This paper examines a public housing eviction board and asks how the decision to prosecute cases informally affected both board action and the implications of that action. It argues that board decisions were patterned and that apparently similar procedures produced different outcomes at different points in time. Informality is seen as compatible with rule-oriented decisionmaking and as a factor that affects the ways that rules and outcomes may be changed and manipulated. Informal justice is not defined, but certain features, such as the quality of discourse in a tribunal, are posited as keys to judgments of informality. It is argued that these keys determine whether a tribunal is perceived as formal or informal but that the actual quality of tribunal need not fit this neat dichotomy, for it is a complex function of whether prosecutors, defendants, and judges take informal or legalistic stances toward the procedural and substantive issues that arise in a case.

As part of the dramatic reforms now sweeping through Eastern Europe, a number of socialist states have enacted new legislation enabling courts to review the legality of administrative decisionmaking. In this essay, I will speculate about the likely development of a socialist rule of law. Using examples from capitalist and socialist law, I will argue that judicial review is at odds both with the long-range ideological goals of socialist societies and with the daily constraints operating on socialist officials and citizens. However, even if judicial review itself is unlikely to gain significant impact in socialist societies as we know them, other changes brought about by socialist law reforms will increasingly help to shelter a socialist citizen against the arbitrary use of state power.

The Texas post-Furman death penalty statute restricts capital punishment to a limited category of murders. If the defendant is found guilty of one of these crimes, the jury must address two and sometimes three questions in the punishment phase of the trial. Affirmative answers to the questions by all jurors result in an automatic death sentence. A “no” answer to any question results in an automatic life sentence. One of the three questions is whether the defendant presents a continuing violent threat to society. From 1974 to 1988, niney-two capital murderers had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. These commutations allow a “natural experiment” to assess the predictions made by jurors that these individuals would present a future violent threat to society. Patterns of institutional and post-release behavior of this group were compared to similar patterns for defendants convicted of capital murder who were not predicted to be dangerous and who received life imprisonment over the same fifteen-year period. We found that although most capital offenders were model inmates, two commuted capital prisoners committed second murders, one while in prison and the other while in the community. We conclude with a discussion of the validity of current death statutes that require jurors to predict future dangerousness.

This research examines the linkages among institutional legitimacy, perceptions of procedural justice, and voluntary compliance with unpopular institutional decisions within the context of political intolerance and repression. Several questions are addressed, including: To what degree do judicial decisions contribute to the acceptance of unpopular political decisions? Do court decisions have a greater power to legitimize than the decisions of other political institutions? Are courts perceived as more procedurally fair than other political institutions? Do perceptions of procedural fairness—be it in a court or legislative institution—contribute to the efficacy of institutional decisions? The basic hypothesis of this research is that to the extent that an institution employs fair decisionmaking procedures, it is viewed as legitimate and citizens are more likely to comply with its decisions, even when they are unpopular. Based on an analysis of national survey data, I conclude that, although perceptions of institutional procedure have little impact on compliance, institutional legitimacy does seem to have some effect. The United States Supreme Court in particular seems to have some ability to elicit acceptance of public policies that are unpopular with the mass public. This effect is greatest among opinion leaders. I conclude with some observations about how these findings fit with the growing literature on procedural justice and with some thoughts about the implications of the findings for the protection of democratic liberty.

The suppression of Islamic family law and the introduction of secular family law to govern family life in Turkey created a legal and regulatory environment that supported more egalitarian relationships within the rural household. Despite the lack of an organized political movement, by 1950 rural Muslim women had begun to use the courts in divorce and other conflicts, suggesting that Ataturk's reforms had diffused to the Anatolian provinces by this time. Female-initiated cases, in conjunction with other behavior such as reducing family size and pushing husbands to leave the extended patriarchal households of their fathers, indicate that rural Islamic women were striving toward more autonomy in their lives. This picture offers a sharp contrast to the image of the passive, submissive rural Islamic woman described in much of the social science literature on Turkey. It suggests instead that rural women were active participants in changing their life situations.