices are appointed for life (formally “good behavior,” but in fact for life), access to Court review becomes crucial.

During the past decade students of the judicial process have devoted considerable resources to an examination of the influence of political party affiliation on judicial decision making. The consequences of this research are substantial due to the key position held by the political party variable in judicial “social background” theory and value questions will necessarily be raised if partisan membership is found to activate certain decisional propensities in a judge's behavior.

Research on the influence of party affiliation on judicial decision making, however, has not been distinguished by clear findings and has left us in a position from which we are unable to generalize to courts not yet studied. Early work on the political party variable concluded that its relationship with decision making did indeed exist. Schubert (1959: 129–142) and Ulmer (1962), in studying workmen's compensation decisions handed down by the Michigan Supreme Court, demonstrated the important role played by partisan politics on that particular tribunal.

Feierabend, Nesvold, and Feierabend (1970) suggest two major hypotheses relating the concept of permissiveness-coerciveness of political regimes to the occurrence of political instability. First, they expect that “Low levels of political coerciveness (that is, political permissiveness) and high levels of coerciveness are associated with internal stability while mid-levels of coerciveness are associated with political violence.” Second, they hypothesize that “The greater (lesser) the fluctuation in level of political coerciveness, the higher (lower) the level of political violence.” The justification of these hypotheses are largely in terms of the psychology of frustrations and aggression. Political coerciveness is conceptualized as a set of restraints on the behavior of individuals imposed by a political regime. The more restraints imposed by the regime the more likely is any particular individual to be inhibited from performing certain of his desired behaviors. This situation is seen as producing, in the aggregate, higher levels of system-wide frustrations. It is appreciated, however, that if the number of restraints imposed is sufficiently large, then along with higher levels of frustration there will also appear a deterrent effect. The deterrent effect will presumably prevent these frustrations from becoming manifest in politically violent behavior.