The complexity and linguistic construction of jury instructions can inhibit jurors' ability to comprehend and apply the law. Study 1 analyzes questions asked by actual deliberating jurors in order to identify sources of juror misunderstanding in criminal pattern jury instructions. Instructions concerning “reasonable doubt,” criminal “intent,” the use of evidence concerning prior convictions, and the general duties of jurors, are selected for further investigation. Study 2 uses videotaped trial materials to pinpoint linguistic problems that confuse jurors and interfere with their abilities to accurately comprehend and apply the selected pattern jury instructions. Available knowledge concerning psycholinguistics is then applied to rewrite the troublesome instructions; in addition, legal expertise is consulted to help assure that the rewritten instructions are legally valid. Study 3 demonstrates that the rewritten instructions improve jurors' understanding relative to Pattern or No instructions. Overall, the research indicates the availability to the criminal justice system of improved methods for instructing jurors accurately and effectively in the law.

This article examines the institutional impact of environmental management systems (EMSs), focusing on ISO 14001. It develops a pluralistic framework for thinking about the dynamic of corporate self-regulation that we term the polyphonic model. It argues that the adoption of ISO 14001 can move the firm into a new equilibrium trajectory, which enmeshes together environmental and economic goals and reflects greater sensitivity to ecological concerns. There is a positive reciprocal cycle between the pro-environmental structural changes induced by ISO 14001 and the employees' attitudes toward the firm and the environment. In order to examine ISO 14001 institutional impact, we conducted a series of interviews with managers and administered questionnaires to employees in 24 Israeli firms with and without certification. The findings indicate that the perceived environmental commitment of certified firms was higher than that of noncertified firms and was higher among employees that perceived the EMS as more highly integrated in the firm. Perceptions of the standard's integration were also found to be positively correlated with personal environmental commitment. The results also indicate that the increase in the firm's environmental commitment was positively associated with employees' organizational citizenship behavior within certified firms. Further indications of the pro-environmental dynamic induced by ISO 14001 were found in the in-depth interviews.

Determinate sentencing reform in Minnesota aimed at enhancing sentencing uniformity and neutrality. According to official reports by the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission, both of these goals were largely (although not completely) achieved during the first year of guideline implementation. However, methodological shortcomings in these reports question the true effectiveness of sentencing reform. Moreover, Minnesota's felony sentencing guidelines do not encompass the full range of sentencing options available to the courts. Our study reanalyzes the Commission's data to evaluate the degree of sentencing uniformity and neutrality achieved under regulated and unregulated sentencing decisions. Our results generally confirm the Commission's reports that regulated sentencing practices were significantly more predictable and neutral than unregulated practices. We conclude that Minnesota's reform efforts have succeeded where those other states have failed because of the presumptive (i.e., legally mandated) nature of their sentencing guidelines.

Research on punitive attitudes has, so far, focused largely on people's retributive attitudes toward offenders. However, a large theoretical body of research indicates that concerns about different types of offenses and victims may be just as important in structuring punitive attitudes. Particularly, Moral Foundations Theory suggests that distinct punitive attitudes may be based in intuitive moral concerns (“moral foundations”) about offenses that victimize individuals, groups, and the “divine,” referring to bodily purity or sanctity. In this study, I develop measures of what I term “victim-centered punitiveness,” and use data from a nationwide survey of adult Americans (N = 915) to compare the sources of offender- and victim-centered punitiveness. As expected, different moral foundations shape offender- and victim-centered punitiveness in different ways, suggesting that they have distinct intuitive, moral bases. Other factors, including racial resentment, also have distinct effects on each type of punitiveness.

This paper is based on an exploratory study of the Office of Prosecuting Attorney, King County (Seattle), Washington. The lack of social scientific knowledge about the prosecutor dictated the choice of this approach. An open-ended interview was administered to one-third of the former deputy prosecutors who had worked in the office during the ten year period 1955-1965. In addition, interviews were conducted with court employees, members of the bench, law enforcement officials, and others having reputations for participation in legal decision-making. Over fifty respondents were contacted during this phase. A final portion of the research placed the author in the role of observer in the prosecutor's office. This experience allowed for direct observation of all phases of the decision to prosecute so that the informal processes of the office could be noted. Discussions with the prosecutor's staff, judges, defendant's attorneys, and the police were held so that the interview data could be placed within an organizational context.

