What is the relationship between employment discrimination litigation and the relative earnings of blacks and whites in the United States? Do victories in court affect blacks' relative earnings? Are gains in earnings associated with legal victories enduring or temporary? Can litigation be an effective tactic in efforts at social reform? Data on plaintiff victories in employment discrimination cases decided by U.S. appellate courts from 1965 through 1985 show that victories are associated with significant and enduring increases in blacks' relative earnings. One implication is that at least in this area, the courts may bring about social reform.

A question intimated by some contemporary scholarship (but not yet fully explored) is how cultural practices that law both enables and limits might be related to new styles of politics and redefinitions of community. This query is first explored in the context of Queer Nation's response to the decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), which reduced homosexual identity to a single behavior. Queers' subsequent embrace of a cultural politics of “direct address” suggests that the transformation of identities and communities must be built from social and cultural practices that seek to redefine citizens' affiliations. While “turning away from the law” is one strategy for redefining political practice, the case of Karen Ulane—a transsexual who was fired after having sex reassignment surgery—suggests another: The articulation of a queer notion of “nonidentity” within the legal field may afford possibilities for destabilizing dominant legal classifications such as “sex” and “gender.”

This article explores the ways in which law and religion overlap and interact in Thailand. The imaginative-symbolic dimensions of Thai law and religion share many common elements, which have been apparent in the discourse of national politics throughout the 20th century and in the discourse associated with conflict, dissent, and reform in contemporary Thailand. With the emergence of a constitutional monarchy in the 1930s, traditional Buddhist concepts of cosmic law and religion were fused with new concepts of political administration and legal authority. A new “civic religion” emerged, resting on the threefold formula of nation, religion, and kingship. This evolving civic religious tradition has provided a framework for both the imaginative-symbolic and the more practical, action-oriented discourses that characterize modern Thai legal culture.

Stuart Scheingold, Toska Olson, and Jana Pershing (1994) draw from interviews with 15 people, including 5 leaders of victim advocacy organizations and 7 members of the state legislature, to show how a punitive ethos played itself out in legislation to control sexual violence. The lesson learned from Washington State's Community Protection Act (CPA) of 1989 is that members of victim advocacy organizations and grassroots social movements may practice a conservative law-and-order politics toward crime and justice. Scheingold et al. place their study within the terms of a debate, which they say has two sides. On one side are “republican and some feminist criminologists,” who “are sympathetic to victim advocacy because they see victims as natural spokespersons for republican/feminist values and policies” (p. 730). The other side contains liberals of various types, “including civil libertarians, just desert theorists, and others not readily identifiable with any general theory” (p. 734), “who see victim advocacy and/or republican criminology as a threat to the integrity of the criminal process” (p. 730). The authors conclude that while the Washington State victim advocates were both active players and pawns of politicians, “the net effect of victim advocacy is … substantially problematic for republican/feminist values and for sound crime control policy as well” (p. 731).

Legal culture is a socially derived product encompassing such interrelated concepts as legitimacy and acceptance of authorities, preferences for and beliefs about dispute arrangements, and authorities' use of discretionary power. This study investigated five attributes of legal culture by comparing subjective notions of law and the legal system of respondents from Turkey (Kurds), Lebanon, and Germany. Our samples fell into two distinct groups on cultural orientation: the German group showed a distinct individualistic orientation; the two other groups (Kurds and Lebanese) showed a relative collectivistic orientation. The findings suggest a substantial variety of legal preferences and practices between the two orientations. Collectivistic groups had a greater preference for abiding by the norms of tradition and religion and were less willing to let state law regulate in-group disputes; individualistic respondents showed a clear preference for formal procedures and guidelines. The study suggests that legal norms prevailing in Western societies may be inconsequential to people socialized in other cultures. Implications of diverse conceptions of law, legal expectations, and legitimacy for various cultural groups in multiethnic and plural societies are discussed.

