Statistics has been called the science of uncertainty. Central to this science is the concept of probability. Operationalizing probability, however, has provided statisticians with many difficulties over the years, and to this day no complete agreement has been reached on this extremely important issue.

In 1963 and 1964, New Zealand and Great Britain adopted the first modern crime compensation programs. These programs compensate for injury and death caused by a criminal attack upon an innocent victim. Although the reception given to these programs has been quite favorable and there have been additional adoptions by other jurisdictions, the total number of program adoptions remains small. New Jersey's adoption in October, 1971, brought the total number of program adoptions in the United States to six (New York Times, October 25, 1971: 28c). In addition, Nevada and New York City have adopted partial compensation programs called “citizenship” or “Good Samaritan” programs that compensate only those injuries or deaths incurred while assisting law enforcement officers or while attempting to prevent the commission of a crime or in trying to apprehend a criminal. This means that six general crime compensation programs have been adopted in the United States during the past six years. These program adoptions have been by California, New York, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

This paper is about the administration of justice in drunk driving cases. It is the second in a series (Little, 1971a) stemming from an intensive study of law enforcement and judicial systems in operation. The data reported here were obtained in 1970 and 1971 in a study carried out in the State of Vermont with the purpose of learning about how justice is administered in DWI cases in the context of a known legal framework. The method of the study was to obtain representative samples of DWI offenders and violators of other serious motor vehicle offenses, and trace what happened to them with the police, in the courts and with licensing agencies. The complete chronicle of what happened to each offender was carefully scrutinized, beginning with the time of arrest and ending when the case had been disposed of. The earlier paper contained a number of preliminary descriptive statistics, and this one follows up that background with more detailed analysis.

The interplay between professionals and clients has been examined in a number of settings (Etzioni, 1964: 87-89; Becker, 1952; Willie, 1960; Schur, 1968; Myers and Roberts, 1959) and the impact of laymen on professional behavior is well-known to the sociologists (Friedson, 1960). In this research report these insights are applied to police-citizen interaction in an effort to explain the dynamics of discretionary decisions by police officers and the role such discretion plays in their quest to attain higher professional stature. Specific attention will be paid to variations in the willingness of policemen to develop and utilize informers or “stool pigeons.”

A prominent feature of the landscape of American sociolegal research is Marc Galanter's scholarship on the civil justice system. Galanter began his academic career in anthropological research on India, and his studies of the American legal system reflect these origins. Like an anthropologist at work in his native land, Galanter's contribution has been to illuminate the properties of the American legal system as a social whole. No other scholar has so effectively comprehended the organic character of American law—how the operation of the formal rules system depends on the strategic interplay among actors in the system, the significance of indigenous or embedded systems of normative ordering that pervasively emerge in the shadow of the formal legal system, and the relationship between the law as a system of symbols and a system of bargaining endowments. “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead” (Galanter, 1974) remains the most ambitious and comprehensive attempt to explain the relationship between the litigation system and patterns of inequality in American society. Not only did the article develop a useful set of grounded categories for social actors in the system (the famous distinction between “repeat players” and “one-shotters”), it also specified the mechanisms through which these social categories could achieve dominance in the system. In broad sweep, it suggested those strategies of legal change that would have the greatest redistributive effects on society, as well as the limitations that would confront attempts at social change through the law. Given the nature of this early accomplishment, it seemed natural when Galanter (1983b) reasserted his role as the preeminent commentator on the civil justice system with “Reading the Landscape of Disputes.”

US immigration law increasingly excludes many immigrants materially and symbolically from vital safety-net resources. Existing scholarship has emphasized the public charge rule as a key mechanism for enacting these exclusionary trends, but less is known about how recent public charge uncertainty has shaped how noncitizens and healthcare workers negotiate safety-net resources. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 80 safety-net workers and patients in three US states from 2015 to 2020, I argue that intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding public charge has extended a sense of surveillance into clinical spaces in previously unexamined ways. Drawing on theories of medical legal violence, system avoidance, and legal estrangement, I demonstrate how these dynamics undermined immigrants' health chances and compromised clinic workers' efforts to facilitate care. I also reveal how participants responded to this insinuation of legal violence in healthcare spaces by promoting situational trust in specific procedures and institutions.

In his presidential address, Frank Munger (2001) asks us to consider a reconciliation between inquiry and activism. Although Munger uses the broader and more inclusive term “social inquiry” as his counterpoint to activism, I would like to focus on a particular type of inquiry, one that has deep roots in the Law and Society Association (LSA) and one that is most opposed to activism: social science inquiry. In short, I would argue that tensions that historically have kept the projects of inquiry and activism separate emerge out of a particular brand of inquiry known as empiricism and, among other things, its commitment to value freedom.