Past legal consciousness research has revealed a great deal about what individuals think and do with regard to law, but less attention has been paid to the social processes that underpin these attitudes, beliefs, and actions. This article focuses particularly on a “second-order” layer of legal consciousness: people's perceptions about how others understand the law. Ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with cockfighters in rural Hawaii reveal how law enforcement practices not only affect cockfighting rituals, but are embedded within them. Police practices and informal rules work in concert to shape fighters' second-order beliefs. These beliefs have implications for participants' understanding of central concepts, including order, disorder, and illegality. Examining legal consciousness from a second-order perspective also underscores that notions of legitimacy are constantly created and recreated. Recognizing legitimacy's inherently relational nature helps us understand how experiences of law are synthesized into beliefs—for example, when an unusual police action directed toward a subgroup of fighters compromised the law's legitimacy for them. Foregrounding the relational nature of legal consciousness offers scholars a means to better understand and operationalize the dynamic nature of human relationships to law.

A good deal of scholarly evidence suggests that the decisionmaking of the U.S. Supreme Court is affected by legal argument. At the same time, it seems clear that in a great many cases the justices have enduring, strongly held views. In such cases, they should be impervious to the effects of advocacy. When are the justices apt to be influenced by the Court's legal community, and when will lawyers be less relevant? The answer, we think, has to do with the salience of the issue before the Court. We suspect that in nonsalient cases the justices have less-intense preferences and therefore are open to the persuasion of lawyers. In salient cases, by contrast, the content of legal policy matters much more to the justices. As a result, they are less amenable to legal argument and adhere more strictly to their personal policy preferences. Our empirical tests support this orientation.

In jurisdictions throughout United States, thousands of sexual assault kits (SAKs) (also termed “rape kits”) have not been submitted by the police for forensic DNA testing. DNA evidence may be helpful to sexual assault investigations and prosecutions by identifying offenders, revealing serial offenders through DNA matches across cases, and exonerating those who have been wrongly accused, so it is important to understand why police are not utilizing this evidence. In this study, we applied focal concerns theory to understand discretionary practices in rape kit testing. We conducted a three-year ethnography in one city that had large numbers of untested SAKs—Detroit, Michigan—to understand why thousands of SAKs collected between 1980 and 2009 were never submitted by the police for forensic DNA testing. Drawing upon observational, interview, and archival data, we found that while practical concerns regarding resources available for forensic analysis were clearly a factor, as Detroit did not have the funding or staffing to test all SAKs and investigate all reported rapes, focal concerns regarding victim credibility and victim cooperation were more influential in explaining why rape kits were not tested. Implications for the criminal justice system response to sexual assault and rape kit testing legislation are examined.

Within the burgeoning global discourse on human rights, gender violence provides one of the most important examples of the use of rights to tackle a newly defined social problem. A comparison of three quite different approaches to violence against women in a single town, each of which is rooted in a global movement, reveals sharp differences in the way the problem is defined and the solutions are imagined. One approach focuses on the assertion of rights and relies on a feminist analysis of patriarchy, another on prayer and the elimination of enemy forces within a framework of Pentecostal Christianity, and one on repentance and reconciliation within the framework of the family and the community. Despite these differences, however, all three employ similar technologies of the self, focusing on knowing feelings, making choices, and building self-esteem. This article demonstrates how globalization allows differences on the basis of religion and culture while promoting similarities in techniques of fashioning the self, thus promoting modern subjectivity in the midst of difference.

In this essay I make a case for what I call a “moderate” and also an “empirically grounded” social constructionist approach, which I conceptualize as a further development of numerous strands of a longstanding and rich tradition. I argue that this approach, one I see as emergent now in cross-disciplinary work like that presented in this Symposium, can help to move scholarly discourse past the impasses posed by dichotomous, either/or thinking about law, society, and epistemology. To orient those unfamiliar with the pertinent scholarship, I begin with a sketch of the intellectual traditions and issues involved.

