The Soviet militsiia (regular police) has evolved in the past 70 years from a feeble body seeking to ensure the survival of Soviet rule to a massive bureaucracy corrupted by nearly absolute power. As the Soviet militia has developed the focus of its activities, its ethos, professionalism, and its relationship to both the Party and KGB have changed in all periods, the militia has had political, economic, and social responsibilities, but the balance among the three has shifted depending on the conditions of the state.

The militia, like the Soviet state, is currently in crisis. It remains an instrument of the party that is losing its legitimacy among the population. Perestroika's objective of making institutions subordinate to the law is a sharp deviation from existing practice. But even if the militsiia responds to these new expectations, because of the demands of a centrally planned socialist state the regular police will remain we intrusive into the lives of the citizenry than are police in Western democratic societies.

For cases of serious crime a number of European countries employ a variant of the jury called the mixed court, in which laymen and professional judges sit together in a single panel that deliberates and decides on all issues of verdict and sentence. Trials in the mixed court proceed quite rapidly, in large measure because the mixed court dispenses with most of the time-consuming practices of jury control that characterize Anglo-American trial procedure. Consequently, the legal system can process all cases of serious crime to full trial. The present article describes the German mixed-court system and contrasts it with the American jury, asking to what extent the mixed court serves the purposes of the jury. The conclusion is that the mixed court serves the jury policies well, though not fully; and that it is a superior alternative to the indigenous nontrial devices—plea bargaining and bench trial—that have displaced the jury from routine American practice.

Using two marital disputes, this article examines women's experiences in bringing legal claims regarding family property in Botswana. It highlights the ways women draw on diverse economic and social resources available to them through their differing positions within gendered social networks that shape daily life and affect the ability to access and manipulate a legal system incorporating Tswana customary law and European law. The divergent discourses among women and between women and men document how the administrative and theoretical separation of legal systems does not extend to people's uses of the law in arranging their own lives. This analysis challenges the formalist model of legal pluralism by demonstrating that legal arguments are constructed from the gendered social and economic facts of individuals' lives that traverse the legal categories of European and customary law. It also contributes to feminist legal scholarship by explicitly marking the links among gender, power, and law.

While developments in intellectual property have opened the door for trademarking color alone or color per se, it is important to observe that color codification is not a new phenomenon. This article outlines the quest to metaphorically trademark purple in antiquity and to provide it with clear “secondary meaning.” It highlights how language, literature, and sumptuary law was deployed to infuse purple with the appropriate symbolism, and it links contemporary debates to some of the historic moves to sequester color.

Growth and bureaucratization have begun to transform patterns of recruitment and career development in large law firms. Based on a case study of four large Chicago firms, this article examines these changes and their implications. The findings indicate that the social composition of large firms has become substantially more heterogeneous with respect to the status of law school attended, gender, and ethnoreligious background. However, data on lawyers' careers suggest that associates entering firms today face an increasingly bureaucratic organizational context marked by higher levels of turnover, earlier and more intensive specialization, decreased levels of client responsibility, and more frequent assignment to large-scale litigation. The article also addresses the dynamics of individual choice over type of work performed in firms. Lawyers initially working in litigation fields are far more likely to change fields of practice than are lawyers who begin in office practice fields, reflecting the increased tendency for firms to assign new associates to litigation as well as the alienating propensity of large-firm litigation for many associates. Paradoxically, a greater proportion of lawyers in traditionally organized, general service firms than in bureaucratically organized, specialty firms report that their choice of work was dictated by the firm. Also, somewhat surprisingly, the frequency with which firms explicitly direct lawyers into particular fields has not increased from earlier periods. The article concludes that these anomalies result from the fact that firms control the career choices of lawyers, and always have, but that the way such control is exercised varies across firms and historical periods.

This article analvzes referral practices among lawyers. The hypothesis is that the market for legal services is “efficient,” that is, market forces enable plaintiffs in personal injury cases to maximize their recoveries, given the quality of lawyers representing defendants. If this market is indeed efficient, one would expect that legal claims which would benefit most from high-quality legal services would be assigned to high-quality lawyers. The evidence shows that referrals enable claims to be matched with lawyers in just that way. That is, through the mechanism of referrals, claims of greater intrinsic value are assigned to lawyers of higher quality.

The paper also provides a model of the decision a generalist must make: to litigate a case himself or refer it to a trial specialist. The implications of the model support the hypothesis that this market is efficient in the sense defined above.

