Variation in sentencing outcomes represents the actions of a number of members of the criminal justice system. To isolate the part of the variation that is due to the discretion of the judge (or other sentencing agent, such as a prosecutor), one can model the sentencing guidelines themselves. Such a model captures any non-linearity in the sentencing grid. In practice, modeling the guidelines rather than legal factor scores (as is common in the literature) means that more of the variation that race and legal factors share in common will be attributed to the racial status of the offender. Using data from Maryland, we find that African Americans have 20% longer sentences than whites, on average, holding constant age, gender, and recommended sentence length from the guidelines. We find more judicial discretion and greater racial disparity than is generally found in the literature. Moreover, when we begin to try to explain this discretion, we find that judges tended to give longer sentences (relative to those recommended by the guidelines) to people in the part of the guidelines grid with longer recommended sentences (who are disproportionately African American) than they gave to people in the part of the grid with lower recommended sentences.

Police reformers in the early 21st century place great importance on the development of police-community partnerships, but they have not recognized the deep obstacles that these relationships face. This study argues that the central problems of working in partnership involve conflict over values: Different organizations advance different social values, and when the partners who cling to them try to collaborate, conflict flares up at the point of contact. I draw on several case studies to describe how these conflicts surface and potentially undermine partnerships, and I analyze the strategies that police agencies have developed to respond to them. This analysis reveals that community policing has fundamental (and probably desirable) implications for police practice because it forces police to attend to many neglected dimensions of their mandate. The article thereby offers a new interpretation of community policing's implications for practice and a new interpretation of its value as a reform movement.

This article explains how minority women in rural China managed to use state legal and political institutions to obtain a divorce, despite numerous obstacles. Beginning with a legal controversy over why women from the Yi minority were going to court for “fun” and then divorcing their husbands, I proceed to look at the many factors that may have contributed to divorce in rural China, such as state ethnic policy, generational empowerment, culture, and the role of community in mediation and collective action. While such factors were influential, I argue that women's divorce in Yunnan was largely the result of a particular, time-bound confluence of revolutionary political forces that were unique to China, and not the direct product of the law or ethnic culture and status.

The Islamic waqf appears to have emerged as a credible commitment device to give property owners economic security in return for social services. Throughout the Middle East, it long served as a major instrument for delivering public goods in a decentralized manner. In principle, the manager of a waqf had to obey the stipulations of its founder to the letter. In practice, the founder's directives were often circumvented. An unintended consequence was an erosion of the waqf system's legitimacy. In any case, legally questionable adaptations proved no substitute for the legitimate options available to corporations. As it became increasingly clear that the waqf system lacked the flexibility necessary for efficient resource utilization, governments found it ever easier to confiscate their resources. In the 19th century, the founding of European-inspired municipalities marked a formal repudiation of the waqf system in favor of government-coordinated systems for delivering public goods.