This article, based on an analysis of 30 community mediation sessions, provides a theoretical frame for tracking the emergence and domestication of violence stories in the sessions themselves. Challenging the Cartesian distinction between mental and physical violence, I use Scarry's 1985 work to identify the presence of violence stories as stories in which speakers (1) objectify pain through the discursive production of weapons and wounds, (2) describe the loss of voice itself, and (3) describe attempts to reappear as agents in the elimination of pain itself. Drawing on Minow's 1987 analysis of rights discourse, I offer a definition of the “domestication” of violence as a movement from “rights” to “needs” in the discourse of the session. With this framework, and consistent with Silbey and Sarat's 1989 research, I found that violence stories were domesticated in 80% of the sessions in which such stories emerged. Finally, drawing on Foucault (1979), I describe this domestication process as a function of the “microphysics of power” and track the rules of transformation through which violence is subducted into the discourse of mediation itself. I argue that the mediation process contributes to erase any morality that competes with the morality of mediation and, in the process, disappears violence.

This study analyzes Chicago lawyers' networks of relationships with a selected set of prominent practitioners, drawing on 1994–95 interviews with 788 randomly selected respondents. Since the same technique was used 20 years earlier, the research sheds light on the extent to which the constituencies of elite Chicago lawyers have changed. The network is organized in three principal sectors—liberals, trial lawyers, and corporate lawyers. The structure implies a lack of integration within the bar. Minorities and women are now more widely dispersed across the segments of the network than they were in 1975, but they still have relatively few connections in the corporate sector of the bar.

There is an interest among scholars working on cause lawyering to “globalize” the subject by studying professional and political networks that span national boundaries. The globalizing scope of human rights provides a particularly relevant perspective, complementing the more narrowly attenuated focus on the roles and activities of cause lawyers. The subjects of this article are Israeli and Palestinian cause lawyers who have worked in the Israeli military court system in the Occupied Territories. This study adopts a transnational perspective both because the context itself (Israel/Palestine) is composed of relations that span national boundaries (statal and ethnonational) and because it befits a consideration of the international networks of human rights. Following an introductory discussion of transnationalism and a brief background on Israel/Palestine and the military courts, I turn to three aspects of cause lawyering: the political motivations inspiring lawyers to engage in such work; a comparative assessment of the legal and extralegal strategies pursued by lawyers; and the influence of human rights on the politics of lawyering in this context.

This article is part of a larger study about the factors shaping the exercise of discretion by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) inspectors. It focuses on an infrequently examined topic: how agency behavior is affected when government depends on private enterprise to help enforce legal requirements. My examination of the INS's relationship with international airlines reveals that airlines are part of a third-party liability system. Airlines are mandated by law to screen foreign travelers prior to transporting them to the United States, in order to ensure foreign travelers' admissibility to the country, as well as required to remove all inadmissible travelers at airline cost. The study shows how third-party liability requirements generate a complex system of exchange relations and dependence between the INS and international airlines, a system that affects in important ways how the INS handles the cases of suspected inadmissible travelers.

Using ethnographic data, I examine prosecutors' discourse on case convictability (the likelihood of a guilty verdict at trial) in sexual assault cases. The analysis shows how prosecutors construct discordant locales through their categorization of victims, defendants, jurors, and their communities and the location of crime incidents. It demonstrates how prosecutors use discordant locales to justify case rejection. By ascribing stereotypical characteristics of a neighborhood to victims, defendants, and jurors, prosecutors construct distinct groups with different cultures who live in geographically separate spaces and have different schemes through which they interpret the everyday world. To construct discordant locale categorizations, prosecutors employ race, class, and gender imagery. Through this imagery they construct multiple normative standards of moral character of persons and of places. I argue that through the categorizations of place as discordant locales, prosecutors inadvertently reproduce race, class, and gender ideologies in legal decisionmaking. I conclude with policy suggestions for expanding and equalizing citizens' access to justice.

Here I discuss the response of local state agencies to the problem of arson-for-profit as a way to address the debates in the white-collar crime literature over the problem of class bias and the political autonomy of state institutions. Arson-for-profit makes for an especially compelling case because of the inherent organizational difficulties involved with controlling this crime and the relationship this crime has to the perpetuation of social inequality in urban neighborhoods. I argue that arson-for-profit has been relegated to a nonissue status by law enforcement. Although this can be explained largely in institutional terms, this outcome suggests a selectivity on the part of the state where arson enforcement is concerned. The findings have implications for our understandings of equity in law enforcement processes and the question of class bias in state processes.

Le primary principle underlying the physician's oath is nonmaleficence: “first, do no harm.” These five books present the best contemporary thinking about trends in criminal sentencing and philosophies of punishment; taken together, they offer the physicians’ wise counsel to modem politicians, judges, and citizens across the globe.