The article examines the operation of the Hong Kong stock and futures exchanges during the crash of October 1987 and in particular the controversial decision to close the exchanges. It argues that the closure decision exposes a serious conflict of interest and abuse of power on the part of the major decision makers and fundamental flaws in Hong Kong's self-regulatory system. Moreover, these events raise broader questions about the strengths and weaknesses of different regulatory regimes and about the value of different theoretical explanations of regulatory behavior. In particular, it is argued that the most influential theory concerning the regulation of financial markets—that of certain Chicago School economists—raises as many questions as it answers, and that an alternative view which locates cultural and organizational factors at its core provides a more satisfactory explanation of the events of October 1987.

The Soviet political system is made up of three major institutions: the Communist Party, the parliament, and the government. Whereas the first two have changed dramatically under perestroika, the government has continued to function in more traditional ways. Most worrying to reformists, the government–the Soviet Union's “executive branch”–has used its broad rulemaking authority to impede the transformation of Soviet politics and society. This essay examines the role of governmental rules in the Soviet political and legal system. It concludes, following the lead of Soviet reformists, that without a fundamental restructuring of government making authority, legal, political, and economic reform in the Soviet Union cannot be institutionalized.

This article concerns the relationship between the thought of Karl Marx and the fate of law, and the rule of law, in the communist states of the Soviet Union and east and central Europe. It takes the rule of law to be primarily an attempt to institutionalize restraint on power through law, and it takes it to be realized to a far greater extent in Western liberal democracies than in once-communist states. It argues that Marx's thought offered no support for such institutionalization of restraint, but, on the contrary, considerable support to the repressive, ideological and purely instrumental uses of law and the rejection and destruction of the rule of law, which were characteristic of communism.

England grants unusually broad responsibility for sentencing of criminal offenders to voluntary part-time lay magistrates who, like their legally trained professional colleagues, sentence a wide range of offenders. Using simulated cases, archival analyses, and observational techniques, this article compares the sentencing decisions of the lay and professional magistrates in London. The study reveals no evidence of the lay preference for more severe sentencing that is typically shown in public opinion polls. The extent to which legal training, court experience, panel decisionmaking and role within the court system can explain the relative leniency of the lay magistrates are considered Consistent with results from other studies, these findings suggests that when laypersons assign sentences to particular offenders rather than express generalized satisfaction or dissatisfaction with current sentencing practices, laypersons are no more punitive than professional judges.

This investigation sought to discover whether, and in what respects, Soviet advocates in the wake of perestroika are comparable with legal professions in the West. Taped interviews with ten advocates and various other legal specialists in Moscow and Leningrad in the winter of 1988–89 centered on four major professional goals. The responses showed (1) that Soviet advocates felt that their colleges effectively control admission to the bar; (2) that they have little sense of occupational jurisdiction, except in relation to the newly established legal cooperatives; (3) that they behaved like members of a self-governing profession in that bar association chairmen and bureau managers were perceived as colleagues rather than bosses, while party and state intervention control was dismissed as insignificant; (4) although they feel their status has risen dramatically since Gorbachev, it is not clear that this owes much to their collective efforts or that they have developed a corporate ideology to defend their position. Overall, the evidence supports the view that professional aspirations and institutions comparable to those in the West are to be found among Soviet advocates. Whether this might be seen as the reassertion of civil society, and of pluralism, in Soviet society is a much debated but currently unanswerable question. Negative and positive indications on this matter emerged during the research, the latter being rather the more persuasive.

The treatment of white-collar offenders by the criminal justice system has been a central concern since the concept of white-collar crime was first introduced In general, it has been assumed that those higher up the social hierarchy have an advantage in every part of the legal process, including the punishment they receive as white-collar criminals. In a controversial study of white-collar crime sentencing in the federal district courts, Wheeler, Weisburd, and Bode contradicted this assumption when they found that those of higher status were more likely to be imprisoned and, when sentenced to prison, were likely to receive longer prison terms than comparable offenders of lower status. While they argued that results were consistent with “what those who do the sentencing often say about it,” their analyses failed to control for the role of social class in the sentencing process. In this article we reanalyze the Wheeler et al sentencing data, including both measures of socioeconomic status and class position. Our findings show that class position does have an independent influence on judicial sentencing behavior. But this effect does not demand revision in the major findings reported in the earlier study.

This article examines a period of profound crisis about the English bar. The metaphor of “moral panic” is invoked in assessing the impact of five notorious cases of barristers’ misconduct which riveted public attention between 1859 and 1863. Four of the barristers involved were subjected to “professional discipline” in what was the first spate of disciplinary proceedings for breaches of bar “etiquette.” Professional “ethics” were applied in remarkably selective ways and amounted to a “shutting down” of laissez-faire professional practices. This was a crucial turning point in the English legd profession, and the effect was to transform the bar from a relatively open, unregulated status group into something akin to a rule-bound disciplinary regime.

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.

A major challenge for scholars seeking new directions in sociolegal research is the persistence of old paradigms and assumptions about law. The challenge for the new is not to be cast as part of the old by efforts that assimilate its methods, goals, and results to earlier approaches. Such efforts, aimed at comparison and clarification, tend to “domesticate” the new, or in Boa Santos's words “doubly institutionalize” a developing project by reading the order of a conventional analysis into the emergent order appearing in the interstices of new scholarly work. In this essay we focus on interpretivism as a developing project in sociolegal research. In particular, we discuss three aspects of interpretive research that are at the center of current debates in sociolegal theory: meaning construction and the dynamics of power, legal ideology, and knowledge as politics. Our discussion focuses on different readings of ideology, on different understandings of power, and on the politics of interpretive research connected with these readings. To illuminate the struggles over these points and at the same time illustrate the process of domestication, we begin with a recent paper by David Trubek and John Esser, “‘Critical Empiricism’ in American Legal Studies.” Their paper lays out a treatment of ideology and politics that provides a basis for our broader discussion of interpretive work in the second half of this essay.

In reading the essays by David M. Trubek and John Esser and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I thought about what I call epistemological moments that have provided contexts within which to understand the relationship between social science research and politics. I will sketch four moments and suggest that I find one of them more compelling than the others because it speaks particularly to social scientists with critical, democratic ambitions and to Trubek and Esser's concerns about politics and the intellectual vitality of the law and society movement.