Scholars have devoted attention to “cause lawyers” on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies—business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents—and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between “insider politics” and “populism,” which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential “mediators”—prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests.

How and to what extent does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? How important is it compared to other incentives and mechanisms of social control, and how does it interact with those mechanisms? How might we explain variation in corporate responses to law and other external pressures? This article addresses these questions through an study of environmental performance in 14 pulp and paper manufacturing mills in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Georgia in the United States. Over the last three decades, we find tightening regulatory requirements and intensifying political pressures have brought about large improvements and considerable convergence in environmental performance by pulp manufacturers, most of which have gone “beyond compliance” in several ways. But regulation does not account for remaining differences in environmental performance across facilities. Rather, “social license” pressures (particularly from local communities and environmental activists) and corporate environmental management style prod some firms toward better performance compliance than others. At the same time, economic pressures impose limits on “beyond performance” investments. In producing large gains in environmental performance, however, regulation still matters greatly, but less as a system of hierarchically imposed, uniformly enforced rules than as a coordinative mechanism, routinely interacting with market pressures, local and national environmental activists, and the culture of corporate management in generating environmental improvement while narrowing the spread between corporate leaders and laggards.

This article outlines a distinctive, albeit not entirely unprecedented, research agenda for the sociolegal study of contracts. In the past, law and society scholars have tended to examine contracts either through the intellectual history of contract doctrine “on the books” or through the empirical study of how real-world exchange relations are governed “in action.” Although both of these traditions have contributed greatly to our understanding of contract law, neither has devoted much attention to the most distinctive concrete product of contractual transactions—contract documents themselves. Without denying the value of studying either contract doctrine or relational governance, this article argues that contract documents are independently interesting social artifacts and that they should be studied as such. As social artifacts, contracts possess both technical and symbolic properties, and the sociolegal study of contract-as-artifact can profitably apply prevailing social scientific theories of technology and symbolism to understand both: (1) the microdynamics of why and how transacting parties craft individual contract devices, and (2) the macrodynamics of why and how larger social systems generate and sustain distinctive contract regimes. Seen in this light, the microdynamics of contract implicate “technical” theories of transaction cost engineering and private lawmaking, and “symbolic” theories of ceremony and gesture. In a parallel fashion, the macrodynamics of contract implicate “technical” theories of innovation diffusion, path dependence, and technology cycles, and “symbolic” theories of ideology, legitimacy, and communication. Together, these micro and macro explorations suggest that contract artifacts may best be understood as scripts and signals—collections of symbols designed to yield technically efficacious practical action when interpreted by culture-bearing social actors within the context of preexisting vocabularies and conventions.

In this article, we examine factors that influence appellate supervision in the lower tiers of the federal judicial hierarchy. Drawing on the insights of agency theory, we develop a framework to assess the determinants of circuit panel decisions to affirm or reverse federal district court rulings. Our analysis of U.S. Courts of Appeals' published civil rights decisions over a 29-year period (1971–1999) offers support for several hypothesized relationships. As expected, the outcome of appellate review varied with the level of agreement between the preferences of the circuit (as principal) and the policy position of the trial court (as agent). In addition, we found that circuits were more likely to affirm trial court decisions that were contrary to the preferences of the federal district court judge, suggesting that circuit judges may rely on ideological signals when evaluating appeals before them. We also hypothesized that the monitoring activities of circuits would be influenced by individual circuits' relationship with their principal, the Supreme Court. Consistent with these expectations, panels were more likely to reverse district court rulings that were incongruous with the policy predisposition of the High Court. In addition, as Supreme Court scrutiny of a circuit increased, the likelihood of a circuit panel subsequently reversing a district court also increased. Although further inquiry is necessary to clarify the interpretation of this result, the finding does suggest that district courts are more likely to engage in decision making that deviates from circuit preferences when that circuit faces more intense supervision from the Supreme Court.

Rates of homicide involving intimate partners have declined substantially over the past 25 years in the United States, while public awareness of and policy responses to domestic violence have grown. To what extent has the social response to domestic violence contributed to the decline in intimate-partner homicide? We evaluate the relationship between intimate-partner homicide and domestic violence prevention resources in 48 large cities between 1976 and 1996. Controlling for other influences, several types of prevention resources are linked to lower levels of intimate-partner homicide, which we interpret in terms of their capacity to effectively reduce victims' exposure to abusive or violent partners. Other resources, however, are related to higher levels of homicide, suggesting a retaliation effect when interventions stimulate increased aggression without adequately reducing exposure. In light of other research on deficiencies in accessing and implementing prevention resources, our results suggest that too little exposure reduction in severely violent relationships may be worse than none at all.