This article drew on expectancy theory in industrial/organizational psychology to explain arrest productivity for driving under the influence (DUI) in a sample of Pennsylvania police officers. Expectancy theory is a cognitive model of motivation and performance based on workers' perceptions of their situation. Its major elements are estimated in a regression model: the officer's capability and opportunity for DUI enforcement (performance-reward expectancy), the instrumentality of DUI enforcement behavior for the officer, and the reward-cost balance associated with making DUI arrests. These factors account for 26% of the residual variance in the number of DUI arrests made annually once organizational effects have been removed. The relationships revealed are as expectancy theory predicts, except for instrumentality variables, which show a negative relationship to arrest productivity. This is due largely to the orientation of a small number of “rate busters,” whose exceptionally high arrest rate and negative attitudes toward their peers and the department hierarchy make them a distinct group accounting for a disproportionate number of arrests.

Thailand in the late 19th and early 20th centuries transformed its legal and administrative structure from one based on the principles of sacred kingship to one based on the symbols of a constitutional monarchy in a Western-style nation-state. This transformation had important implications for the status of the Muslim minority population residing primarily in the four southernmost provinces of Thailand. Traditionally, one of the most important responsibilities of the Thai king was to uphold and protect Thai Buddhism and to oversee and purify the Buddhist clergy. In the new nation-state, these governmental responsibilities were generalized to some extent to include other religions of Thai citizens, such as Islam. This process of generalization, however, was associated with certain conceptual and political problems, whose analysis in this article sheds light not only on the status of the Muslim minority in contemporary Thailand but also on modern concepts of religion, law, and kingship in the Thai polity.

The author examines the images of community that lie behind the Environmental Protection Agency's decision not to extend proactive, uniform regulation of the Clean Air Act to the problem of local industrial odor. Under this decision, the regulation of such odors remains dependent on complaints and local initiatives rather than on proactive governmental intervention. The legitimacy and economic logic of the reactive structures the agency endorsed rely on two assumptions: (1) industrial odors are an aesthetic annoyance rather than a toxic threat; and (2) local environmental conditions reflect conscious decisionmaking by homogenous local communities as to trade-offs, and preferences for environmental quality will differ among these communities. The author uses three case studies to cast doubt on the validity of these assumptions; they demonstrate in particular the mythical character of the “community” posited by the EPA as a foundation for viable reactive enforcement. Indeed, to trigger enforcement, it has been necessary to undertake heroic organizational efforts and to create novel forms of social groupings hardly characterizable as “communities.”

This essay introduces a conceptual and theoretical model for understanding how dispute resolution in the workplace contributes to gender differences in employment. We conceptualize workplace disputes as having three components: origins, processes, and outcomes. We synthesize theory and existing empirical findings in several disciplines to examine how these three components are patterned by gender roles, sex segregation in jobs, and institutionalized work structures. The essay illuminates workplace dispute resolution generally, demonstrates linkages to other aspects of gender inequality in employment, and provides a model for further research and policymaking.

We are grateful for the thoughtful responses to our study of the Washington State Community Protection Act (Braithwaite & Pettit 1994; Daly 1994). These responses underscore the importance of pushing beyond our case study and point to a variety of promising ways to determine the extent to which the problems we uncover in Washington are typical and/or idiosyncratic.

We attempt to make sense of the law enforcement response to the savings and loan debacle and the larger pattern of white-collar crime enforcement of which it is a part. Drawing from government documents and in-depth interviews with federal regulators and enforcement officials, we argue that the current response to savings and loan fraud is unprecedented both in terms of the extensive resources committed and the prosecution of thousands of white-collar offenders. Pointing out that this at first seems inconsistent with the government's relative tolerance of corporate crime cited in other white-collar crime studies, we borrow from state theory to explain this “crackdown.” By bringing together two traditions that have usually remained distinct—white-collar crime research and state theory—this analysis may contribute both to a better understanding of the government response to white-collar crime and to a more empirically grounded approach to the state.

Members of the Muslim minority in the Philippines have a distinctive legal culture whose rules and customs are grounded in Islam. To address this situation of legal pluralism, the government in 1977 enacted a Code of Muslim Personal Laws, which stands alongside the Philippines Family Code and Civil Code and officially recognizes the principle of plural legal regimes for at least one minority cultural and religious group within the general population. This article, written by a participant in the legislative process, explores the complexities of conceptualizing and drafting the Code. These complexities include the use of ethnographic descriptions of customary law within the Muslim community, the selection of rules from among the different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and the harmonization of conflicts between the laws now applicable to Muslims and non-Muslims in the Philippines.

