The longer I serve as editor, the more frustrated I feel at turning down good or promising manuscripts. Whether there has been a change in my own standards or a change in submissions, my overall impression is that I have had to turn away an increasing number of high quality papers. I have dealt with this by reducing the type size in volume 22 and exceeding the page limits by a bit. The result in this issue should be obvious just by the feel of it—it is longer.

This paper analyzes the politics of disputing in complaint hearings held by the court clerk in a district criminal court in Massachusetts. By examining struggles over the meaning of local conflicts, it suggests the implications of detailed studies of dispute processing for our understanding of how systems of legal and social meanings are constituted and reproduced. The paper argues that the work of the court, the roles played by court officials, and the meaning of law and of community at particular moments in time are shaped in the interaction of court staff with local citizens. At the same time, it argues that these interactions are constrained by culturally and historically embedded relations of class, ethnicity, and power. Thus the paper suggests how the practice of complaint hearings both reproduces and transforms systemic inequalities and oppositions, and points to the importance of interactive rather than dichotomizing approaches for studying the interconnection and interpenetration of law with society.

During plea negotiations, attorneys use stories to tell what happened when a defendant was charged with an offense. This paper is concerned with how attorneys tell stories, and includes a consideration of narrative structure and how components of this structure are used in plea negotiations. Components of narrative include: (1) a story entry device; (2) the story itself which may contain a backgrounding segment, action report, and reaction report; and (3) a defense segment in which an attorney denies or explains the defendant's behavior. Systematic employment of these components results in four patterns of negotiations: (1) routine processing, (2) assessing character; (3) disputing facts, and (4) arguing subjectivity. Narrative structure is part of the interaction order of negotiations and is a mechanism through which participants assemble features of a case and aspects of the courtroom setting. Narrators reflexively become part of the stories they tell, which provides a structural motivation for them to perform well during negotiations.

Recent research on the determinants of litigant satisfaction has consistently found that abstract evaluations of the justness of case outcomes and of the fairness of the case disposition process contribute significantly to outcome satisfaction, independent of the favorability of the outcome itself. Most such findings have been produced either in laboratory settings using college student subjects or in survey research involving litigation in which the stakes are relatively small. As a consequence, skepticism has been expressed about whether procedural and distributive justice make a difference in serious civil or criminal cases. Reanalyzing data gathered in a previous panel study of defendants charged with felonies in three cities, we argue that the evidence suggests important effects for procedural and distributive fairness, even among a sample of litigants who share few attributes with college student populations and who are involved in litigation in which the stakes are high. The implications of these findings for case disposition processes such as plea bargaining and alternative dispute resolution techniques are discussed.

Preadjudicatory detention is used for about one-third of all juvenile offenders (Poulin et al., 1980). A protectionist purpose is often held to justify both the need for discretionary decision making in these cases and the absence of due process protections. In this study, we have included measures of juvenile offenders' socioemotional status with indicators of their legal status and social background in a log-linear analysis of detention decisions in New Jersey. The results suggest that protectionism is a major influence on these decisions and is in turn related to the impact of gender.

New York's Juvenile Offender (JO) Law of 1978 is a significant step away from separate systems of justice for adults and juveniles. The law requires that juveniles accused of violent offenses be tried in criminal court, and it provides penalties comparable to those for adults. This paper evaluates the impact of the JO Law on violent juvenile crime rates in New York City and in upstate New York. Analyzing arrest data through the use of an interrupted time series model, we conclude that the JO Law has not been effective in reducing juvenile crime.

Previous studies of the cost of crime have focused on the out-of-pocket expenses incurred by victims. This approach significantly underestimates the cost of crime to victims by ignoring the pain, suffering, and fear caused by crime. Other studies have attempted to infer the cost of crime by estimating property value differences in high versus low crime areas. However, this approach does not permit one to determine the cost of individual crimes. The purpose of this paper is to estimate the cost of individual crimes by examining the pain, suffering, and fear endured by crime victims. Actual victim injury rates are combined with jury awards in personal injury accident cases to estimate monetary values for pain, suffering, and fear. I combine crime-related death rates with estimates of the value of life to arrive at monetary values for the risk of death. My estimate of the aggregate annual cost of crime to victims of FBI index crimes is $92.6 billion. These estimates are shown to have several direct policy applications.

The Magistrate Act of 1968 (Pub. L. 90-578, tit. I, § 101, 82 Stat. 1113) introduced a new tier of judicial officers into the federal district courts. As a result of this act and two amendments (Pub. L. 94-577, § 1, 90 Stat. 2729 (1976); Pub. L. 96-82, § 2, 93 Stat. 643 (1979)), magistrates may now work on a wide variety of civil and criminal pretrial tasks at the discretion of Article III judges; indeed, with the consent of both parties, magistrates may hold jury trials in civil cases. In addition, the act and the amendments encourage courts to delegate “additional duties” to magistrates with a view toward developing innovative work relations between two tiers of judicial officers.

Since both groups are lawyers, magistrates and Article III judges share the same formal training and professional expertise. Organizationally, however, magistrates work for federal judges. There is the potential, therefore, for a wide variety of work relations between these two tiers of judicial officers. The history of magistrates' “professional project” (Larson, 1977) to expand their formal duties, their autonomy and control over decision making, and their organizational status provides a useful entry point for analyzing recent developments in judicial work relations, the subject of this article.

I will first report the results of a study of U.S. magistrates. These findings suggest a typology of three distinct patterns of response to these new judicial officers: additional judge, bureaucrat, and team player. I next consider why courts opt for the occupational models they do. Finally, I speculate about the implications of the variations for understanding contemporary developments in judging and judicial process.

In this paper we investigate a largely unrecognized but nevertheless important chapter in the legal and political history of Soviet Marxism: the simultaneously coherent and contradictory theoretical tendencies in Lenin's pronouncements about law, legality, and delegalization (“the withering away of law”) during the socialist transition. We identify and discuss these tendencies as they unfold against the historical background of the Russian Revolution. We argue that Lenin's political and theoretical objections to legal formalism greatly contributed to the tragic neglect of constitutional mechanisms needed to secure the radical democratic motives of the revolutionary process.