Campaigns against domestic violence and projects designed to reform laws are increasingly part of the development initiatives undertaken in African nations. Such projects are subject to standard criticisms of development (e. g., its tendency to enhance the power of donors over recipients) and to more recent concerns raised by postcolonial feminist scholarship (e. g., its tendency to ignore how women's condition in developing nations emerges from relations between donors and recipients). Mindful of these criticisms, many gender and law reform projects begun in Tanzania in the 1990s were designed to foster egalitarian relations between donors and recipients as well as to change laws and legal practices with respect to domestic violence. In addition, many projects relied on interactive workshops to impart information about law reform while empowering local participants. This essay focuses on two domestic violence workshops held in Tanzania in 1998. Linguistic analysis is used to expose the multiple relations of power in these development initiatives. The article demonstrates that demands on the structure of interaction—that is, everyone must be encouraged to participate—can work against creating egalitarian relations and suggests that some challenges to reforming development lie at the level of linguistic interaction.

This article draws on law and society theories on the circulation of legal ideas to explain the instrumentalization of transitional justice in Colombia. Most scholarship explains transitional justice as a theoretical framework or as a set of instruments that helps redress mass violence. In contrast, this study reveals that the idea serves as a placeholder for different political actors to promote their respective interests. Drawing on over fifty interviews, the study suggests that the power of transitional justice lies in its malleability, which is both its strength and its weakness, as those with different political agendas can appropriate the idea in contradictory ways. The findings emphasize that understanding transitional justice requires a turn from abstract analyses that either take the idea for granted or try to define its meaning toward examining how people on the ground understand the idea, and how they translate those understandings into political action.

This article explores the role of legality in conceptions of state and society among bureaucrats in the Taipei, Taiwan city government. When administrators confront the global arena, the existence of law emblematizes modernity and the ability to participate in the international system. In interactions among administrators, law is laden with impossible ideals and fraught with assumptions of hypocrisy. In dealings with people outside the government, legality often signals the breakdown of other, more valuable social norms. Far from legitimating administrative action, legality itself is legitimated by reference to the same values as other social action: it is held up to an ideal of consensus and cultural coherence and judged by its ability to fulfill obligations and nurture relationships. Law does not hegemonically structure administrators’ conceptions of state and society. Rather, it defines one aspect of governance at the margins of legitimacy, dependent on justification through other ethical norms.

There is little documentation about how nuisance property laws, which fine people for excessive 911 calls, affect victims of domestic violence. In St. Louis, we found that police and prosecutors believe that the law benefits victims of domestic violence by providing them with additional services. By contrast, advocates for domestic violence victims believe that the law undermines battered women's access to housing and discourages them from calling 911. Using qualitative data, we analyze how the organizational structures and dynamics within which each group works give rise to different stocks of working knowledge. We conclude that law enforcement officials are unaware of these harms because women's voices and experiences are marginalized during the enforcement process. This research reveals mechanisms through which law enforcement policies reinforce gender inequality, and illustrates some ways in which gender relations and power come into play in what, on their surface, appear to be gender‐neutral laws.

Despite the importance of judicial diversity for litigants and the broader public, no previous study has examined this issue within the French judiciary. This article begins to fill this gap by using original, qualitative data that shed light on judges’, prosecutors', and other legal actors' discourses on racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity. Its main contribution is to show that these legal professionals deploy three strategies—linguistic, institutional, and geographic—to dodge or downplay the relevance of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. The first, linguistic, form of avoidance lies in refusing to name and discuss race and ethnicity explicitly; the second, institutional, in denying that the judiciary has a diversity problem or that the problem lies within its power; and the third, geographic, consists in relegating the issue of diversity to distant places—the United States and overseas France. The article concludes by discussing key directions for future research.

Critics have highlighted the complicity of human rights law in mass disempowerment and domination—a criticism equally applicable to child law. This article investigates this issue, as evidenced by three recent developments that Israel has justified by invoking these legal frameworks: an increased separation of Palestinian adults and children in Israeli custody; the Israeli legal system's growing preoccupation with “rehabilitating” the now-segregated Palestinian children; and the Israeli authorities' ever-diminishing interest in such rehabilitation for adult Palestinian prisoners. By canvassing the legal architecture, judicial rationalizations, adverse effects, and sociopolitical context of these developments, this article foregrounds their divide-and-rule logic and structure of driving a generational wedge between Palestinians and potentially weakening their political ties, solidarity, and resistance.

