Can professional groups, such as lawyers, be incorporated within class analyses? Results from a Toronto survey indicate that lawyers can be usefully located within class categories operationalized in terms of power relations. The class structure of legal practice in Toronto is dominated by older, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males with degrees from Canada's elite law schools, who are practicing corporate and commercial law for predominantly corporate clients. Notwithstanding evidence of recently and substantially improved mobility prospects, we found an absence of Jewish lawyers from the capitalist class and a tendency for women to remain in a legal working class. We also discovered the emergence of a new working class in the legal profession that, perhaps unexpectedly, includes young associates in the corporate and commercial departments of large firms. The exploitation of this “professional proletariat” is as clear as are their relatively high salaries and promising prospects of sharing in the power relations that facilitate their domination and limited autonomy. We argue with qualitative data that it is the combination of high salaries, good mobility prospects, and a highly competitive environment that allows this group to be exploited with very little chance of rebellion. More generally, this kind of class analysis opens new possibilities in the comparative and historical study of lawyers and other professional groups.

This article examines the theory and empirical methods of recent studies of law and litigation. It argues that the recent interest in longitudinal studies of trial court dockets proceeds from a deeply rooted functionalist theoretical tradition in empirical work on courts. Functionalist theory, through its sophisticated application in the work of James Willard Hurst, is described as the direct or indirect source of theory for longitudinal litigation studies. Though there are many reasons for suspecting that fuctionalist theory is inadequate, it has seldom been rejected through proper empirical testing of its hypotheses. The theory, often poorly conceptualized, is discussed here in detail. Hypotheses derived from a careful reading of Hurst and others are operationalized, employing data from the dockets of three West Virginia trial courts between 1870 and 1925, and a test of the hypotheses is constructed taking advantage of the historical variation in the economic development of three neighboring counties. Conclusions supported by the analysis of these data are largely prophylactic. Research can address the widespread problems of poor conceptualization and data analysis that have limited the value of much longitudinal trial court docket research. If court function is to continue to be the focus, theory, it is argued, must take account of the social organization of relations between litigants outside the courts, as well as the organization of the courts themselves. Data analysis must address the measurement of the power, litigation capacity, and perception of usefulness of litigation held by litigants. Illustrating the value of hypothesis testing as employed here, it is contended, these conclusions about appropriate future directions and methods for longitudinal court docket research are based on properly supported findings.

This paper examines procedural justice in the context of citizen experiences with the police and courts. It is based on interviews of 652 citizens with recent personal experiences involving those authorities. I will consider two issues: first, whether the justice of the procedures involved influences citizen satisfaction with outcomes and evaluations of legal authorities; and second, how citizens define “fair process” in such settings. The results replicate those of past studies, which found that procedural justice has a major influence on both satisfaction and evaluation. They further suggest that such procedural justice judgments are complex and multifaceted. Seven issues make independent contributions to citizen judgments about whether the legal authorities acted fairly: (1) the degree to which those authorities were motivated to be fair; (2) judgments of their honesty; (3) the degree to which the authorities followed ethical principles of conduct; (4) the extent to which opportunities for representation were provided; (5) the quality of the decisions made; (6) the opportunities for error correction; and (7) whether the authorities behaved in a biased fashion. I found that the meaning of procedural justice varied according to the nature of the situation, not the characteristics of the people involved.

In this paper we present results from a study of small claims litigants' expectations about the civil justice system. Interviews with plaintiffs at the time they file their cases reveal that many people come to court with profound misunderstandings about the authority of civil courts as well as the procedural and evidentiary burdens that the civil justice system imposes. These findings, based on the empirical investigation of litigants' beliefs about and understandings of civil justice, complement experimental studies of procedural justice conducted over the past two decades. We find that litigants are at least as concerned with issues of process as they are with the substantive questions that make up their cases. Yet litigants' preconceptions of procedure are frequently at variance with what the law requires and what will happen in the legal process. Such differences suggest that litigants' expectations and understandings deserve attention in the study of their attitudes toward the legal process.

This study replicates and then extends Wilson and Boland's (1978) theory of the deterrent effect of policing on crime rates in American cities by linking it to recent thinking on control of urban disorder and incivilities (Sherman, 1986; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981). The theory posits that police departments with a legalistic style tend to generate policies of proactive patrol (e.g., high traffic citation rate and frequent stops of suspicious or disorderly persons), which in turn may decrease crime rates either (1) indirectly, by increasing the probability of arrest, or (2) directly, by decreasing the crime rate through a deterrent effect regarding perceived threat of social control. We test both these propositions in an examination of robbery rates in 171 American cities in 1980. Overall, the major results suggest that proactive policing has direct inverse effects on aggregate robbery rates, independent of known determinants of crime (e.g., poverty, inequality, region, and family disruption). Moreover, when we demographically disaggregate the robbery rate the direct inverse effect of aggressive policing on robbery is largest for adult offenders and black offenders. We examine the reasons for these findings and discuss their theoretical and policy implications.

Scholarly and media accounts have portrayed the Reagan administration as strongly committed to the selection of judges who are ideologically in tune with the president. Interviews with key congressional participants indicate that Reagan has received substantial home-state support for his ideological selection criteria. These findings lead to the prediction that Reagan judges on the lower federal courts will be substantially less supportive of criminal defendants than will Nixon or Carter appointees. Analysis of each appointment cohort's criminal justice decisions confirms this expectation for the district courts and courts of appeals. Indeed, the degree of polarization between the Reagan and Carter cohorts is unprecedented. However, this difference was due to the unexpectedly high support for criminal defendants exhibited by Carter appointees as well as the predicted low support provided by Reagan judges.