The early social scientific effort to understand law and the legal system is largely associated with attempts at grand theory. The names of Durkheim and Weber, in particular, stand out, but Maine, Pashukanis, Timascheff, and others all offered encompassing perspectives. The renewed interest in law and social science, which began in the United States in the 1950s and came to flourish in the sixties and seventies, has had just the opposite character. It has been largely an empirical enterprise. In tracing the rebirth of social scientific interest in law and the legal system, one speaks not of theories but of studies; for example, Schwartz's (1954) research into the legal orders of two Israeli communities, Ball's (1960) study of rent control violations in Honolulu, and Macaulay's (1963) inquiry into non-contractual relationships among businesses.

The most comprehensive efforts to develop a new evolutionary approach to law are found in the work of Nonet and Selznick in the United States and Habermas and Luhmann in Germany. While these theorists are concerned with a common problem—the crisis of formal rationality of law—they differ drastically in their accounts of the problem and their vision of the future. This paper tries to resolve these differences by first decomposing and then restructuring the diverse neo-evolutionary models. Using a more comprehensive model of socio-legal covariation, the author identifies an emerging kind of legal structure which he calls “reflexive law.” Reflexive law is characterized by a new kind of legal self-restraint. Instead of taking over regulatory responsibility for the outcome of social processes, reflexive law restricts itself to the installation, correction, and redefinition of democratic self-regulatory mechanisms. The author identifies areas of private law in which reflexive solutions are arguably emerging, and he spells out the consequences which a concern for reflexivity has for a renewed sociological jurisprudence.

Michigan's Felony Firearm Statute (Gun Law) imposed a two-year mandatory add-on sentence for defendants convicted of possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. The Law was widely advertised with proponents claiming that it would introduce greater equity in sentences, ensure certainty of punishment, and decrease violent crime in the state. We examine the processing of these Gun Law cases in Detroit Recorders Court, as well as the effects of the law on crime, and find that most of the goals of the Law's proponents are not met. Notwithstanding a rigid prosecutorial policy which prohibited plea bargaining in these gun cases, alternative mechanisms developed to mitigate the Law's effects and, in most instances, to preserve the “going rate” for various crime categories. Similarly, using an interrupted time-series model, we are unable to uncover effects of the law, or the associated publicity campaign, on violent crime.

In 1980, Phoenix, Arizona, experienced a “crime wave.” A structural equation model based on a two-wave survey of the population shows that the crime wave had a powerful impact that was almost a mirror image of what the fear of crime literature would predict. Demographic groups thought to be most fearful (e.g., women and the elderly) were least affected while groups thought to be least fearful (e.g., well-educated whites) were affected most. In addition to demographic factors, our analysis demonstrates that crime rate perceptions and confidence in the police are integral components of fear, especially in the context of a crime wave. These findings have important implications for crime policy specifically and for criminological research generally.

The paper examines the theoretical and empirical adequacy of Donald Black's (1976) The Behavior of Law. The work is found to be logically incoherent and its operationalization of variables problematic. The evidence that bears on its propositions does not consistently support them.

Allan Horwitz and I are in full agreement about the value of studying the extralegal sources of statutory law (such as vagrancy legislation) or of governmental social control (whether or not it is identified as law). A good deal of my own work has concerned just this (Greenberg, 1977; 1980; forthcoming; Humphries and Greenberg, 1981; forthcoming; Loftin et al., 1981).