This article investigates the effects of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 in structuring an encounter over a decision about building a dam in central Arizona. From the vantage point of three groups with deep-investments in the outcome of this decision, it analyzes how the interests and identities of these parties were transformed as a result of this encounter. In defining standing and the terms of relevance, in providing a political forum, and in requiring these groups to explain themselves to others, this law powerfully mediated the politics surrounding this controversial decision.

This article seeks to understand how reported mediation rates in Chinese courts are produced and what they actually signify. It analyzes data obtained through prolonged fieldwork at a court in central China. The article finds that the court has directly responded to central level mediation incentives by enhancing its overall mediation rate. It has done so strategically by seeking the highest increase using the fullest discretion in the mediation incentive structure and seeking to optimize the highest rate at the lowest cost and risk to the court. This has undermined the objectives of the central level incentives toward mediation, while also drawing the courts' scarce resources away toward unnecessary mediation practices, in part far removed from the courtroom. The article concludes by drawing out broader theoretical conclusions about how information asymmetries, discretion, and goal displacement play out in hierarchical control structures of authoritarian courts.

In authoritarian contexts where the state is the primary performer in the public sphere and legal mobilization is constrained and repressed, activists often seek to carve out a public space to confront the frontstage and backstage of the state’s performance in order to pursue collective action. Comparing the online legal mobilization of feminist and lawyer activists in China, this article investigates how performance arts are used by activists to challenge the authoritarian state in the age of social media. Performing “artivism” is to create conspicuous spectacles in the public eye for the purposes of exposing the state’s illegal or repressive backstage actions or promoting alternative values and norms different from the official ideology. By subversively disrupting the evidential boundaries set by the state, Chinese activists have been able to gain momentum and public support for their legal mobilization. However, it was precisely the success of their artivism that contributed to the government crackdowns on both feminists and lawyers in 2015.

Law professors and political scientists generally subscribe to opposed theories of Supreme Court decision making. Law professors, to a great degree, adhere to an internal view: Supreme Court justices decide cases according to legal rules, principles, and precedents. Political scientists follow an external view: justices decide cases according to their political ideologies or preferences. This article develops an interpretive-structural theory that harmonizes these seemingly opposed views. This interpretive-structural theory not only explains why the internal and external views often are both effective but also why, sometimes, one approach might be more effective than the other. The article concludes by comparing the interpretive-structural theory with the “new institutionalism” that is emerging in political science.

A key criticism that has emerged in the debate over the search and seizure exclusionary rule is that it exacts heavy societal costs in the form of lost prosecutions and that such costs outweigh any demonstrated social benefits. This article examines the costs of three exclusionary rules using data collected for 7,500 cases in a nine-county study of criminal courts in three states. It emphasizes motions to suppress physical evidence but for comparative purposes also includes motions to suppress confessions and identifications. The results show that the various exclusionary rules exact only marginal social costs. Motions to suppress physical evidence are filed in fewer than 5% of the cases, largely drug and weapons cases, while serious motions to suppress identifications and confessions are filed in 2% and 4% of the cases. The success rate of motions to suppress is equally marginal. Successful motions to suppress physical evidence occur in only 0.69% of the cases, while successful motions to suppress identifications or confessions occur much less often. Moreover, not all who successfully suppressed evidence escaped conviction, especially when only an identification or a confession was suppressed. In all, only 46 cases—less than 0.6% of the cases studied—were lost because of the three exclusionary rules combined, most of them involving offenses that would have incurred less than six months’ imprisonment or first offenders. Finally, the impact of unsuccessful motions on subsequent plea bargaining was found to be marginal; only unsuccessful motions to exclude confessions resulted in any real sentencing concessions.

Earlier studies haw shown that professional orientations are related to individual compliance with laws and regulations. However, no quantitative studies have focused on compliance at the organizational level and the professional orientations of the chief executive officer. Studies on dues and law breaking at the individual level have focused on professional orientations, but within an organization there are other aspects of professionalism that will be of import in determining the organization's compliance with the law. We posit that professionalism is a more complex notion for individuals located in an organizational setting. Utilizing data collected from 410 Australian nursing homes, which are characterized by a flat management structure, the data show that of three aspects of professionalism—orientation, values, and autonomy—it is professional autonomy that directly affects organizational compliance. However, the data do suggest that the relationship between professional orientations and organizational compliance are mediated by the complexity of the organization. Organizational culture is also shown to be an important factor in explaining compliance with the law.