Tyler and Rasinski (1991) challenge Gibson's (1989) contention that perceptions of procedural justice do not influence citizens' compliance with unpopular Supreme Court rulings. Noting a significant correlation between procedural justice and institutional legitimacy, Tyler and Rasinski argue that perceptions of procedural justice exert indirect influence on compliance. In response, Gibson (1991) questions Tyler and Rasinski's interpretation of the causal relationship linking institutional legitimacy and perceptions of procedural justice. Although both sides in this dispute offer persuasive discussion, neither can advance conclusive empirical evidence regarding the question of causality. This note presents a reexamination of the relationship between institutional legitimacy and procedural justice, with data drawn from an experiment designed specifically to address the question of causality. Results do not enable conclusive assessment of the Gibson hypothesis. However, in contrast to the Tyler-Rasinski hypothesis, no evidence is found supporting the contention that perceptions of procedural justice influence perceptions of institutional legitimacy.

This article examines the impact of court-ordered structural reforms on a Texas penitentiary. The staff's prisoner control structure is analyzed before, during, and after the reform measures decreed in the complex and sweeping prison reform case Ruiz v. Estelle (1980). Participant observation and inmate disciplinary report data are utilized to examine how legal intervention affected the prison community. Results show that after the court order was inaugurated, inmate-inmate and inmate-guard violence escalated to new plateaus. The final section compares several aspects of the old and new prisoner control structures and discusses the implications of court reforms for prisoner control.

Despite concerns over racial disparities in imprisonment across the United States, little empirical attention has been paid to how changing the structure of sentencing might affect levels of disparity. This article examines whether Ohio's shift to determinate sentencing corresponded with significant changes in legal and extralegal effects on case outcomes, both generally and differentially for African American and white defendants. Bilevel analyses of felony defendants from 24 jurisdictions reveal relatively few substantive changes in these effects over time. Some changes involved reductions in race-related disparities (e.g., in the severity of charges convicted on), with others reflecting increased disparity (e.g., higher imprisonment likelihoods for African Americans). Findings underscore a modest link between restructured sentencing and actual case outcomes overall, with some relatively mixed effects on levels of disparity.

Increasing racial and ethnic group representation in justice-related occupations is considered a potential remedy to racial inequality in justice administration, including sentencing disparity. Studies to date yield little evidence of such an effect; however, research limitations may account for the mixed and limited evidence of the significance of justice workforce racial diversity. Specifically, few studies consider group-level dynamics of race and representation, thus failing to contextualize racial group power relations in justice administration. To consider these contextual dynamics we combine court organizational and case-level data from 89 federal districts and use hierarchical models to assess whether variably “representative” work groups relate to district-level differences in sentencing. Using district-specific indexes of population and work group dissimilarity to define representation, we find no relationships between black judge representation and sentencing in general across districts, but that districts with more black representation among prosecutors are significantly less likely to sentence defendants to terms of imprisonment. We also find in districts with increased black representation among prosecutors, and to a lesser degree among judges, that black defendants are less likely to be imprisoned and white defendants are more likely to be imprisoned, with the effect of narrowing black-white disparities in sentencing. Consistent with the “power-threat” perspective, and perhaps “implicit racial bias” research, findings encourage modeling diversity to account for relative racial group power in processes of social control and suggest that racial justice may be moderately advanced by equal representation among authorities.

In this article I address the historical interrelationship of law and social science. I explore the separation of “law” and “social science” during the later 19th century, examine their relationship over the next 50 years, and finally take up their more elaborate post-World War II interaction, culminating in the birth and development of the law and society movement. The narrative focuses on two realms of encounter, the intellectual and the institutional, or “spatial,” and in the latter case on two particular locales—the academy and the state. Histories of the interaction of law and social science have mostly pursued its academic aspect, resulting in a history of encounters expressed primarily as pedagogical disputes. But encounters between law and the social science disciplines are also competitions between distinct languages of state formation. Moments of encounter are moments of rivalry in the state, not simply in the common room. Mostly, I conclude, law wins.

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the “ex ante” function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states (Wisconsin, Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that had adopted a minority position on some aspect of criminal law reported the relevant law of their state to be no different than did citizens of “majoritarian” states. Path analyses using structural equation modeling suggest that people make guesses about what their state law holds by extrapolating from their personal view of whether or not the act in question ought to be criminalized.

This article examines the impact of lawyer capability on the decisionmaking of the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC). Extending prior attorney capability studies of U.S. judicial decisionmaking, we test three lawyer variables: prior litigation experience, litigation team size, and Queen's Counsel designation. We find that the first two variables have a statistically significant and positive relationship with the SCC's decisions in non-reference-question cases from 1988 to 2000. Moreover, this relationship persists even after controlling for party capability, issue area, and judicial policy preferences.