The experiences of 798 burglary and larceny defendants in the criminal courts of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in 1971 were studied to identify the factors having the greatest influence on the defendant's likelihood of emerging from court with an active prison sentence. The following variables were found to have a significant effect, listed in order of importance: (1) severity of offense (defined in terms of value of property taken and degree of skill required)—positive effect; (2) defendant's income—negative effect; (3) prior arrest record—positive effect; (4) strength of case against defendant as determined by promptness of arrest—positive effect. The influence of the defendant's sex could not be measured because there were too few females in the sample. Race, age, and employment were found to be of little or no importance. The four most important variables had a generally additive effect on prison probability.

Further analysis showed that the defendant's income affected not whether he was convicted of an offense, but the likelihood of going to prison after conviction. Most of this effect could be explained by the low-income defendant's poorer opportunity for pretrial release and greater likelihood of having a court-appointed rather than privately retained attorney. This suggests that the apparent disadvantage of the low-income defendant could be overcome by improvement of pretrial release and defense service.

The study's implications with regard to sentencing procedures are discussed. Judges' wide latitude in imposing sentence may enable the defendant's income to exert the large influence that it apparently does, but narrowing judicial discretion may not reduce the effect of income if present plea bargaining practices continue.

Why do some business firms and not others work hard to advance regulatory values such as environmental protection and comply with regulations? Previous research indicates that business firms are influenced in that regard by a number of variables—not merely the perceived likelihood of legal punishment but also the risk of negative reactions by societal actors (which we call “social license pressures”) and the intensity of managers' commitment to norms of law-abidingness and environmentalism. This article reports on a study of control of diesel emissions in the trucking industry, a highly competitive market with many small firms, mobile pollution sources, expensive “best control technologies,” and weak regulatory demands. In contrast to findings in studies of large firms, we found that social license pressures on small trucking firms are minimal. Trucking companies' environmental performance—good and bad—flows from managers' economic choices, which are influenced by their particular market niche. In such highly competitive, small-firm market contexts, these findings imply, significant improvement in environmental performance is not likely without strong direct regulatory pressures.

The worldwide expansion of international law firms has generated regulatory battles and workplace conflicts in advanced market economies as well as developing countries. This article uses the case of China to explore the changing global–local relationship in the globalization of the legal profession and to understand the role of the government in constituting the corporate law market. The author argues that the globalization of the Chinese corporate law market is a process of boundary-blurring and hybridization, by which local firms become structurally global-looking and global firms receive localized expertise. Boundary-blurring occurs in law firms' workplaces, in lawyers' career trajectories, and in state regulatory policies. It has produced a localized expertise that can be diffused conversely from local firms to global firms and has partially changed their relationship from collaboration to competition. Consequently, it becomes increasingly difficult for the government to make or enforce any substantive policy to clarify the market boundary between these two types of law firms.

In recent years, police conduct has rapidly emerged as a major social and political issue. Although both the nature and the outcome of this controversy have important consequences for law and society, its most immediate effects have been evident in changing public attitudes toward police activities. Policemen have become the targets of growing and frequently irreconcilable popular demands both for the maintenance of “law and order” and for the elimination of “police brutality.” Law enforcement agencies, therefore, have seemed to encounter a mounting crisis of public confidence in police practices.

Although the effects of mounting public concern about crime and police protection probably have been most evident among whites (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967: 144–149; Ennis, 1967; Feagin, 1970), a desire for increased police protection has also emerged among black Americans. In fact, black attitudes toward police practices have appeared to reflect a perplexing enigma. While many black citizens have complained about harsh or brutal police behavior, they also have expressed intense criticism of a lack of police protection.

Over the last four decades, the United States has witnessed a historic expansion of its criminal justice system. This article examines how street-level criminalization transforms the cultural contexts of poor urban communities. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in Los Angeles’ Skid Row–the site of one of the most aggressive zero-tolerance policing campaigns to date–the study finds that residents develop and deploy a particular cultural frame–“cop wisdom”–by which they render seemingly-random police activity more legible, predictable, and manipulable. Armed with this interpretive schema, “copwise” residents engage in new forms of self-presentation in public, movement through the daily round, and informal social control in order to deflect police scrutiny and forestall street stops. While these techniques allow residents to reduce unwanted police contact, this often comes at the expense of individual and collective well-being by precluding social interaction, exacerbating stigma, and contributing to animosity in public space.

