Experimental research has recently shown a powerful impact on legal policy. An experiment demonstrating a deterrent effect of arrest on domestic violence has shaped public policy. Stimulated by efforts to publicize the results of the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (Sherman and Berk, 1984a), police departments were persuaded to adopt an arrest policy for misdemeanor domestic violence. Over one-third of respondents from U.S. police departments in 117 cities said their policy had been influenced by the experiment, although respondents from some departments that adopted an arrest policy did not recognize the experiment or its results. Lempert (1987, 1984), citing medical research as precedent, suggests that this impact is premature and inappropriate until replications are completed. However, we find no indication that medical research employs a standard of delaying adoption of research results prior to replication. Our analysis suggests that publicity can encourage replication of legal research at other sites and thus improve the knowledge base for policy recommendations.

Little is known about the reactions of tort litigants to traditional and alternative litigation procedures. To explore this issue, we interviewed litigants in personal injury cases in three state courts whose cases had been resolved by trial, court-annexed arbitration, judicial settlement conferences, or bilateral settlement. The litigants viewed the trial and arbitration procedures as fairer than bilateral settlement, apparently because they believed that trials and arbitration hearings gave their case more respectful treatment. They were less satisfied with the outcome of judicial settlement conferences than with the outcome of bilateral settlements, because judicial settlement conference outcomes were more likely to fall below their expectations. In general, procedural justice judgments and outcome satisfaction were little related to objective outcome, cost, or delay; instead the evaluations appeared to be determined largely by perceptions of whether the procedure met litigants' criteria for procedural fairness and expectations on outcomes and costs. Gender, income, and race did not have much effect on evaluations.

In this article I examine how prison conditions litigation in the 1970s, as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, inadvertently contributed to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. Using Florida as a case study, I detail how prison conditions litigation that aimed to reduce incarceration was translated in the political arena as a court order to build prisons. Drawing on insights from historical institutionalist scholarship, I argue that this paradox can be explained by considering the different historical and political contexts of the initial legal framing and the final compliance with the court order. In addition, I demonstrate how the choices made by policy makers around court compliance created policy feedback effects that further expanded the coercive capacity of the state and transformed political calculations around crime control. The findings suggest how “successful” court challenges for institutional change can have long-term outcomes that are contrary to social justice goals. The paradox of prison litigation is especially compelling because inmates' lawyers were specifically concerned about racial injustice, yet mass incarceration is arguably the greatest obstacle to racial equality in the twenty-first century.

At issue in the debate over social norms are different conceptions of human nature and the social order, of the ways people behave, and of the ways the law can both modify and be modified by social conduct. Three interpretive frameworks to the discussion of social norms are discussed: (a) whether social norms affect individual behavior merely as environmental/external factors or whether they also shape people's intrinsic predispositions; (b) the specific process by which norms influence people (i.e., whether preferences are considered predetermined or assumed to be modifiable as a result of internalization and persuasion); and (c) the ways social norms themselves are formed (whether merely via rational choice or also through historical transmissions). It is concluded that the discussion of social norms within a legal context is enriched by considering a “law and socio-economics” model, which combines the law and economics and law and society perspectives into a single discipline.

Man is an ingenious social animal. Institutionalized responses to interpersonal conflict, for instance, stretch from song duels and witchcraft to moots and mediation to self-conscious therapy and hierarchical, professionalized courts. The dispute processing practices prevailing in any particular society are a product of its values, its psychological imperatives, its history and its economic, political and social organization. It is unlikely that any general theory encompassing all of these factors will be developed until there have been many piecemeal attempts to understand something of the influence of each.

This research explores the utility of Black's theory of law for explaining differences in homicide clearance rates across large cities in the United States. Using insights from the social disorganization literature, we develop and evaluate hypotheses regarding homicide clearance rates and aggregate measures of stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and alternative social control. Our findings support the argument that the rate of clearing homicide cases varies according to the social characteristics of the location where they occur. In particular, clearance rates were highest in cities marked by greater racial disparities in education, income, employment, and residence; greater residential stability; higher levels of educational attainment; higher expenditures for educational programs; and lower rates of homicide. We discuss the implications of our analysis for both the social disorganization literature and Black's theory, and we suggest directions for further inquiry into the relationship between structural conditions in urban areas and homicide clearance rates.

In spite of long-term declines in the violent victimization of U.S. police officers, the danger of police work continues to structure police socialization, culture, and behavior. Existing research, though attentive to police behavior and deviance that negatively affects the public, analytically ignores how the danger of policing engenders officer behavior that harms police themselves. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews in three U.S. police departments, this article describes how police are informally and formally socialized into the danger imperative—a cultural frame that emphasizes violence and the need for officer safety—and its effect on officer behavior. As a result of perception mediated through the danger imperative, officers engage in policy-compliant and policy-deviant behaviors to protect themselves from violence. Unfortunately, policy-deviant behaviors such as unauthorized highspeed driving and not wearing a seatbelt, though justified in the name of safety, lead to catastrophic car accidents that injure and kill both police and members of the public. This article concludes with discussion of how seemingly mundane policy deviant behaviors are a reflection of assumptions within police culture that undergird police practices that damage public wellbeing and perpetuate broader inequalities in U.S. policing.

