We investigate the causes of protracted violent conflict by examining the dynamics of a so-called family feud in one Appalachian county in the 19th century. Using data from the civil and criminal court docket and sociohistorical sources, we find that protracted local violence was neither an alternative to dispute resolution through the courts nor a simple function of economic development. Rather, feud violence reflected the social and economic relations and cleavages that accompanied local state building. We discuss the implications of these findings for a historically specific understanding of the relation between local governance and protracted disputing.

Recent “alternatives” to law assume diverse forms and include various community mediation programs. Proponents see these programs as a triumph of empowered individuals and communities over the state. By contrast, early critics—in their various ways—view such programs as an expansion and intensification of state control. Against both, and working with “new informalist” insights, this article focuses on the political logic of community mediation practices. Drawing on Foucault, it explores mediation as a governmentalization (cf. expansion) of state dispute resolution which marshals both techniques of discipline and self in an attempt to produce peaceful individual selves. A case study is used to analyze community mediation as a confessional institution that deploys sociocultural pressures in search of nondisputing self-identities. The article concludes that the search for fixed notions of individual, self, or even community empowerment may entrench, rather than resist, current forms of regulation in dispute resolution arenas.

This article reports data that contrast with an extended tradition of viewing litigation as incompatible with ongoing relationships. Within the regulatory process at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), nongovernmental actors having the most sustained relationships with EPA are the ones most likely to engage in litigation against the agency. Litigation within regulatory relationships is not explained by existing theory, which treats litigation largely as a function of relationships. A disturbance theory of disputing, which focuses on how litigation interacts with existing relationships, provides a more robust account of litigation generally and of its compatibility with ongoing regulatory relationships.

Researchers and policymakers have long been concerned about the extent to which such sociocultural factors as ethnicity and gender determine access to organizational rewards and constraints within legal systems. Scholars have also wondered whether less formal processes, such as those found in alternative dispute resolution, are especially susceptible to bias. To test these arguments, we studied the impact of disputants' ethnicity and gender on monetary outcomes in 312 adjudicated and 154 mediated small claims civil cases in Bernalillo County (Albuquerque), New Mexico, in 1990–91. Multivariate analysis including case characteristics showed that much of the effect of disputants' ethnicity and gender on outcomes—especially in courtroom hearings—was accounted for by the kinds of cases in which women and minorities were involved. Controlling for case characteristics eliminated ethnic and gender differences in adjudication, but some ethnic differences remained in mediated case outcomes. Specifically, cases including at least one Anglo mediator resulted in higher monetary outcomes for Anglo claimants, and minority female claimants received lower monetary outcomes in mediated cases in which both mediators were women.

Police officers regularly construct their work in terms of a morality that is so pronounced that it must arise from unique aspects of their role in society. I draw on fieldwork conducted in a patrol division of the Los Angeles Police Department to develop an explanation for the prevalence of police morality. Three components of the police function create potent dilemmas that their morality helps ameliorate: the contradiction between the police's ostensible aim to prevent crime and their inability to do so; the imperative that they run roughshod over the ambiguity inherent in most situations they handle; and the fact that they invariably act against at least one citizen's interest, often with recourse to a coercive force that can maim or kill. Reliance on moralistic understandings for the police's mission provides a salve for these difficulties; however, it can also work to harm police-community relations. Paradoxically, the police's reliance on morality can encourage or condone overly aggressive actions that are, in fact, contradictory to the virtuous self-definition officers often construct.

Recent legislative responses to a perceived increase in hate crimes have resulted in efforts to quantify the rates of occurrence of such crimes. However, there remains little understanding of the processes by which statutory requirements are implemented at the level of front-line personnel like the police. This article examines the situated decisionmaking practices of police detectives in two divisions of a large urban police department charged with collecting official hate crime data. The authors argue that police detectives engage in certain routine practices in order to determine the hate-related status of an incident and that these practices are inflected by the particular institutional arrangements of the divisions and the department in which they operate. They describe in detail the various categorization practices employed in these two divisions and the ways that a seemingly common orientation to the prevalence of hate crimes have differential consequences for the reporting of hate crimes in each division.

Numerous commentaries and empirical studies have suggested that while a substantial proportion of incoming law students are interested in careers in “public interest law,” by the time they graduate only a small minority take jobs in that sector. However, none of these studies have been based on a panel study having data on both job preference before students began their studies and information about the actual first job taken. This Research Note fills that gap by updating an earlier study of the University of Wisconsin Law School class of 1976. We find that while over half the respondents expressed some interest in public interest law before beginning law study, only 13% actually took a job in legal aid, as a public defender, or in a nonprofit organization. Analysis of respondents who initially expressed an interest in nontraditional jobs shows that political orientation and participation in a social action law program during law school are the strongest predictors of who in fact took a nontraditional job.