The master issue for the law and society field for the early 1990s may have been best described by the “crossing boundaries” metaphor that has been adopted, with variations, in the past few years as the theme of the programs of a number of professional associations whose members contribute to law and society scholarship. Apparently, in contrast to the recent past when issues of diversity and identity drew attention to differences of perspective, conflicts between cultures, the incoherence of authority, and the politics of interpretation, a move is being made to find and define the central enterprise that draws scholars together in the law and society field while avoiding the imperialism of particular perspectives or theories. The metaphor of crossing boundaries suggests respect for the boundary—for difference and for plural meanings, for integrity in separateness—and suggests a search for a concept of coherence that does not require a permanent bridging, merging, and unifying of starting points for understanding.

This Symposium issue of the Review is a satisfying conclusion for my three years as general editor. In her Introduction, Symposium editor Beth Mertz examines the long genealogy in law and society research of the central problem that the Symposium's contributors address, law and the constituting of communities. Community is a dual concept in law and society studies. First, it is a term that is used to refer to an empirical domain within which some research is situated, the boundaries of which simplify the task of description or analysis. Second, it is a normative concept associated with authority and, often, with meaningful action. Particularly in this second sense, community has been an important focus of recent thought and research, both as a foil for critical analysis of legal authority and its constitutive properties and as an element of work on the constitution and reconstitution of action and identity. This Symposium is intended to draw attention to the importance of continuing work on the group concepts that frame, with varying degrees of explicitness, law and society studies of action and identity—race, gender, class, and, overlapping all, community.

This special issue of the Law & Society Review grows out of a unique intellectual encounter: an attempt by the Association to reach beyond its usual geographical horizons and to listen to and engage in conversation with a group of scholars from a region of the world—Southeast Asia—that has received little attention within the law and society community. This conversation is significant for the Association in several ways. First, as our scholarly community becomes more aware of the globalization of our field and the interconnections between our interests and developments in other regions of the world, it behooves us to make new efforts to broaden our understanding of sociolegal issues that are important to the scholars and peoples of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and other world regions. Second, if the Association is to realize its aspirations to internationalize its membership, we should at the same time attempt to understand the scholarly interests and commitments of new colleagues with whom we seek to share our community. We must therefore find ways to listen to the voices of scholars in regions of the world whose work may not yet be familiar to the Review's general readership. Third, the infusion of new perspectives, new research issues, and new voices can enrich the dialogue among sociolegal scholars in many ways. Familiar topics—legal pluralism, the family, crime, the environment, civil rights—can be seen in a new light; and topics that now receive somewhat less attention among North American and European sociolegal scholars—indigenous peoples, law and religion, land rights—emerge as fundamentally important and deserving of renewed research interest.

This article looks at one component of Taiwan's development experience, the informal financing techniques used by small businesses, to clarify the interaction between the formal Republic of China (ROC) legal system and the network structure of Taiwanese society. The ROC legal system has supported the economic development process direcdy by regulating economic activity, and indirectly by facilitating the networks of relationships that also regulate economic activity. The relational structure of traditional, rural Chinese society has survived in a modified form in modern Taiwan, and this modern form selectively blends elements of the modern legal system, networks of relationships, and the enforcement services of organized crime. Ideas such as “legal centralism” and “legal pluralism” fail to capture the dynamic of the relationship between the ROC legal system and Taiwanese society, so the idea of “marginalization of law” is offered as a better description.

Community has been a central concept of political and legal philosophy since its beginning. It has often served as a frame of reference even when not explored as such. From the well-known opening of Aristotle's Politics to the French constitution of 1958, community has served to designate the human group with which politics and law are concerned and to which all the characteristic phenomena of political life, power, authority, law, and the rest must be referred.

—Friedrich 1959:3

The community myth is that there is now, or ever has been, a “community” in the sense of groups of like-minded individuals, living in urban areas, who share a common heritage, have similar values and norms, and share a common perception of social order… . [T]he idea of community contains many implications of the environment encompassed by the myth. Geographically and ethnically identifiable groups become “neighborhoods,” or moral entities characterized by a sense of belonging, a sense of common goals, involvement in community affairs, and a sense of wholeness.

—Crank 1994:336–37

There exists out there, somewhere, “the black community.” It once was a place where people both lived and worked. Now it is more of an idea, or an ideal, than a reality. It is like the mythical maroon colony of the Isle des Chevaliers (for those of you who have read Toni Morrison's Tar Baby), or like Brigadoon (for those of you who are culturally deprived). “The black community” of which I write is partly the manifestation of a nostalgic longing for a time when blacks were clearly distinguishable from whites and concern about the welfare of the poor was more natural than our hairdos.