At first sight, the vastly different litigation frequencies in West Germany and The Netherlands present a riddle, as both countries have a legal system tradition in common and their baseline of potentially litigious conflicts is very much alike. This study tries to find an explanation by disaggregating various kinds of civil procedures. The distinguishing variables are found in the presence or absence of institutions filtering disputes at the pretrial stage. While in The Netherlands plaintiffs are offered a bigger set of alternatives for dispute resolution, the German court system, being very cost efficient, attracts masses of petty claims. Thus, it is unnecessary to look for attitudinal differences or even different “litigation mentalities” in the neighboring cultures. The institutional infrastructure is sufficient to explain why it is rational for Germans to use the courts and for the Dutch to avoid them.

Despite a widespread assumption that divorce mediation and divorce lawyers are incompatible, lawyers do play active—if largely unexamined—roles in many mediation programs. This article reports on the work of lawyers in a state with mandatory mediation. We find that lawyers in Maine have generally embraced mediation because it helps them manage problems inherent in divorce practice. Mandated divorce mediation facilitates both settlement negotiation and trial preparation, permits client participation in decisionmaking without requiring lawyers to surrender control, provides a forum for resolving both legal and nonlegal issues, and promotes efficient case management.

In the Maluku Islands of Eastern Indonesia, a center of global diversity in coral reef systems and the historic center of trade in cloves and other spices, tenure practices known as sasi have flourished for at least a century. This article analyzes changes in the ways Dutch colonial officials, Indonesian government officials, and environmental NGOs have interpreted Moluccan customary law and local institutions. Dutch colonial accounts of sasi, a generic name for a historic family of institutions, laws, and ritual practices that regulated access to fields, reefs, and rivers, suggest that sasi was a synthetic, highly variable body of practices linked to religious beliefs and local cultural ideas of nature. During the past two decades, as international and national conservation discourses have proliferated and a movement has developed to support indigenous Indonesian cultural communities, Indonesian NGOs and the Ministry of the Environment have promoted, and largely created, images of sasi as an environmental institution and body of customary law promoting sustainable development, conservation, and social equity. This article focuses on how sasi has been continuously reinterpreted by a variety of actors, following the trajectory of changing institutional interests and images.

Law has influenced the shape of Indian group life by providing economic or political incentives for groups to organize along particular lines, by forcing groups into closer proximity with one another or separating them, and by creating an official vocabulary for the discussion of group life. The most striking effect of law has been to focus the expression of Indian political identity at the level of the “tribe.” Although largely a construct of non-Indian legal forces, the tribe has become a powerful vehicle for assertions of Indian autonomy, even when it has not always been the traditional locus of political legitimacy. Modern Indian identity and community thus reflect conflicts over and distinctive ways of appropriating the institution of the tribe. A second effect of law has been the developing support among tribal members for a supratribal Native American political community. Significantly, however, most tribal members view their support for such a community as a means of strengthening tribal units.

The author uses a conceptual framework grounded in theory of institutional process to assess developments in the theory of community-based policing. He suggests that two contemporary myths in policing—the myth of the police watchman and the myth of community—provide core elements the theory. Both liberal and conservative advocates for reform have drawn on these myths to support reinstitutionalizing police as community protectors with broad authority, including authority to arrest, unconstrained by law enforcement or due process considerations. He also discusses fundamental differences in the ways in which liberal and conservative reform advocates perceive the relationship between the myths.

The research reported tests the influence of judgments about the fairness of government lawmaking procedures on evaluations of the legitimacy of a national-level governmental authority through studies—two experiments and a survey—examining judgments about Congress. The influence of procedural justice on legitimacy is contrasted with the effects of self-interested judgments indexing agreement with congressional decisions. Although a sizable empirical literature already suggests the importance of procedural justice in shaping reactions to personal experiences with legal, political, and managerial authorities, recent studies have been inconsistent about the degree to which procedural justice findings generalize to national-level institutions. The findings of the studies reported here strongly support the argument that procedural justice judgments influence evaluations of the legitimacy of a national-level political institution. A further exploration seeking to find an influence of ethnicity, gender, education, age, income and/or ideology on the psychology of legitimacy suggests that demographic differences do not influence the criteria respondents use to assess the fairness of decisionmaking procedures. The findings suggest that procedures provide a viable basis for maintaining public support in the face of differences in individuals' policy positions and background characteristics.