This case study of immigration law in Spain examines the contradiction between the rhetoric of immigration politics stressing immigrant integration and the reality of immigrant exclusion and marginalization. Drawing from a variety of secondary sources, government documents, and interviews, I show how Spanish policies regularly “irregularize” Third World immigrants. Further, I argue that this legal construction of illegality consigns these immigrants to the margins of the economy where they provide what policymakers appreciatively call “flexibility” to the post-Fordist Spanish economy. Finally, I discuss the ways in which racial “otherness,” exclusion, and economic function are mutually constituted, and the role of law in that process.

In prosecution, as in armies, prisons, and schools, organization matters. Japanese prosecutors work in an organization that differs markedly from the organizations in which their American counterparts work. This fact has important implications for how prosecutors in Japan define and perform their central tasks and thus for the quality of Japanese criminal justice. Most critically, the Japanese way of organizing prosecution enables prosecutors to effectively manage the tension between two imperatives of justice that American regard as often incompatible and always in tension: the need to individualize case dispositions and the need to treat like cases alike so as to achieve “order.” As mirror and model, Japan can teach the United States how to improve the level of order in its own systems of criminal justice.

This article compares findings from two surveys of Chicago lawyers, the first conducted in 1975 and the second in 1995. The earlier study indicated that the Chicago bar was then divided into two broad sectors or “hemispheres,” one serving large corporations and similar organizations and the other serving individuals and small businesses. Analyses of the structure of co-practice of the fields of law indicate that the hemispheres are now less distinct. The fields are less tightly connected and less clearly organized—they became more highly specialized during the intervening 20 years and are now organized in smaller clusters. Clear indications of continuing separation of work by client type remain, however. Estimates of the amount of lawyers' time devoted to each field in 1975 and 1995 indicate that corporate practice fields now consume a larger share of Chicago lawyers' attention, while fields such as probate receive a declining percentage. Growth is most pronounced in the litigation fields, especially in business litigation. The organizational contexts within which law is practiced both reflect and contribute to these changes. The scale of those organizations has increased greatly, and the allocation of work within them has been divided along substantive, doctrinal lines. As a result, there is a greater disaggregation of work and workgroups within the profession today.

This study adds to the limited body of empirical evidence on the effect that legitimacy and deterrence have on compliance behavior. The theoretical models of compliance behavior tested include the basic deterrence model, which focuses on the certainty and severity of sanctions as key determinants of compliance, and models which integrate economic theory with theories from social psychology to account for legitimacy, deterrence, and other motivations expected to influence individuals' decisions whether to comply. Probit and Tobit econometric estimators are used to examine the compliance behavior of 318 Peninsular Malaysian fishermen who face a regulation banning them from fishing in a zone along the coast. The results of the empirical analysis provide additional evidence on the relationship of deterrence and legitimacy to compliance. The findings are also used to draw implications for compliance policy for regulated fisheries.

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.

The author reflects on the significance of violence (the theme of the 1997 Law and Society Association's annual meeting) for sociolegal scholars, considering the changing landscapes of law and difference, especially in the contemporary United States, as well as issues of vocation and agency.

We advance here a neighborhood-level perspective on racial differences in legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and the tolerance of various forms of deviance. Our basic premise is that structural characteristics of neighborhoods explain variations in normative orientations about law, criminal justice, and deviance that are often confounded with the demographic characteristics of individuals. Using a multilevel approach that permits the decomposition of variance within and between neighborhoods, we tested hypotheses on a recently completed study of 8,782 residents of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago. Contrary to received wisdom, we find that African Americans and Latinos are less tolerant of deviance—including violence—than whites. At the same time, neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage display elevated levels of legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and tolerance of deviance unaccounted for by sociodemographic composition and crime-rate differences. Concentrated disadvantage also helps explain why African Americans are more cynical about law and dissatisfied with the police. Neighborhood context is thus important for resolving the seeming paradox that estrangement from legal norms and agencies of criminal justice, especially by blacks, is compatible with the personal condemnation of deviance.

The legal and administrative apparatus responsible for the social control of organizations relies extensively on the deterrent effects of punishment. This strategy presumes a rational choice model of organizational misconduct that decontextualizes decisionmaking, emphasizing consequences while ignoring how preferences are formed. I raise three challenges to the rational choice/deterrence model of social control: (1) research and theory on decisionmaking, (2) a sociological paradigm that situates individual action in a structure/culture/agency nexus that influences interpretation, meaning, and action at the local level, and (3) an analysis of the Challenger launch decision at NASA as situated action, showing how structure, culture, and history shaped preferences and choice. These challenges suggest a need to reorient regulatory activity toward the social context of decisionmaking. I conclude with a research agenda to explore the relationship between situated action, preference formation, and rational choice.

This article surveys recent works that seek to enrich criminal law policy analysis by incorporating social norms. The article does not purport to adduce the “true” or even the “best” definition of “social norms”; rather it breaks that term down into a cluster of related concepts that are frequently subsumed within it, including “social organization,” “social meaning,” and “social influence.” The motivation for grouping these concepts together, moreover, is as much political as conceptual. Using a pragmatic standard of assessment, the article uses the social norms literature to identify a host of politically feasible law enforcement policies—from curfews to gang-loitering laws to order-maintenance policing to reverse stings—that deter as well or better than severe prison sentences but that avoid the destructive effect of those sentences on inner-city communities.

