On May 15, 1967 the United States Supreme Court rendered, in In re Gault, its first decision in the area of juvenile delinquency procedure. Commentators have repeatedly construed the rulings in Gault as requiring juvenile courts to adopt new and more liberal practices. The privilege against self-incrimination, and the rights to notice of charges, counsel, confrontation, and cross-examination were heretofore primarily regarded as the cornerstones of an adversary system of justice. The extension of these rights to juvenile courts would have seemed to require an overnight transformation of the court procedures.

That the legal profession is not monolithic, but consists of a group of specialties, is well-known. In this respect, the legal profession's structure is similar to that of other professions that have been studied. The structural conditions conducive to the growth of specialties arise from the inability of any individual to master all the techniques and knowledge of a complex occupation. In law, the specialties are usually organized around a field of legal doctrine, such as probate; tasks, such as litigation and legal research; or client relationships, such as house counsel and government lawyers. A given law practice or career, of course, may and typically does include more than one specialty. Public office-holding is another prominent part of the work that lawyers do, but it has so far hardly been taken into account by the legal profession as part of its work. Indeed, many discussions of lawyers' work barely mention their involvement in politics, except for offhand references. Yet the evidence shows that public office-holding figures importantly in the lawyer's world of work. Even beyond occasional office-holding, evidence to be cited in this paper suggests that for some lawyers public office-holding takes on some characteristics of a career, perhaps amounting to another specialty within law. Admittedly, the uncertainties and risks of public office mean that few men who go into politics give up their other means of livelihood entirely. Yet some men become sufficiently involved in public office-holding for both them and observers to think of it in career terms.

As I told you yesterday, I can't figure this out. A criminal lawyer, who is famous for making big fees-maybe he'll make $15, $20, $30 or $40,000-will go in and represent a person on a multiple murder, arson, rape, and four or five other crimes, and the public has some kind of fondness for that. But if some guy will take, if a lawyer will take a case and he says, “I'm going to represent this communist because I think he has a right to express himself, and I'm going to do it just for the love of doing it,” you get a little bit of an odd-ball stigma put on you. I think-I may be wrong on that. But ... it's a strange thing that when you do it for money, the public seems to accept it; when you do it for more lofty reasons, I'm not sure that the public does accept it. What do you think?

Certain recent technological developments may soon make possible new alternatives to the incarceration of offenders. These alternatives clearly present some hazards as well as benefits. The purpose of this paper is to discuss briefly a few of the difficult and complex issues that may soon arise as a result of these new alternatives.

Some of the most relevant advances in technology are occurring in areas other than that of corrections. For example, an electronic rescue and rehabilitation system now being developed will permit the monitoring of the heart rate and geographical location of cardiac patients in an urban environment as they move through the prescribed monitored area. In the event of acute cardiac infarction, the patient could transmit an emergency signal to the base station and help could be sent immediately. Even if the patient were unconscious, the base station might automatically be alerted to his condition and location. The location would not need to be determined unless an emergency occurred. A similar system might also be used to help rescue persons subject to other types of medical emergencies, to protect mentally ill or retarded persons who might easily become lost or confused in the city, and to help safeguard persons with suicidal tendencies.

The law, especially Anglo-American law, gives as a rule wide latitude to the determination of the sentence that follows the conviction of a defendant. The law may set the minimum or maximum sentence for the particular crime, it may set the range, or it may allow different types of sentences (fine, prison, etc.); at the very least, it provides a choice between two alternatives, for instance, after conviction of a capital crime, it now allows in most states a finding of death or life in prison.

As a rule it is the judge who determines the sentence, but in capital cases, and in some states in other cases, it is the jury. In one state, California, it is the prison authority to whom the sentencing decision falls, the judge merely pronounces sentence in terms of the range set by the penal code. But wherever the discretionary power lies, discretion is almost unlimited. Very seldom will an appellate court impinge on this discretion and change the sentence.

The Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California has received a Ford Foundation grant to support a program of studies of criminal law and social policy. The five-year grant was awarded to the Center and the Earl Warren Legal Center. Activity under the grant will focus on theoretical and empirical studies of “law and order.” Among the participants are Caleb Foote, who is studying the nature and uses of judicial discretion; Sanford Kadish and Mortimer Kadish, studying variations in the ways in which legal systems deal with departures from rules; Jerome Skolnick, on leave from the University of Chicago, studying with Richard Spiegelman the process of penal code revision; Paul Jacobs, working on the governance of police; and Rodney Stark, embarking on a series of field studies of crises in law and order.