Immigration judges make consequential decisions that fundamentally affect the basic life chances of thousands of noncitizens and their family members every year. Yet, we know very little about how immigration judges make their decisions, including decisions about whether to release or detain noncitizens pending the completion of their immigration cases. Using original data on long-term immigrant detainees, I examine for the first time judicial decision making in immigration bond hearings. I find that there are extremely wide variations in the average bond grant rates and bond amount decisions among judges in the study sample. What are the determinants of these bond decisions? My analysis shows that the odds of being granted bond are more than 3.5 times higher for detainees represented by attorneys than those who appeared pro se, net of other relevant factors. My analysis also shows that the detainees' prior criminal history is the only significant legally relevant factor in both the grant/deny and bond amount decisions, net of other relevant factors. This finding points to the need for further research on whether and how immigration courts might be exercising crime control through administrative proceedings.

This article analyzes the social origins of evidence. Applying Black's theory of partisan behavior to a variety of empirical materials indicates that the ability to attract supporting evidence is differentially distributed across social life. Thus, the amount of investigative effort legal officials put into a case, the willingness of people to testify, and the supportiveness of witness testimony all increase with the social status of the principal parties and the number of intimate ties they have. In addition, the quality, or credibility, of the evidence parties attract varies directly with their social status and the number of distant ties they have. Far from creating a factual component divorced from the social dimension of the case as is often believed, the evidentiary process helps to transform the attributes of high status and social ties into successful legal claims.

This article documents and provides possible explanations for the degree of judicial activism in eight post-communist countries. We examined constitutional court cases for the three years following the initial adoption of a constitution in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and Slovakia. We found that contextual political factors, such as the extent to which the party system is fragmented and the extent to which the court enjoys popular trust and confidence (rather than the formal powers entrusted to the court by the constitution or the structure of the political system), contribute most to the degree of activism by constitutional courts.

In this rejoinder, I try to clarify and to develop further the concept of “reflexive law” by expanding its theoretical framework. I make use of the theory of autopoietic systems—a recently developed version of system theory. Legal autonomy and social autonomy turn out to be the crucial concepts. Their reformulation in terms of closed, self-referential, and self-reproductive structures leads to the core problem for a post-interventionist law: Can the law adapt its internal models of social reality to the autopoietic organization of legally regulated social systems?

Based on in-depth interview materials, this article examines why most rural-urban migrant entrepreneurs in Beijing do not fully comply with a discriminatory license requirement, and in particular, why they prefer license-renting from the locals. This article suggests that the law's lack of legitimacy adds weight to instrumental considerations. But more important, this license-renting practice seems to be reinforced and sustained institutionally by local businesses, law enforcement officers, and the local authorities, because their interests are inextricably intertwined with it. The whole situation constitutes a general equilibrium through which various interests are balanced. This case study thus paints a far more complicated picture of the law's impact on people's behavior than usually assumed. Instrumental concerns, or coercive action and sanctions alone, do not adequately explain people's interaction with the law in a “lawless” circumstance; a whole range of instrumental concerns must be considered, and they, together with sanctions, must be understood in the context of a larger institutional environment in which the interactions of various players unfold.

Analyzing strategic aspects of judicial decisionmaking is an important element in understanding how law develops. In this article, we examine sophisticated voting on the U.S. Supreme Court by empirically modeling justices' decisions to pass when it is their turn to vote during conference discussions. We argue that, due to the opinion assignment norm, the chief justice may pass when one of the key conditions necessary for sophisticated voting—certainty about the views held by other justices and the agenda—is lacking. By passing, the chief can view his colleagues' votes in order to determine which vote will allow him to assign the majority opinion and, ultimately, forward his policy preferences. Using data from Justice Lewis F. Powell's conference notes, we show that the chief passes for this purpose, and that doing so is an effective strategy. In addition, we show that the senior associate justice in a case, who has a nontrivial chance of assigning the majority opinion, also passes for strategic reasons. As we expect, the data indicate that the remaining associates seem not to pass for strategic purposes.

Taiwan's political democratization has engendered a contradiction in its legal regime: consolidation of rule of law at the macro-institutional level is matched by the persistent marginalization of legal authority in ground-level social practices. This article uses an ethnographic study of neighborhood police to explore certain practical and structural elements involved in maintaining this contradictory sociopolitical order. I examine some of the processes through which state authority is invoked and applied to the policing of public space, focusing on the ideals of legitimacy that animate these processes. The argument of the article is that historical and cultural factors embodied in contemporary Taiwan's “idea of police”—exemplified in the trope of a balance between reason, law, and sentiment—are crucial to understanding how solidification of the rule of law within state institutions is kept within the boundaries of a social sensibility that does not take law as the last word.