Despite increasing interest in understanding patterns of criminal behavior over the life course and, especially, desistance from crime, evidence about the predictors of these experiences has been derived only from samples of male offenders. We evaluate whether there are gender differences in the predictors of both self-reported illegal earnings and arrest among samples of recently released male and female offenders. Our analysis of gender differences illustrates how both the behavior of the offender and the behavior of law shape our understanding of the transition out of crime. We analyze event history data from a large-scale social experiment that provided employment to male and female offenders. The results indicate that (1) gender differences in the predictors of desistance largely depend on the domain of behavior under consideration; (2) indicators of normative status, as opposed to the perceived risks of crime or age-graded informal controls, are particularly important determinants of women's risks of rearrest.

Scholars from across disciplinary lines are interested in understanding legal development. One impediment to the quest for a systematic explanation has been measures of legal change. Indicators like whether a court overturns an earlier ruling capture one facet of legal change but fail to capture the full range of courts' actions to develop legal doctrine. I introduce an alternative measure of legal change here—one based on Levi's (1949) focus on whether factual circumstances are or are not encompassed by the law. I use the U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions on the federal common law of public nuisance to illustrate this measure. Utilizing a multinomial logit model to explore the appellate judiciary's decisions to develop this legal doctrine, I find that the judges' decisions to develop the federal common law are explained by the judges' policy preferences; the litigation environment consisting of party resources, attorney experience, and amicus support; as well as the broader political context of public opinion and Supreme Court rulings.

Economist Ronald Coase's famous theorem regarding the ways that neighboring property owners bargain “around” law and government has been refined by Robert Ellickson, who studied the ways ranchers and their ranchette neighbors resolve problems of fencing and animal trespass. Both Coase and Ellickson rely on rational actor models of Economic Man in predicting and explaining human behavior and dispute resolution. Both offer animal trespasses as the prime illustrations. Both models are flawed.

Ellickson asked what might one learn by mining historical sources to reconstruct “bargaining” between ranchers and farmers, but he found the task daunting.

In the course of research into the “high” (formal) legal cultures and the “low” (informal) legal cultures in the lands of the British diaspora, 1630–1910, I gathered information on just such interactions (over fencing and animal trespass), and in this article I put Coase's and Ellickson's models to the test of the historian's laboratory. While Ellickson's model has significant power in predicting the behavior of mature British settlements where the neighbors were of the same core culture, it is not as effective in predicting dispute resolutions in frontier conditions and is of little use in predicting the interactions of Puritans and Algonquins, Pakehas and Maoris.

Everyday legal discourse refers to the spoken language with which ordinary people constitute the law-in-action. In this article, we experimentally investigate the social distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse found by ethnographers in small-claims court settings. We examine the influences of sex differences and social ties between disputants on these types of discourse in a mock small-claims setting using a quantitative content coding scheme. We do not find empirical support for sex differences in the production of simulated everyday legal discourse. The relational context of a dispute (operationalized as the strength of social ties between disputants) has significant effects on the distribution of rule- and relationally-oriented discourse, so that disputants in relationally-close contexts produce more relationally-oriented discourse and those in relationally-distant contexts produce more rule-oriented discourses than those in relationally-close contexts. With these findings as a backdrop, we discuss (1) the contextual nature of sex differences in everyday legal discourse; (2) discourse “switching” and emotional investment in personal relationships, and (3) applications for our coding scheme to studies of disputing frames.

In this article I review court records from the early period of settlement in Puritan Massachusetts (1629–50). The study avoids the great controversies of the day, focusing instead on the patterns that appear in the adjudication of a great number of cases over time. In the first part of the study, a quantitative analysis is performed on a data set comprising crimes (the independent variable) and punishments, evaluated according to an ordinally ranked scale of severity. In the second part, I review the records in detail and suggest conclusions concerning the purposes of punishment and the organizing concepts that are shown to have governed the adjudication of cases in the early Massachusetts courts. The study finds that over a period of decades and a large number of cases (N=793), the actions perceived to be necessary for the restoration of communal order dictated the severity of punishment imposed. I argue that this pattern demonstrates impressive fidelity to the doctrinal principles that served as the public legitimating principles for these courts. These findings, in turn, encourage us to question accounts that purport to show that these principles were merely veils for religious, economic, or social aggrandizement, particularly when such accounts are based on interpretations of individual cases or events.

This ethnographic research, conducted in a parole field office in central California, looks at how Feeley and Simon's (1992) “new penology” paradigm plays out at the level of implementation, given competing pressures on agents to be tough on crime as well as successful danger “risk managers.” Findings suggest that agents embrace a traditional law enforcement role for themselves that primarily takes an individualistic approach to the clientele and an intuitive approach to their management, rather than taking on the new penological role of actuarial risk managers defined by upper management. The agents were influenced by the popular discourse on crime in defining their priorities and actively subverted directives management issued to reorder those priorities. As Simon (1993) foreshadowed in his work on parole, the agents in this setting did not appear poised to become mere human “waste managers.”