We address fundamental questions about the ability of interest groups to shape public policy by examining the influence of amicus curiae briefs on U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion content. We argue that the justices will incorporate language from amicus briefs into their opinions based on the extent to which the amicus briefs contribute to their ability to make effective law and policy. Using plagiarism detection software and other forms of computer assisted content analysis, we find that the justices adopt language from amicus briefs based primarily on the quality of the brief's argument, the level of repetition in the brief, the ideological position advocated in the brief, and the identity of the amicus. These results add fresh insight into how interest groups influence the development of federal law by the Supreme Court.

Recent “alternatives” to law assume diverse forms and include various community mediation programs. Proponents see these programs as a triumph of empowered individuals and communities over the state. By contrast, early critics—in their various ways—view such programs as an expansion and intensification of state control. Against both, and working with “new informalist” insights, this article focuses on the political logic of community mediation practices. Drawing on Foucault, it explores mediation as a governmentalization (cf. expansion) of state dispute resolution which marshals both techniques of discipline and self in an attempt to produce peaceful individual selves. A case study is used to analyze community mediation as a confessional institution that deploys sociocultural pressures in search of nondisputing self-identities. The article concludes that the search for fixed notions of individual, self, or even community empowerment may entrench, rather than resist, current forms of regulation in dispute resolution arenas.

A substantial body of sociolegal scholarship suggests that the legitimacy of the law crucially depends on the public's perception that legal processes are fair. The bulk of this research relies on an underdeveloped account of the material and institutional contexts of litigants' perceptions of fairness. We introduce an analysis of situated justice to capture a contextualized conception of how litigants narrate fairness in their actual legal encounters. Our analysis draws on 100 in-depth interviews with defendant's representatives, plaintiffs, and lawyers involved in employment discrimination lawsuits, selected as part of a multimethod study of 1,788 discrimination cases filed in U.S. district courts between 1988 and 2003. This article offers two key empirical findings, the first at the level of individual perceptions and the second at the level of legal institutions. First, we find that neither defendants' representatives nor plaintiffs believe discrimination law is fair. Rather than sharing a complaint, however, each side sees unfairness only in those aspects of the process that work to their disadvantage. Second, we demonstrate that the very notion of fairness can belie structural asymmetries that, overall, profoundly benefit employers in employment discrimination lawsuits. We conclude by discussing how a situated justice analysis calls for a rethinking of empirical research on fairness. Audio recordings of respondents quoted in this article are available online.*

Legal culture is a socially derived product encompassing such interrelated concepts as legitimacy and acceptance of authorities, preferences for and beliefs about dispute arrangements, and authorities' use of discretionary power. This study investigated five attributes of legal culture by comparing subjective notions of law and the legal system of respondents from Turkey (Kurds), Lebanon, and Germany. Our samples fell into two distinct groups on cultural orientation: the German group showed a distinct individualistic orientation; the two other groups (Kurds and Lebanese) showed a relative collectivistic orientation. The findings suggest a substantial variety of legal preferences and practices between the two orientations. Collectivistic groups had a greater preference for abiding by the norms of tradition and religion and were less willing to let state law regulate in-group disputes; individualistic respondents showed a clear preference for formal procedures and guidelines. The study suggests that legal norms prevailing in Western societies may be inconsequential to people socialized in other cultures. Implications of diverse conceptions of law, legal expectations, and legitimacy for various cultural groups in multiethnic and plural societies are discussed.

Recent research on the functions of imprisonment has begun to provide quantitative, empirical knowledge of its rehabilitative and deterrent effects. Much less is known, however, about the incapacitative effect of imprisonment. While it has long been understood that the physical segregation of prison inmates prevents them from engaging in some criminal activity (as well as much non-criminal activity) during the period of their confinement, quantitative estimates of the size of this effect have been lacking. Leaving aside all deterrent or rehabilitative and counter-rehabilitative effects, it is of some interest to know whether the incapacitative function of imprisonment is large or small.