Although the number of racial and ethnic minority lawyers in the legal profession has greatly increased, concern remains about their low percentage among partners in elite law firms. Using a nationally representative sample of young American lawyers, we compare a human capital–based theory, which emphasizes measures of merit, and an institutional discrimination–based theory, which focuses on differences in partner contact and mentoring. The results indicate that institutional discrimination theory is the better way of understanding racial and ethnic differences in lawyer retention. Future affirmative action programs need to focus not just on access but also the processes within large firms if minority presence is to be increased.

With dramatic changes in family life over the last several decades, child custody law has shifted from a maternal preference to a more egalitarian standard, the best interests of the child. Despite this change in the law, scholars have debated whether gender continues to play a role in the resolution of custody disputes. Drawing on feminist legal scholarship and sociolegal research on judges, I assess the current debates over gender and custody by examining the accounts of judges who frequently adjudicate custody cases. I conduct in-depth, face-to-face interviews with twenty-five trial court judges in Indiana and investigate judges' accounts about whether they continue to use the tender years doctrine in custody disputes, even though the custody statute is explicitly gender-neutral. Then, I assess several competing explanations of the variation across judges' accounts, including the judges' gender role attitudes, gender, age, and political party affiliation. In exploratory analyses, I also examine the contested custody rulings of a subset of nine judges to assess whether judges' accounts are congruent with their actual custody decisions. I discuss the implications of these findings in light of feminist legal scholarship as well as empirical research on child custody adjudication.

In the mid-1980s, many blood transfusion recipients and close to half of Japanese, American, and French hemophiliacs realized that they had been infected with HIV-contaminated blood. In this article I argue that the legal conflicts over HIV-tainted blood in those three nations defy conventional comparative claims about courts, conflict, and compensation. I first describe the similar policy responses of France, Japan, and the United States as public health officials came to realize that HIV threatened the safety of the blood supply. I then focus on what happened when infected individuals began to demand redress. I argue that the mobilization around law by plaintiffs, the centrality of the courts in handling conflicts over HIV and blood, and bold, innovative responses by the judiciary were not distinctive characteristics of the American conflict. Instead, law and courts in all three nations were central players in the battles over blood. Most strikingly, in comparison to courts in the United States, those in France and Japan have been significantly more responsive to plaintiffs' claims. When one looks beyond the courts to legal and legislative action more broadly, the United States has been the least accepting of the plethora of demands for recompense.

Since 1978, all countries in Latin America have either replaced or amended their constitutions. What explains the choice between these two substantively different means of constitutional transformation? This article argues that constitutions are replaced when they fail to work as governance structures or when their design prevents competing political interests from accommodating to changing environments. According to this perspective, constitutions are likely to be replaced when constitutional crises are frequent, when political actors lack the capacity to implement changes by means of amendments or judicial interpretation, or when the constitutional regime has a power-concentrating design. It is further argued that the frequency of amendments depends both on the length and detail of the constitution and on the interaction between the rigidity of the amendment procedure and the fragmentation of the party system. The article provides statistical evidence to support these arguments and discusses the normative implications of the analysis.

Although the meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries, one thread of thought unifies almost all of the many diverging perspectives: a largely unquestioned belief that race is self-evident and visually obvious, defined largely by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. This suggests that “seeing race” is an experience largely unmediated by broader social forces; we simply know it when we see it. It also suggests that those who cannot see are likely to have a diminished understanding of race. But is this empirically accurate?

I examine these questions by interviewing people who have been totally blind since birth about race and compare their responses to sighted individuals. I not only find that blind people have as significant an understanding of race as anyone else and that they understand race visually, but that this visual understanding of race stems from interpersonal and institutional socializations that profoundly shape their racial perceptions. These findings highlight how race and racial thinking are encoded into individuals through iterative social practices that train people to think a certain way about the world around them. In short, these practices are so strong that even blind people, in a conceptual sense, “see” race. Rather than being self-evident, these interviews draw attention to how race becomes visually salient through constitutive social practices that give rise to visual understandings of racial difference for blind and sighted people alike. This article concludes with a discussion of these findings' significance for understanding the role of race in law and society.

This study is concerned with a problem central to comparative politics in a world of new nations pursuing stupendous goals: how, and to what extent, political power—and specifically, legal engineering—may be deliberately used in the revolutionary transformation of societies, especially those we generally call “traditional societies.” It pursues that concern through a study of the interaction between central power and local traditions in one of the peripheral areas of the Soviet land mass, Soviet Central Asia. And it is most especially concerned with the meaning and impact of large, abstract, impersonal political blueprints of great movements and figures when pursued by ordinary men in the small, concrete, and intimate worlds of human relations, on the manipulation of which the achievement of all revolutionary goals ultimately depends.