—Austin 1992:1769

For the past two decades, land in Yajouz has been the locus of fierce contestation between the government of Jordan, the Bani Hasan tribe, and new settlers. Today, Yajouz is a peripheral urban settlement deemed illegal by the government. Three main factors have contributed to the making of Yajouz in its present form: (1) the contested nature of claims to land; (2) the plurality of control mechanisms and ordering of the social and the geographical space, allowing the land market to develop as a semi-autonomous social field; (3) the process of mutual adjustment between state organs and the Yajouz social field, defining the security of tenure among settlers and the social functioning of law. I argue that the Yajouz market does not manifest a traditional phenomenon giving way to modernity; it is rather a modern phenomenon itself shaping and being shaped by the daily functioning of law. In this case, conflicting claims to resources have been catalysts for the development of a semi-autonomous social field, which in turn has engaged state organs in a process of mutual adjustment.

This article focuses on the Community Protection Act (CPA), the State of Washington's legislative effort to control sexual violence, and on the victim advocacy groups that played a prominent role in this effort. It is argued by some, most recently by republican criminologists, that victim advocates serve democratic ideals and introduce into criminal process important values and interests that are neglected by professionals. Others argue that victim advocacy tends to promote punitive policies that empower the state, jeopardize constitutional rights, and divert attention from causes to symptoms. The evidence gathered in this research lends credence to the critics of republican criminology. Victim advocates were not reliable carriers of republican values in their strenuous support of the CPA, the central provisions of which reduce civil liberties and promote exclusion rather than reintegration.

The conference began with a discussion of law and religion and four days later ended with a discussion of concepts of rights in Southeast Asia. The merging of the two topics in this symposium issue reflects a recognition that both concern questions of social order, political legitimacy, sovereignty, personhood, and belief. It reflects as well a recognition that the topics have a single history. As Frank Reynolds observes (with some understatement) in the essay that begins this part, religion as a cultural system and law as a cultural system “overlap and interact in many very different and complicated ways.”

Scheingold, Olson, and Pershing (1994) have posed an interesting challenge to the republican perspective on criminal justice, and we attempt to meet that challenge here. But before considering their argument, we find it useful to set out the main elements in the republican position. In doing so, we summarize the approach in Not Just Deserts (Braithwaite & Pettit 1990) and in some followup articles (e.g., Pettit with Braithwaite 1993, 1994); the summary breaks down this approach, very loosely, into three axioms and eight theorems.

At the end of the 1980s in an effort to increase the effectiveness of its development loans, the World Bank's legal staff began to address what it calls governance issues in borrowing countries. Concerned that the way power is exercised in Third World countries may contribute to the inefficient use of World Bank funds but constrained by its Articles of Agreement from considering “political” criteria in its lending, the General Counsel of the Bank, Ibrahim F. I. Shihata, drafted a memorandum that distinguished “governance” from “politics” and identified the former as a legitimate consideration in the award of Bank loans. At his most general, Shihata equates governance to “good order”; in more specific terms, he calls it “the rule of law,” which he defines at one point as a “system based on abstract rules which are actually applied and on functioning institutions which ensure the appropriate application of such rules” (emphasis in original).

The movement for removal of criminal penalties for possession of marihuana in the United States provides an important case study of the causes and process of decriminalization. Between 1973 and 1978, 11 states reduced criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of the drug, but the reform movement was fragile, brief, and limited to a few states. This case study suggests that reform was driven in part by “moral dissonance” resulting from the arrest of high-status offenders. Although public opinion has always been deeply divided on decriminalization of marihuana possession, a narrow “policy window” was created in the 1970s by the expressed concern of political leaders about the effect of arrest on high-status youths and the support of law enforcement agencies interested in efficient use of limited resources. Even after the window for reform closed at the end of the 1970s with a shift in national leadership, deep moral ambivalence renders criminalization symbolic and police place a low priority on marihuana arrests.

More than 80% of the people of Antigua and Barbuda are born out of wedlock. In 1986 Antigua's Parliament passed new family laws to enable men to acknowledge legally their illegitimate children, to prevent discrimination against children whose parents have not wed, and to allow acknowledged children to inherit from their fathers' estates. How is the Status of Children Act, the keystone of the new measures, being interpreted and applied by legal professionals? To what degree can legal proclamations and judicial processes alter people's commonsense understanding of family? To what extent do social norms and everyday practices remake the meaning and practice of law? I explore law's role in the construction of personal and group identity and in relation to gender hierarchy. I find that Antigua's new kinship codes are both emblematic of a distinctly postcolonial kinship order and indicative of new tensions between certain powerful institutions—schools and churches—which previously enjoyed ideological support from the state.