Kadijustiz is a concept well known from the work of Max Weber. Its essential element, the means by which judicial discretion and equitable assessments are actually made, is, however, less clearly documented. Drawing on a detailed study of a qadi's court in contemporary Morocco, the present article shows how cultural assumptions give shape to the judge's modes of reasoning, factual assessments, and choice of remedies. The study suggests that if careful attention is given to the broader cultural precepts within which judicial discretion is located, Kadijustiz, whether represented by an Islamic court official or a Western justice of the peace, will be seen to possess definite regularities.

To date, most disposition studies have been limited to exploring the effects of male defendants' social characteristics on severity of disposition; the few studies that have included female defendants have done so primarily to see if the sex of the offenders differentially affected sentencing. Utilizing the propositions set forth in The Behavior of Law (Black, 1976), this research looks at the role played by a woman's social status in determining the type of criminal court disposition she receives. Conviction data from a sample of 1,034 female defendants are explored to estimate the effects of (1) economic rank (2) prior criminal record, (3) age, and (4) employment status, controlling for the offense of conviction, on severity of criminal court disposition. The analyses indicate that women's various social characteristics are in fact good predictors of the nature and extent of their sentences and, further, that indicators of respectability and stratification/social integration contribute most to explaining these criminal court dispositions. Accordingly, the propositions of Black's theory of law are generally supported by the results of this study.

An experiment was conducted to assess the preferences of undergraduates and inmates for two possible modifications of plea bargaining: allowing the defendant to participate and including a state-paid or community-volunteer mediator in the negotiation. Respondents were asked to role-play a defendant who was either innocent or guilty of a murder and confronted with either weak or strong state's evidence. Results indicate that all defendants preferred plea bargaining procedures which included the defendant. Undergraduates preferred procedures which involved a mediator, but inmates were neutral toward this modification. Undergraduates preferred a state-paid mediator, while inmates preferred a community volunteer. Several interactions qualifying these effects are discussed in the paper.

Anderson and Hayden argue that meaningful policy implications cannot be drawn from research which lacks “structural, sociological, and conceptual verisimilitude.” Pointing to my article, “Impact of Procedural Modifications on Preferences for Plea Bargaining” (pp. 267-291) as an example of research which lacks such verisimilitude, they conclude that I am unjustified in drawing conclusions with policy implications. I disagree with them for four reasons. Anderson and Hayden have: 1) based their arguments on a misunderstanding of Lind and Walker's discussion of the circumstances in which research need replicate reality; 2) misconceived the nature of theory; 3) created an unnecessary and unsupportable distinction between “structural,” “sociological,” and “conceptual” verisimilitude; and 4) misunderstood and misrepresented my article.

The recent “discovery” of family violence, particularly violence between spouses, has elicited attention from social scientists and policy makers. Police intervention in domestic disputes is a primary focus. Critiques of police practice have often centered on police failure to arrest offenders in domestic violence incidents. Yet, the literature to date reveals little effort to examine systematically the discretionary role of police in domestic disputes. With data drawn from 262 official police reports concerning domestic disturbances, the propensity of police to make arrests is examined through a variety of exogenous variables. Police arrests, we find, reflect the immediate circumstances of police-citizen encounters.

This study of the relationship between businessmen and the civil courts in the Indonesian province of North Sumatra finds that Sumatran businessmen seldom use the courts either to collect retail debts or to settle commercial disputes among themselves. In fact, they were found to litigate disputes only when they hoped to salvage something from a failing business relationship, or when simply opening litigation could by itself help discharge a bureaucratic responsibility, satisfy a personal grudge, or harass a defendant into making an out-of-court settlement. The unusual cost structure of the civil courts, relatively low formal costs and relatively high informal costs, contributed to an unfavorable image of the courts as expensive, arbitrary, and inefficient dispute settlement mechanisms in the eyes of one important group of businessmen, the rubber exporters. Other characteristics of the exporters, their trading partners, and the social and economic relationships among them were found, however, to present more basic obstacles to the use of the courts in settling commercial disputes. These results then suggest some general conditions under which the capacity of a legal system to influence the development of commercial relations is severely limited.

Much attention has been devoted recently to intercircuit doctrinal conflicts in the United States Courts of Appeals (Commission, 1975b: 30-32, 37-44). Less attention has been paid to the equally—if not more—serious problem of intracircuit doctrinal conflict, which causes difficulties for lawyers attempting to advise clients and for district judges trying to apply circuit law (Wasby, 1979). Observers have suggested that decreased frequency of communication among appellate judges leads to less consistency in their decisions. Where judicial interaction is infrequent, because of increased numbers of judges on a court or the judges' geographic dispersion, the “law of the circuit” tends toward disharmony (Commission, 1973: 19-20, and 1975b: 130; also Friendly, 1973: 45). The existence and extent of intracircuit inconsistency may thus be viewed as dependent variables, the number of judges and the judges' geographic dispersion, or both, as independent variables, and communication among judges as a key intervening variable.