This article is presented at two levels throughout. On the surface it is a straightforward historical analysis of a directive to British officers in charge of African courts in the late colonial period, with some African data adduced to sketch the local context into which the British were trying to insert new procedures and practices. On a deeper level the article uses the British colonial occasion to explore widely held cultural assumptions in Anglo-American law about the definability of “justice,” the concept of time and timing in legal affairs, and the complex place of the idea of legitimate, authoritative, and permanent “knowledge” in legal institutions.

Institutional theories of organizational behavior consistently implicate the professions in explaining the diffusion of new organizational practices; yet there has been little empirical study of precisely what role the professions play. We address that issue by exploring the role of the personnel and legal professions in shaping employers' understandings of law and the threat posed by law. We focus on the implied contract theory of wrongful discharge, a recent common law development that allows employees—under a limited set of circumstances—to sue their employers when they are fired without good cause. We first present an analysis of the actual risk posed by the implied contract theory, based on a survey of published cases in six states. Then, by analyzing articles in professional personnel and law journals, we reveal a striking disparity between the actual threat posed by implied contract theory and the threat as constructed by personnel and legal professionals. Our findings support the argument that the professions play an important role in the diffusion of organizational practices and suggest that the professions' constructions of the environment may critically affect how employers respond to environmental threats.

Criticisms of the civil jury, including charges that the jury is biased against business, have been central to debates over the litigation explosion and demands for tort reform. This article seeks to inform these ongoing controversies by examining tort jurors' accounts of how they reached decisions in cases with business parties. Interviews and questionnaire data showed that jurors were skeptical of plaintiff tort claims against businesses, organized their accounts more on the actions and motivations of plaintiffs than on the responsibilities of business, and spoke often of the litigation crisis and the importance of limiting awards.

Several years ago we conducted surveys in one American (Detroit) and two Japanese (Yokohama and Kanazawa) cities exploring the nature of responsibility and sanctioning judgments. Recently we were able to replicate a portion of those surveys in Moscow, and here we compare the results of the Moscow survey with the earlier findings. The fundamental question is whether socialist societies, at least as they have existed in the republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, have created a contextual legal culture like that of Japan, or whether their legal culture is more like the individualistic model of the United States. Our data indicate that when presented with situations of wrongdoing, Moscow residents' punishment preferences more nearly resemble the individualistic preferences of Detroit residents than they do the contextual preferences of Japanese residents. However, unlike Japanese and U.S. residents, the Moscow residents also expressed a preference for quasi-criminal educative sanctions.

Questions about the relation of court caseloads to plea bargaining practices generate much controversy but little sophisticated empirical research. Here we examine the effects of a 1975 felony plea bargaining ban in the Texas district courts in El Paso. Relying on a quasi-experimental interrupted time series model with annual data for 1968–83, we test the hypothesis that the discontinuance of plea bargaining negatively affects court caseloads, specifically the proportion of cases going to jury trial and the disposition rate. We also examine conviction rate, exploring whether the existence of plea bargaining encourages prosecutors to accept weak cases. We find a considerable increase in the proportion of cases going to jury trial immediately after the ban's implementation and a substantial but gradual decrease in the disposition rate. The jury trial rate contributed substantially to the disposition rate decline. The conviction rate was generally unaffected by the ban, although it became more consistent after the ban. Overall our findings suggest that the ban on explicit plea bargaining did affect the district courts' ability to move the felony docket efficiently.