Discretionary legal decisions have become a recent focus of theory development and policy-oriented applied research. We investigated parole release decision making in Pennsylvania from both orientations. Analyses of post-hearing questionnaires and case files from 1,035 actual parole decisions revealed that the Parole Board considers institutional behavior and predictions of future risk and rehabilitation in the decision to release on parole. Predictions seem also to be based on diagnostic judgments identifying causes of crime such as personal dispositions, drugs, alcohol, money, and environment. A one-year follow-up of 838 released parolees showed that predictions were virtually unrelated to known post-release outcomes. An actuarial prediction device was developed that is more predictive than subjective judgments. The use of decision guidelines to structure discretion is discussed, as well as the utilization of our research in guideline development by Pennsylvania.

The mass public is often depicted as indifferent to and unaware of many facets of political life which elites deem essential to understanding the political process (Converse, 1964: 209-14, 231-41; Key, 1964: 182-85, 199-202). Yet despite its indifference to political reality as defined by elites, the general public does hold its own version of political reality - albeit a more emotional, more symbolic, and less concrete reality than elites view (Prothro and Grigg, 1960: 276-94; Edelman, 1967: 1-7, 12-19, 178-81; Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 31-34). Popular perceptions of the United States Supreme Court follow this pattern: on the one hand, most observers take for granted that the public appreciates the Court on a symbolic or mythical plane while, on the other hand, most research concludes that the masses lack factual information on this institution.

Inside counsel to major corporations have accrued more power and status within the legal profession, but continue to struggle for influence and legitimacy within the corporation. In-depth interviews with lawyers and managers in large businesses reveal that inside counsel construct different professional roles for themselves depending on circumstances. We identify three ideal types of such roles: they act as cops (limiting their advice to legal mandates), counsel (combining legal and business advice), or entrepreneurs (giving priority to business objectives rather than legal analysis). The entrepreneurial role and its associated discourse seem to mark a departure from earlier studies of inside counsel. We argue that entrepreneurial tendencies reflect the efforts of corporate counsel to adapt their images and lawyering styles to the prerogatives of contemporary management. Accordingly, inside lawyers limit their gatekeeping functions, emphasize their dedication to managerial objectives, and defer to management's judgments about legal risk. Nonetheless, inside counsel retain their professional identities as lawyers and rarely express an interest in moving into corporate management. Inside counsel are “professionals” who present themselves as enthusiastically committed to corporate objectives.

Michigan's Felony Firearm Statute (Gun Law) imposed a two-year mandatory add-on sentence for defendants convicted of possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. The Law was widely advertised with proponents claiming that it would introduce greater equity in sentences, ensure certainty of punishment, and decrease violent crime in the state. We examine the processing of these Gun Law cases in Detroit Recorders Court, as well as the effects of the law on crime, and find that most of the goals of the Law's proponents are not met. Notwithstanding a rigid prosecutorial policy which prohibited plea bargaining in these gun cases, alternative mechanisms developed to mitigate the Law's effects and, in most instances, to preserve the “going rate” for various crime categories. Similarly, using an interrupted time-series model, we are unable to uncover effects of the law, or the associated publicity campaign, on violent crime.

Lower courts in the United States are generally responsive to specific precedents and trends in the decisionmaking of their judicial superiors. In this article, we ask why. We test one popular explanation—that compliance can be attributed to judges' fear of having their decisions reversed—through an analysis of search and seizure cases decided in the U.S. Courts of Appeals between 1961 and 1990. Since the Supreme Court cannot reverse a decision unless it agrees to review it, we ask whether circuit judges are more likely to decide as the Supreme Court would be expected to when they face cases that are otherwise more likely to be reviewed by the Court. Finding that they are not, we conclude that fear of reversal cannot account for widespread circuit court compliance in these cases, nor, presumably, more generally. More broadly, our findings point to the importance of factors apart from supervisors and the threat of sanctions in determining subordinates' compliance.

This study uses data from courtroom observations and posttrial interviews with jurors who served in thirty-eight actual sexual assault trials. It addresses three issues: (1) the effects of several measures of evidence on jurors' judgments of a defendant's guilt, (2) the relative merits of jurors' recollections of the evidence and measures of evidence coded at trial by trained observers, and (3) whether the effects of jurors' attitudes toward crime and their sentiments toward victims and defendants depend on the strength of the evidence, as Kalven and Zeisel (1966) contended. We find that both trial- and juror-level measures of evidence adequately capture the effects of evidence, and that neither measure is inherently preferable. Also, while jurors were influenced by extralegal factors, these effects were largely limited to weak cases in which the state presented little hard evidence, which is consistent with Kalven and Zeisel's “liberation hypothesis.”

