This study examines the contours of local legal culture in four criminal trial courts. Local legal culture is conceptualized as common practitioner norms governing case handling and participant behavior in a court. A questionnaire consisting of descriptions of 12 hypothetical cases, together with questions regarding the appropriate mode of disposition, disposition speed, and sentence, was completed by judges, defense attorneys, and prosecutors in each of the courts. Responses on these questions are compared across courts and various types of practitioners. The responses are also compared with analogous data on actual case dispositions in each of the courts.

The major substantive conclusion of the research is that the existence of local legal culture—if defined as attitudinal agreement on proper disposition of criminal cases—is most apparent on issues of a procedural nature: disposition time and the necessity of a trial to resolve issues in the case. On these procedural dimensions there is general agreement among the lawyers and judges practicing in a court; furthermore, the contours of this agreement tend to differ across courts and to be related to actual practices (as illustrated by the samples of closed cases). On issues relating more to the substance of the cases—the appropriateness of plea concessions and the proper sentence—much more intracourt disagreement emerges. This disagreement is consistent with traditional notions of the roles of opposing counsel in an adversary setting, suggesting that at least attitudinal adversariness is present in the courts examined.

Plea bargaining and other informal disposition devices dominate case processing in the lower criminal courts. Consistently, studies have found such courts characterized by assembly-line procedures, deemphasis or disregard of formal due process rights, and guilty plea rates approaching 100% of all convictions. Caseload pressures, tendencies toward cooperation among courtroom participants and, above all, process costs of litigation that greatly outweigh the stakes in minor cases are widely thought to render informality and high guilty plea rates inevitable.

The study reported here challenges these assumptions. The author finds that in Philadelphia roughly one-fifth of all misdemeanor dispositions and one-half of all determinations of guilt are the result of genuine adversarial trials. He shows that an adversarial trial system need not impose prohibitive resource costs, even when extended to misdemeanor cases involving little likelihood of imprisonment, and that process costs will not deter defendants from invoking formal procedures when the court culture is committed to providing trials. Finally, the author argues that even routine misdemeanor cases benefit from guarantees of fairness and accuracy afforded by trial but unattainable when cases are processed by plea bargaining.