This article looks at one component of Taiwan's development experience, the informal financing techniques used by small businesses, to clarify the interaction between the formal Republic of China (ROC) legal system and the network structure of Taiwanese society. The ROC legal system has supported the economic development process direcdy by regulating economic activity, and indirectly by facilitating the networks of relationships that also regulate economic activity. The relational structure of traditional, rural Chinese society has survived in a modified form in modern Taiwan, and this modern form selectively blends elements of the modern legal system, networks of relationships, and the enforcement services of organized crime. Ideas such as “legal centralism” and “legal pluralism” fail to capture the dynamic of the relationship between the ROC legal system and Taiwanese society, so the idea of “marginalization of law” is offered as a better description.

At the end of the 1980s in an effort to increase the effectiveness of its development loans, the World Bank's legal staff began to address what it calls governance issues in borrowing countries. Concerned that the way power is exercised in Third World countries may contribute to the inefficient use of World Bank funds but constrained by its Articles of Agreement from considering “political” criteria in its lending, the General Counsel of the Bank, Ibrahim F. I. Shihata, drafted a memorandum that distinguished “governance” from “politics” and identified the former as a legitimate consideration in the award of Bank loans. At his most general, Shihata equates governance to “good order”; in more specific terms, he calls it “the rule of law,” which he defines at one point as a “system based on abstract rules which are actually applied and on functioning institutions which ensure the appropriate application of such rules” (emphasis in original).

Legal culture is a socially derived product encompassing such interrelated concepts as legitimacy and acceptance of authorities, preferences for and beliefs about dispute arrangements, and authorities' use of discretionary power. This study investigated five attributes of legal culture by comparing subjective notions of law and the legal system of respondents from Turkey (Kurds), Lebanon, and Germany. Our samples fell into two distinct groups on cultural orientation: the German group showed a distinct individualistic orientation; the two other groups (Kurds and Lebanese) showed a relative collectivistic orientation. The findings suggest a substantial variety of legal preferences and practices between the two orientations. Collectivistic groups had a greater preference for abiding by the norms of tradition and religion and were less willing to let state law regulate in-group disputes; individualistic respondents showed a clear preference for formal procedures and guidelines. The study suggests that legal norms prevailing in Western societies may be inconsequential to people socialized in other cultures. Implications of diverse conceptions of law, legal expectations, and legitimacy for various cultural groups in multiethnic and plural societies are discussed.

This essay introduces a conceptual and theoretical model for understanding how dispute resolution in the workplace contributes to gender differences in employment. We conceptualize workplace disputes as having three components: origins, processes, and outcomes. We synthesize theory and existing empirical findings in several disciplines to examine how these three components are patterned by gender roles, sex segregation in jobs, and institutionalized work structures. The essay illuminates workplace dispute resolution generally, demonstrates linkages to other aspects of gender inequality in employment, and provides a model for further research and policymaking.

We attempt to make sense of the law enforcement response to the savings and loan debacle and the larger pattern of white-collar crime enforcement of which it is a part. Drawing from government documents and in-depth interviews with federal regulators and enforcement officials, we argue that the current response to savings and loan fraud is unprecedented both in terms of the extensive resources committed and the prosecution of thousands of white-collar offenders. Pointing out that this at first seems inconsistent with the government's relative tolerance of corporate crime cited in other white-collar crime studies, we borrow from state theory to explain this “crackdown.” By bringing together two traditions that have usually remained distinct—white-collar crime research and state theory—this analysis may contribute both to a better understanding of the government response to white-collar crime and to a more empirically grounded approach to the state.

The author uses a conceptual framework grounded in theory of institutional process to assess developments in the theory of community-based policing. He suggests that two contemporary myths in policing—the myth of the police watchman and the myth of community—provide core elements the theory. Both liberal and conservative advocates for reform have drawn on these myths to support reinstitutionalizing police as community protectors with broad authority, including authority to arrest, unconstrained by law enforcement or due process considerations. He also discusses fundamental differences in the ways in which liberal and conservative reform advocates perceive the relationship between the myths.

In the following exchange Professor Howard Gillman draws our attention to the importance of contextual and culturally specific understandings in studies of law and change. In his comments he suggests that categorical data employed in quantitative research cannot adequately represent the actions of judges and others involved in applying (or complying with) law. He uses as an example a recent article published in the Review in which Neal Tate and Stacia Haynie examined the impact of the Marcos dictatorship on the work of the Philippine Supreme Court. In that article, the authors drew on a framework for describing the work of appellate courts developed by Martin Shapiro, identifying several dimensions of judicial function, operationalizing them and employing sophisticated statistical techniques to detect the impact of the changes in political regime. The questions raised by Professor Gillman and the responses of Professors Tate and Haynie have significance both for research on our own legal institutions and, a fortiori, for our efforts to understand legal institutions of other societies.

Tate and Haynie's (1993) recent essay in these pages on the functions of courts in authoritarian regimes is evidence of an increasing interest among American political scientists in the comparative study of judicial politics. There have always been a few among us who have argued for the benefits of broadening our perspectives beyond the American judiciary. As the story goes, the effort began 30 years ago with just a handful of pioneers meeting in a Dallas hotel room to discuss ways to make comparative judicial studies a more conspicuous feature of public law scholarship among political scientists (see Abraham 1987). Over the years a fairly diverse and distinguished group of social scientists have contributed to this effort (see Tate 1987). By 1981 there was sufficient interest among scholars affiliated with the International Political Science Association to convene the Mansfield College Conference on Comparative Judicial Studies. That same year Martin Shapiro gave a boost to these effort with the publication of his influential and widely read Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis. Still, it was not until 1987 that the first collection of essays was published on “comparative judicial systems,” and even then the papers in that volume were characterized in the subtitle as representing “challenging frontiers in conceptual and empirical analysis” (Schmidhauser 1987). Over the course of 30 years a few more pioneers were recruited, but apparently the terrain was still a frontier.

Following both Pritchett and Gibson, we thought we were, in “Authoritarianism and the Functions of Courts” (Tate & Haynie 1993), extolling the virtues of an infrequently grown, but potentially beautiful or even useful, floral species: falsifiable, reproducible research on the role of courts outside the United States of America. Indeed, because our bloom grew outside the well-cultivated plots of the industrialized democracies, we thought it might be of still greater interest to the horticultural community of sociolegal studies. Thus we urged the members of that community to try their own hands at growing this rare blossom.