What are the conditions conducive to long-term transplantation of mafia groups in new territories? This article systematically reviews a number of factors that facilitate such an outcome and then explores two attempts at transplantation by members of the Calabria-based mafia group `Ndrangheta to the town of Bardonecchia (Piedmont region) and to Verona (Veneto region). While the former case was successful, the latter failed. The article concludes that features of the local economy—the presence of significant sectors of the economy unprotected by the state and a local rather than export orientation—generate a demand for criminal protection, and successful transplantation occurs in the presence of such a demand. Generalized migration or forced resettlement of mafiosi are not sufficient to predict transplantation. The article shows that a high level of interpersonal trust among local law-abiding residents is not sufficient to hinder mafia transplantation, contrary to established theories of social capital and trust.

By requiring that police issue fourfold warnings to silence and appointed counsel prior to any custodial questioning, Miranda v. Arizona (1966) created universalistic criteria for the legal regulation of police interrogations. While Miranda appears to be partly responsible for the dramatic decline in violence in the interrogation room in the 20th century, American police have become skilled at the practice of manipulation and deception during interrogation. Drawing on more than 500 hours of participant observation fieldwork in three police departments, I argue that the sequence, structure, and process of contemporary American police interrogation can best be understood as a confidence game based on the manipulation and betrayal of trust. Understanding interrogation as a confidence game, I argue, goes a long way toward explaining (1) the paradoxical observation that criminal suspects continue to provide police with incriminating statements, admissions and confessions in the majority of cases; (2) the nature of the social interaction during interrogation more generally; and (3) how contemporary police interrogators both exercise and mystify their power inside the interrogation room.

Any relatively stable polity must possess means for converting many, if not most, demands made on political authorities into satisfying outputs, whether material or symbolic. Failure to cope with pressing demands might lead to a severely dysfunctional loss of public support for particular officials as well as for the regime itself. On the other hand, efforts to meet demands through blatant violations of accepted rules can also cause great loss in public support.

In the reform literature on the police, ranging from Hopkins' Our Lawless Police and the Wickersham Commission Reports in the 1930s to the Presidential Commissions of the 1960s, the argument has always been made that effective police reform waits upon professionalization. It is implied that better personnel, with better training, will provide better performance of police tasks. The recruitment and training proposals that are offered suggest that criteria such as a college degree are necessary in order to encourage adherence to “high professional standards of law enforcement.” Few have challenged the implicit assumption that professionalization is indeed efficacious, despite the fact that clear evidence of better performance has never been offered.

Black civilians are more likely to be stopped by police than white civilians net of relevant factors. Less is known about whether or not racial inequalities exist in police use of force during stops. Using data on over 2 million police stops in New York City from 2007 to 2014 and drawing on literatures on race, policing, and the Black Lives Matter movement, we test hypotheses regarding the associations between race, civilian behavior, age, and police use of force. We also investigate whether recent reforms reduced any observed inequality in police violence during stops. Findings show that Black and White civilians experience fundamentally different interactions with police. Black civilians are particularly more likely to experience potential lethal force when police uncover criminal activity and this disparity is greatest for black youth compared to white youth. Overall, if there were no racial disparities in police use of force, we estimate that approximately 61,000 fewer stops of black civilians would have included police use of force and 1,000 fewer stops would have included potential lethal force from 2007 to 2014. Furthermore, while reform efforts substantially reduced the number of stops annually, inequalities in police use of force persist.

Serious criticisms have been raised about divorce mediators' claim that they act as purely neutral facilitators of party-driven agreements. This paper reports on a study, based on tape recordings of mediation in the United Kingdom, intended to describe the strategies used by mediators and clients in the attempt to resolve disputes. It identifies a technique, labeled “selective facilitation,” through which clients may be steered in particular directions chosen by the mediator. This poses important questions for future evaluation studies and for the regulation of mediation practice.

This study examines the sociolegal underpinnings of the “temporary help” relationship as one kind of contingent work arrangement and explores how it became institutionalized in the post-World War II United States. While the American literature on contingent work suggests its tremendous growth has been merely a result of changing “human resource” strategies on the part of business managers, the focus here is on the specific role played by courts, state legislatures, and government administrative bodies in ratifying the temporary help arrangement as legal and legitimate. The article details the obscure history of the campaign waged by temporary help firms to win their claim as the legal employers of workers they send out to client firms, a central premise of the arrangement. It shows that statutory and policy changes supporting the increased use of “temporary work” were in place by the early 1970s, in time for its expanded use to play a key role in the restructuring of U.S. employment relations since that time.

