As Mark Twain once remarked about the weather, everyone talks about law and development, but nobody does much about it. How does law “set off, monitor, or otherwise regulate the fact or pace of social change?” (Friedman, 1969). Atomistic studies relating specific norms of law to specific sorts of social change are plentiful. Holistic studies purporting to explicate general propositions relating rules and behavior can hardly be found. The few that do exist do hardly more than assure us, most sincerely, that yes, there really is a relationship between law and social change.

What is needed is a general model relating law and social change. Here, we discuss (1) the definition of the problem; (2) its parameters; (3) an heuristic model; and (4) a variety of “middle-level” hypotheses that can be suggested. The specific focus of this discussion is on Africa.

The publication in July, 1969, of the “Principles of Corrective-Labor Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics” was notable for a lack of fanfare. This was in itself not surprising, since in the area of corrective-labor law, even since the death of Stalin, unpublished statutes have been the main guides for the operation of corrective-labor colonies and prisons. The old corrective-labor codes of the union republics, while still legally in force, had admittedly lost any real legal power.

While the new Principles came upon the scene with little advance announcement, this fact should not obscure the more important one that “reform,” clarification, and codification have been on the minds of Soviet jurists for the preceding thirteen years — years which have seen the promulgation of two successive statutes (polozheniia) to guide the operation of the corrective-labor system in the RSFSR but, until 1969, little by way of publication or systematization of new provisions.

The labeling theory approach to the analysis of deviance depicts stable patterns of deviant behavior as products or outcomes of the process of being apprehended in a deviant act and publicly branded as a deviant person. The involvement of an individual in this process is viewed as depending much less upon what he does or what he is than upon what others do to him as a consequence of his actions. Deviant persons are regarded as having undergone a degradation ceremony with the result that they have been relegated to membership in a deviant group. In the process, they are thought to have come to acquire an inferior social status and to have developed a deviant view of the world and all the knowledges, skills, and attitudes associated with that status.

During the past two decades students of public law have amassed a considerable amount of evidence which indicates that the administration of federal justice is not uniform throughout the United States. First, there are significant differences in judicial administration among the federal district courts. Kenneth Vines and others have demonstrated how important these differences can be with regard to race relations cases (Vines, 1963; Vines, 1964; Peltason, 1961; Steamer, 1962). In his study of the federal trial courts and urban affairs, Kenneth Dolbeare concluded that “many of Vine's findings with respect to race relations policy making have parallels in the area of urban public policy generally.” (Dolbeare, 1969: 376). Also, there is some evidence that sentencing behavior in criminal cases varies significantly from one federal trial judge to another.

In a critique of our paper, “Severity of Formal Sanctions as a Deterrent to Deviant Behavior” (Law and Society Review, 1970: 21-40), Professor Paul E. Meehl has questioned our interpretation of the data particularly in Table 3 of the original paper. On the basis of that evidence, we concluded that severity of formal sanctions show no direct deterrent effect on the deviant behavior under consideration, but do appear to have an indirect deterrent effect through their impact on the normative climate of the campus (p. 37). In challenging this interpretation of the data, Professor Meehl expressed concern that non social science readers of the Review might be misled by our use of “causal language” in the interpretation of these tabulations from cross sectional data.