Despite the continued importance of discrimination for racial labor market inequality, little research explores the process by which workers name potentially negative experiences as race discrimination. Drawing on the legal consciousness literature and organizational approaches to employment discrimination, we assess the effect of social status, job characteristics, and workplace context on the likelihood that workers perceive race discrimination at work. Analyzing data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, we find that ascriptive status is associated with perceptions of discrimination, with African Americans, Hispanics, and women more likely to perceive racial discrimination, net of job and organizational controls. Results also suggest that workers with a greater sense of entitlement (as indicated by job authority, promotion experience, and union membership) and knowledge of legal entitlements (as indicated by education level and age) are more likely to perceive workplace racial discrimination. Other workplace conditions can signal fairness and decrease perceptions of racial bias, such as formalized screening practices and having nonwhite supervisors, whereas working among predominantly nonwhite coworkers increases the likelihood of perceiving discrimination. These findings suggest that personal attributions of discrimination vary across social groups and their environments, and demonstrate the importance of workplace context for understanding how individuals apply legal concepts, such as discrimination, to their experiences.

This article draws from a qualitative study of Singapore's gay movement to analyze how gay organizing occurs in authoritarian states, and where and how law matters. Singapore's gay activists engage in “strategic adaptation” to deploy a strategy of pragmatic resistance that involves an interplay among legal restrictions and cultural norms. Balancing the movement's survival with its advancement, they shun direct confrontation, and avoid being seen as a threat to the existing political order. As legal restrictions and as a source of legitimacy, law correspondingly oppresses sexual conduct and civil-political liberties, and culturally delegitimizes dissent. However, when activists mount pragmatic resistance at and through law, it also matters as a source of contestation. Further, law matters as a trade-off between reifying the existing order in exchange for survival and immediate gains. Yet, by treating law as purely tactical, these activists arguably end up de-centering law, being pragmatically unconcerned with whether they are ideologically challenging or being co-opted by it.

The author uses a conceptual framework grounded in theory of institutional process to assess developments in the theory of community-based policing. He suggests that two contemporary myths in policing—the myth of the police watchman and the myth of community—provide core elements the theory. Both liberal and conservative advocates for reform have drawn on these myths to support reinstitutionalizing police as community protectors with broad authority, including authority to arrest, unconstrained by law enforcement or due process considerations. He also discusses fundamental differences in the ways in which liberal and conservative reform advocates perceive the relationship between the myths.

This paper reports on research focused on measuring perceptions of justice vis-a-vis an examination of consensus in perceptions of appropriate punishments for convicted offenders. We used a factorial survey design to measure and analyze both the global judgments formed by individuals as well as the judgment-making principles that characterize the race by gender segments of the general population of one jurisdiction.

A proximity-to-crime perspective leads us to expect structured similarities and differences in judgments of appropriate prison sentences. A global judgment agreement indicator suggests consensus across the race by gender segments of the Boston metropolitan area over which crimes are serious and trivial. The same indicator, however, shows dissensus within the general population regarding perceptions of appropriate levels of punishment.

The research findings suggest that perceived or subjective proximity to crime has stronger implications than objective proximity for judgments of punishments for convicted offenders. The paper concludes that a sense of injustice in regard to punishments prevails for some segments of the general population.

What is semi-legality, and why does it offer a viable alternative to the legality–illegality binary divide? Semi-legality, as a heuristic device, is useful to frame the various “in-between” statuses and not resorting to illegality every time ambiguities arise as this casts the net of potential fraud far too wide. It could be viewed as a multidimensional space where migrants' formal relationships with the state interact with their various forms of agency toward the law. As a sensitizing theoretical perspective, it helps to explain why many neoliberal regimes, which claim that law and order are the main features distinguishing them from others, actually engage in perpetuating the legally ambiguous modes of incorporation. Delineating the conditions of semi-legality, I use data from 360 qualitative interviews with migrants in four European countries. I discuss: (1) “incomplete” responses to regularization programs (amnesties) – de facto fulfilling the legalization conditions, yet facing barriers to formally (de jure) corroborate this; (2) balancing between the temporality of residence in various EU countries—under-staying in some and overstaying in others; and (3) the nexus with employment—where migrants' residence in a country is lawful, but their work exceeds the restrictions permitted by their visas.

This article presents results of the first randomized experimental evaluation of a legal assistance program for low-income tenants in New York City's Housing Court. The results demonstrate that the provision of legal counsel produces large differences in outcomes for low-income tenants in housing court, independent of the merits of the case. For example, only 22% of represented tenants had final judgments against them, compared with 51% of tenants without legal representation. Similarly large advantages for tenants with an attorney also were found in eviction orders and stipulations requiring the landlord to provide rent abatements or repairs. In addition, the results suggest that a program of legal assistance for low-income tenants would not increase significantly the number of appearances in court, although it would increase the number of days to final judgment. The program may enhance the efficiency of adjudication by reducing the number of motions filed, particularly post-judgment motions. Limitations and policy implications of the study are discussed.