Crime and its prevention has become a much debated issue. Claims and counter claims are made as to the real extent and the possibility of controlling crime. Law makers are considering legislating heavier sentences, which raises questions about the role of prison sentences in crime prevention. Most discussions of crime and its prevention lack a way of generating quantitative estimates of what alternative policies would achieve and what they would cost. A recent paper by one of the authors (Avi-Itzhak and Shinnar, 1973) attempts to develop a mathematical model simple enough to make approximate quantitative estimates based on available statistical information. In this paper we try to simplify the model further and to present it in a way that will make it more accessible to the policy maker and social scientist. We also try to apply it to conditions in New York.

Police-community relations programs are intended to be long-range, full-scale efforts to acquaint the police and the community with each other's problems and to stimulate action aimed at solving problems; they have been criticized, however, as being concerned mainly with raising the professional image of the police in the minds of the public (President's Commission, 1967a: 100). In some ways, they seem to have functioned to slow down change and to maintain present police policies and practices.

The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967b: 178) has indicated that some of these policies and practices cannot be justified. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968: 158) comments that some activities of even the most “professional” police departments may heighten tension and enhance the potential for civil disorder.

One of the most controversial—and least understood—issues in the area of sexual violence is the prevalence of false reports of rape. Estimates of the rate of false reports vary widely, which reflects differences in way false reports are defined and in the methods that researchers use to identify them. We address this issue using a mixed methods approach that incorporates quantitative and qualitative data on sexual assault cases that were reported to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in 2008 and qualitative data from interviews with LAPD detectives assigned to investigate reports of sexual assault. We found that the LAPD was clearing cases as unfounded appropriately most, but not all, of the time and we estimated that the rate of false reports among cases reported to the LAPD was 4.5 percent. We also found that although complainant recantation was the strongest predictor of the unfounding decision, other factors indicative of the seriousness of the incident and the credibility of the victim also played a role. We interpret these findings using an integrated theoretical perspective that incorporates both Black's sociological theory of law and Steffensmeier, Ulmer, and Kramer's focal concerns perspective.

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Countervailing sociolegal changes render this framework particularly problematic. On the one hand, the definition of racism has contracted in antidiscrimination law and in many social scientific studies of criminal justice, so that racism is defined narrowly as intentional and causally discrete harm. On the other hand, criminal justice institutions have expanded to affect historically unprecedented numbers of people of color, with penal policies broadening in ways that render the identification of racial intent and causation especially difficult. Analyses employing the penology of racial innocence examine the ever-expanding criminal justice system with limited definitions of racism, ultimately contributing to the erasure of racial power. Both racism and criminal justice operate in systemic and serpentine ways; our conceptual tools and methods, therefore, need to be equally systemic and capacious.

This paper analyzes the politics of disputing in complaint hearings held by the court clerk in a district criminal court in Massachusetts. By examining struggles over the meaning of local conflicts, it suggests the implications of detailed studies of dispute processing for our understanding of how systems of legal and social meanings are constituted and reproduced. The paper argues that the work of the court, the roles played by court officials, and the meaning of law and of community at particular moments in time are shaped in the interaction of court staff with local citizens. At the same time, it argues that these interactions are constrained by culturally and historically embedded relations of class, ethnicity, and power. Thus the paper suggests how the practice of complaint hearings both reproduces and transforms systemic inequalities and oppositions, and points to the importance of interactive rather than dichotomizing approaches for studying the interconnection and interpenetration of law with society.

This article helps strengthen our comparative and theoretical understanding of lawyers as gatekeepers to justice by analyzing the screening practices of lawyers in a non-Western context. The explanation for Chinese lawyers' aversion to representing workers with labor grievances focuses on their own working conditions, on the organization of their legal labor, and on their evaluations of the moral character of prospective clients. By linking the screening practices of Chinese lawyers to their socioeconomic insecurity and to popular stereotypes informing and legitimating their screening decisions, this article identifies institutional and cultural obstacles not only to the official justice system but also to cause lawyering. After establishing motives for screening clients, this article then demonstrates lawyers' screening methods: by defining legal reality in strategic and often misleading ways, lawyers use the law as a weapon against the interests of the individuals who seek their help.

How is it that the U.S. Supreme Court is capable of getting most citizens to accept rulings with which they disagree? This analysis addresses the role of the symbols of judicial authority and legitimacy—the robe, the gavel, the cathedral-like court building—in contributing to this willingness of ordinary people to acquiesce to disagreeable court decisions. Using an experimental design and a nationally representative sample, we show that exposure to judicial symbols (1) strengthens the link between institutional support and acquiescence among those with relatively low prior awareness of the Supreme Court, (2) has differing effects depending upon levels of preexisting institutional support, and (3) severs the link between disappointment with a disagreeable Court decision and willingness to challenge the ruling. Since symbols influence citizens in ways that reinforce the legitimacy of courts, the connection between institutional attitudes and acquiescence posited by Legitimacy Theory is both supported and explained.