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Legal Cultures and Punishment Repertoires in Japan, Russia, and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Joseph Sanders  and
V. Lee Hamilton
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Abstract

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Several years ago we conducted surveys in one American (Detroit) and two Japanese (Yokohama and Kanazawa) cities exploring the nature of responsibility and sanctioning judgments. Recently we were able to replicate a portion of those surveys in Moscow, and here we compare the results of the Moscow survey with the earlier findings. The fundamental question is whether socialist societies, at least as they have existed in the republics of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, have created a contextual legal culture like that of Japan, or whether their legal culture is more like the individualistic model of the United States. Our data indicate that when presented with situations of wrongdoing, Moscow residents' punishment preferences more nearly resemble the individualistic preferences of Detroit residents than they do the contextual preferences of Japanese residents. However, unlike Japanese and U.S. residents, the Moscow residents also expressed a preference for quasi-criminal educative sanctions.

Type
Legal Culture and Legal Discourse
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , 1992 , pp. 117 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

This article is based on a paper presented at the Law and Society Association Meetings, Amsterdam, 29 June 1991. We wish to thank Gennady Denisovsky, Polina Kozyreva, and others from the Institute of Sociology for ably directing the Moscow survey. We also wish to thank Misha Matskovsky and James Gibson for their assistance on the Moscow survey. Michael Speckhart, a graduate student at the University of Houston, provided invaluable help with translations throughout the research. Support for the Moscow survey was provided by the National Science Foundation Grant No. SES 90-03868 and the Law School and College of Social Sciences at the University of Houston.

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