At one time the Law and Society Association might have been loosely defined as “a group of people who subscribe to the Law & Society Review” Today the Review is properly described as the journal of the Association, for the Association has developed into a true fellowship of scholars, and publishing the Review is only one of the Association's activities. For more than a decade the Association was governed by a Board of Trustees that chose its own leaders and successors. Today the trustees and the president are elected by the membership at large. Early trustees meetings were often “piggybacked” onto meetings of the AALS or APSA—meetings that a substantial proportion of trustees were likely to attend in any event—and it was a triumph of intellectual interchange if some other social science association could be persuaded to add to its annual meeting a panel or two devoted to “Law and . …” Today the Association's trustees and president are elected by its members, and the Association holds well-attended annual meetings filled with more interesting research panels than any one person can accommodate. In addition, the Association supports an active executive office that regularly publishes a newsletter and participates with other social science associations in explaining the business of social science to the public and in seeking the support needed for the important work we do. All of this reflects the fact that for an increasing number of scholars the Law and Society Association has become a primary rather than secondary discipline affiliation.

This paper examines the last 12 years of research on trial courts. It focuses on three shortcomings of that research. The first is a failure to examine distributional questions about what kinds of benefits and sanctions are apportioned to which members of American society as well as the place of adjudication in the course of dispute processing. The second shortcoming is a failure to integrate the various theoretical perspectives which have won widespread acceptance. The third is an undue concentration on comparative designs to the neglect of longitudinal analyses within single jurisdictions.

Most research on social control decision-making takes the individual case as the sole unit for the analysis of decision outcomes. Yet under a variety of organizational circumstances, social control agents process and respond to cases in relation to, or as part of, some larger, organizationally determined whole. This paper identifies three such larger units of cases found in social control decision-making—case sets, caseloads, and collections of cases grouped by the demands of establishing precedent and consistency—and suggests conditions which increase and decrease the effects of such holistic units on decisions made in particular cases.

Perceptual deterrence researchers have used simple cross-sectional correlations between prior behavior and current perceptions to study the effect of legal threats on social control. Such designs are inadequate because they: (1) confuse the causal ordering of perceptions and behavior, and (2) fail to take into account other inhibitory factors in an explicit causal model. In an analysis of panel data, the methodological simplicity of earlier studies is shown to have led researchers to reach erroneous conclusions. Our data suggest that past studies report an experiential effect, not a deterrent effect, and that the effect of perceived sanctions on criminal involvement is minimal once social definitional factors (moral commitment, informal sanctions) are controlled.

This study analyzes data for state criminal defendants prosecuted in New York to determine the bases upon which judges make pretrial release decisions for these defendants. Treating statutory law as defining the category of legal variables, it finds legal factors substantially affect decisions about whether to release a defendant on recognizance, the amount of bail required, and whether to offer a defendant a cash alternative to a surety bond. The impact of these factors varies, however, depending upon the particular decision being made. Factors not prescribed in the statute—extra-legal factors—are also found to affect these pretrial release decisions. Their impact, too, is decision context specific. Among the extra-legal factors that affect pretrial release decisions, the effects of status characteristics of the defendant pale in comparison to the effects of bench bias and measures of the defendant's dangerousness.

Regression analysis is applied to civil commitment decisions to evaluate the importance of psychiatric opinion, externally visible “facts,” and judges' attitudes. Indices were constructed of evidence of dangerousness, based on information presented at court hearings, and of judges' attitudes toward psychiatrists, mental hospitals, and the mentally ill, based on their responses to Likert type items. Additional variables include respondent's prior commitment status, diagnosis, court behavior, race, sex, age, and family caring. The analysis suggests that “facts” and psychiatric opinion but not judges' attitudes are significant influences on commitment decisions.