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.

It is an instructive irony that Frank Munger delivered his Presidential Address in Miami Beach. As someone who was there on Memorial Day weekend of 2000, I can report that at the time of the address there was more than the usual contrast between setting and substance. Munger issued his call for connecting law and society research to the real world of struggle and politics in the cool, windowless expanse of a plush convention-hotel ballroom. The response of the audience was polite, if not inspired. In sharp contrast, immediately outside the hotel, the hot and humid streets of South Beach buzzed and blared with a Hip Hop convention that had drawn masses of young people from around the country. This was an audience that really was turned on to the message of its leaders.

I agree completely with most of the issues raised in Mark Atlas's article “Rush to Judgment” in this issue (Atlas 2001). First, environmental justice is an important research topic that is too often addressed by writers with preconceived notions about the presence or absence of discrimination in environmental protection. Second, I agree with Mark's critique of the National Law Journal (NLJ) study, the first to investigate possible racial or class inequities in civil environmental penalties. Third, I agree that researchers need to use appropriate data, controls, and statistical techniques and that there is no evidence that civil penalties for violating environmental regulations are systematically lower in poor and/or minority communities. Finally, I agree that in “Rush to Judgment” Atlas makes a unique and valuable contribution to the environmental justice literature—which is why I recommended that the manuscript be published in Law & Society Review. Nevertheless, I believe that “Rush to Judgment” has substantial weaknesses that detract from its stature as a piece of social science research. Not surprisingly, I disagree with Mark's assessment of the validity of the conclusions from my previous work in this area—conclusions that “Rush to Judgment” reinforces in every respect. More important, however, I believe that Mark's article displays fundamental flaws regarding how we use evidence to draw generalizable conclusions about the world around us, and how one makes use of extant research to carve out a niche for one's own work.

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.

Within the burgeoning global discourse on human rights, gender violence provides one of the most important examples of the use of rights to tackle a newly defined social problem. A comparison of three quite different approaches to violence against women in a single town, each of which is rooted in a global movement, reveals sharp differences in the way the problem is defined and the solutions are imagined. One approach focuses on the assertion of rights and relies on a feminist analysis of patriarchy, another on prayer and the elimination of enemy forces within a framework of Pentecostal Christianity, and one on repentance and reconciliation within the framework of the family and the community. Despite these differences, however, all three employ similar technologies of the self, focusing on knowing feelings, making choices, and building self-esteem. This article demonstrates how globalization allows differences on the basis of religion and culture while promoting similarities in techniques of fashioning the self, thus promoting modern subjectivity in the midst of difference.

Many points raised by Dr. Evan J. Ringquist's response in this issue already are addressed in my article, so readers should simply review its relevant portions. Just as he indicated that space constraints limited his response, I am limited to focusing on his comments that are less fully addressed in my article.

Italy's Supreme Court recently overturned a rape conviction on the grounds that the woman was wearing blue jeans at the time. The Court reasoned that blue jeans cannot be removed “without the active cooperation of the person who is wearing them,” and therefore sexual intercourse must have been consensual. The decision was met with outrage by media commentators, political leaders, and ordinary Italians in a range of civic organizations. I argue here that this case and others like it are conspicuously inconsistent with a constitutive perspective that sees law and everyday normative orders as mutually embedded, or at least reciprocally reinforcing, and that focuses on law's hegemonic potential. In this revisiting of the constitutive approach, I propose that the concept of legal hegemony be elaborated to include the counterintuitive possibility that law can sabotage the very ideologies it invokes. For when an authoritative source such as law is so out of step with the evolving normative order, the shocking discrepancy exposes not only the fallibility of law but also the foolishness of the outdated moral vision it is caught endorsing. Finally, I suggest that it may be during “unsettled cultural periods” (Swidler 1986) that such “de-constitutive” moments are most likely.

As a sociologist, I have always been envious of legal scholars' license to prescribe. They not only elucidate the ideas and interests behind the law, the ways it is applied, and the problems it confronts. Unencumbered by social scientists' reticence, they also tell us how to do better. The scholars represented in The Passions of Law argue in no uncertain terms that feminists should not appeal to disgust in attacking pornography, that levying more stringent penalties on “hate crimes” unjustly punishes opinions, that we should admit vengefulness as a motive for punishment, and that a wrongdoer's remorse should mitigate his penalty. Of course, the authors describe, analyze, and explain as well as recommend, and they do so in shrewd and enlightening ways. They also occasionally disagree strongly with each other's prescriptions. Those who argue that disgust is bad, shaming is good, and vengefulness is meritorious are countered by those who argue the opposite.

In her book Susan Hirsch explores how Swahili Muslim women in the Kenyan coastal cities of Mombasa and Malindi pursue marital disputes in local Kadhi's (Islamic) courts. Focusing in particular on the Malindi Kadhi's court, Hirsch highlights how Muslim women actively use legal processes to transform the religious and local norms that underlie their disadvantaged position in this Swahili community in postcolonial Kenya. In her microlevel study, based on empirical work featuring court records, court observations, and participation in everyday life in the community, the author offers a nuanced analysis highlighting the ways in which women are both constrained and empowered in this setting where customary law, religious law, Western law, and social norms concerning male and female speech intersect and interact. Although constraints derived from local and religious norms operate to urge compliance with social convention that projects women as persevering wives who should suffer in silence in relation to their pronouncing husbands, some women are, nonetheless, able to negotiate these stereotypes to circumvent male power. Hirsch's study details the process whereby some Muslim women who resist patriarchal norms are silenced while others succeed in transforming the perception of womanhood to their advantage in their disputes with their husbands.

What role do courts play in the establishment and maintenance of constitutional democracies? To address this question, we elaborate a model that draws on existing substantive literature and on theories that assume strategic behavior on the part of judges, executives, and legislatures. This model, in turn, leads to several behavioral predictions about the interactions among the relevant political actors. Although those predictions could be assessed in many distinct contexts, we focus on Russia. In particular, we provide a demonstration of how the model helps make sense of the behavior of the Constitutional Court (Konstitucjonnyj sud) in light of the difficult political situation it confronted. We conclude with some thoughts on the broader implications of our theory for the study of courts throughout Eastern Europe and how it may well illuminate constitutional politics in other parts of the world.

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the “ex ante” function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states (Wisconsin, Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that had adopted a minority position on some aspect of criminal law reported the relevant law of their state to be no different than did citizens of “majoritarian” states. Path analyses using structural equation modeling suggest that people make guesses about what their state law holds by extrapolating from their personal view of whether or not the act in question ought to be criminalized.