If we want to explore the social dimensions of property, we need to think of it not only historically but also geographically, entailing both practices in and representations of social space. The concept of landscape is a useful bridging device here, given its double meaning as both a material space and as a particular way of seeing space. Landscapes, in both senses, can serve to reify and naturalize dominant property relations but can also serve as spaces of contestation. Such landscapes, however, cannot be disentangled from the places in which they are positioned. I use this framework to make sense of resistance to gentrification in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, a poor neighborhood with a rich history of activism. A collective property claim by the poor has been staked out through the material use, production, and representation of an urban landscape. Such local meanings and practices, however, are threatened by “outsiders,” who are seen to map and use this landscape in very different ways.

This research is an exploratory test of two hypotheses emerging from debates about how police behavior may influence domestic violence victim reporting. From a procedural justice perspective, victims should be more apt to report victimization when previous encounters with police are viewed as procedurally fair. From a distributive justice perspective, denying victims their preferred outcome may discourage future police utilization. We find that satisfaction with police is related to both distributive and procedural justice but that re-utilization of police is conditioned by preferred outcome. Specifically, if the offender was arrested in accordance with victim preference, the victim is significantly more apt to utilize police in the future.

This study attempted to construct and test a discretionary justice model of disciplinary response to inmate rule breaking in a medium-security prison for adult male felons (N = 182). We found, first, that while black and white inmates were equally likely to engage in rule-breaking activity, blacks were more likely to be officially reported for rule infractions. Second, a prior record of official disciplinary action, itself shown to be a product of discriminatory response, influenced subsequent sanctioning decisions, thus amplifying the racial bias. Third, analyses of separate models for black and white inmates revealed the importance of prior record to be differentially imputed on the basis of race. The study concludes with a discussion of the nature and impact of stereotypic expectations and labeling processes in the reaction of guards to inmate behavior.

The most notorious lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1890 and 1940 involved publicity, crowds, ritual, and abnormal cruelty. Several hundred of these “public torture lynchings” took place, most of them in the Deep South. The author develops an interpretation that takes seriously the specific forms and discourses that lynchers and their supporters used to describe and justify these events—characterizing them as criminal punishments, albeit summary, informal ones that were shaped by a white supremacist culture and a politics of racial domination. An interpretation of the penal context and meanings of these public torture lynchings helps us understand their specific forms and their claims to legitimacy. The penal character of these lynchings increased the probability that they would be tolerated by local (and even national) audiences and thus made them a strategic form of violence in struggles to maintain racial supremacy. The author argues that a consideration of these events should lead us to revise our standard narratives about the evolution of modern punishments.

This article takes as its launching point a 2005 U. S. Supreme Court case, Johnson v. California (543 U.S. 499), which ruled that the California Department of Corrections' unwritten practice of racially segregating inmates in prison reception centers is to be reviewed under the highest level of constitutional review, strict scrutiny. Relying on observational data from two California prison reception centers, this research is grounded in an interactionist perspective and influenced by Smith's work on “institutional ethnography.” I examine how racialization occurs in carceral settings, arguing that officers and inmates collaborate to arrive at a “negotiated settlement” regarding housing decisions. They do so working together (but not always in agreement) to shape how an inmate is categorized in terms of ‘race’/ethnicity and gang/group affiliation, within a framework established by official Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation paperwork and related institutional understandings of housing needs. The findings demonstrate that administrators, officers, and inmates alike have influence over the process by which people are categorized and ‘race’ is produced, even as they derive their power from different sources and are both enabled and constrained by the relationship between them. I conclude that California prisons are, as Wacquant has put it, “the main machine for ‘race making’” (2005:128), and that the fuel for that machine—a series of patterned, negotiated settlements—happens in real time, “on the ground,” and with important consequences for inmates, officers, and administrators.

Sociolegal scholars have become increasingly interested in comparative legal cultures, largely under the hypotheses that what people think about the law and the values embedded therein has something to do with how they behave and, ultimately, some consequences for the larger political and legal systems. For instance, attitudes toward the rule of law no doubt influence (though they do not determine) people's willingness to comply with laws. Most agree that one cannot understand the role of law in society without understanding something of legal cultures. We present an investigation into the legal cultures of the countries of the European Union. Drawing on mass surveys conducted within each of the countries (including a separate sample in East Germany), we explore popular attitudes toward various dimensions of law: support for the rule of law; perceptions that law is a nonneutral, repressive force; and support for individual liberty. Although our analysis focuses on national differences, we also explore within-system variation (e.g., across various socioeconomic strata). Ultimately, our purpose is to document cross-national differences in legal cultures and to take some tentative steps toward explaining the origins of these differences.