Understanding pollution is only partly a matter of becoming informed about technical variables and processes. It is also — or even predominantly — a matter of gaining knowledge about social and economic systems. As is the case with many other issues, we need to know why these systems “produce the results they do and how we can use understanding of them to produce more desirable ones” (Kneese, 1970: 190).

The current emphasis on environmental problems has resulted in the passage of new legislation and increasing public pressure upon individual companies seen as polluters. However, the factors which influence organizations to change their ways are rather hazy. In the absence of clear market controls, particular businesses may fight environment-oriented legislation, complying only when political and legal avenues have been exhausted. Other businesses may announce their intent to help clean up the environment and initiate action in this regard with relatively little prodding on the part of the public, state and federal bureaucracies, or conservation groups.

While federal anti-employment discrimination laws have helped diminish inequality at work, discrimination persists, in part perhaps due to unequal handling of equal employment lawsuits. Prior research demonstrates that the definition of discrimination can vary based on local normative ideas, while another line shows that a judge's race or gender can shape how related lawsuits are handled. In this article, I draw on a set of EEOC workplace discrimination cases prosecuted in Federal Court and combine it with locality data, to analyze: (1) the impact of local context, specifically rurality, local political context, and southerness and; (2) how judges' race and gender interact with the local cultural-milieu. Findings reveal that plaintiffs of colour in race discrimination cases fair worse in rural courts or before white judges. Meanwhile, white judges in conservative areas are more defendant friendly than those outside the in more liberal areas. Black judges, in comparison, are more plaintiff friendly in conservative areas when compared to black judges in more liberal areas. While female judges are generally more plaintiff friendly than male judges in sex cases, location has no discernible effect.

Discussion about slavery and law has been raised recently to a high level of abstraction, but important aspects of the relationship remain unexamined. Under what circumstances were masters held liable for the damage that resulted from the wrongs of slaves? The question of distributing the burdens of accidents is a matter of policy, and involves important questions of power and responsibility. But, within an historical context, the range of choices open to a society is neither infinite nor static. This study suggests that legal traditions, styles of reasoning, and, above all, social relationships and perceptions (including those between slaveholders and nonslaveholders) help unravel the policy choices Southerners made in the years before the Civil War.

We are grateful for the thoughtful responses to our study of the Washington State Community Protection Act (Braithwaite & Pettit 1994; Daly 1994). These responses underscore the importance of pushing beyond our case study and point to a variety of promising ways to determine the extent to which the problems we uncover in Washington are typical and/or idiosyncratic.

Over the past decade, recording technologies have enabled organized activists and ordinary residents to capture and circulate videos of police misconduct. Existing research focuses primarily, however, on organized activists who rely on formal training programs to record police behaviors. If formal programs train organized activists to capture police abuses on camera, how then do ordinary residents determine when they should record police behavior? Drawing on in-depth interviews with Black men who live in a Southside Chicago neighborhood, this study finds that residents’ recurrent interactions with police enable them to interpret officers’ words and actions as symbols of police misconduct, which, in subsequent exchanges, serve as signals to record events with their cellphones – what I term “camera cues.” Camera cues facilitate situated conceptions of legal authority that trigger residents’ distrust of police, reflecting the micro-dynamic connections between individuals’ legal consciousness and legal cynicism. Equipped with cellphones, residents scrutinize officers’ outward displays and police–citizen interactions to challenge police misconduct. While recording police behavior makes it possible at least occasionally to resist the dominance of legal authority, doing so often involves additional risks, including the destruction of their cellphones, verbal and physical threats, and arrests.

US immigration law increasingly excludes many immigrants materially and symbolically from vital safety-net resources. Existing scholarship has emphasized the public charge rule as a key mechanism for enacting these exclusionary trends, but less is known about how recent public charge uncertainty has shaped how noncitizens and healthcare workers negotiate safety-net resources. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews with 80 safety-net workers and patients in three US states from 2015 to 2020, I argue that intensifying anti-immigrant rhetoric surrounding public charge has extended a sense of surveillance into clinical spaces in previously unexamined ways. Drawing on theories of medical legal violence, system avoidance, and legal estrangement, I demonstrate how these dynamics undermined immigrants' health chances and compromised clinic workers' efforts to facilitate care. I also reveal how participants responded to this insinuation of legal violence in healthcare spaces by promoting situational trust in specific procedures and institutions.

This article presents the results of survey-based research which explores if licensed aircraft maintenance engineers working in Norway, Sweden, and Portugal experience regulated “just culture” as procedural justice-infused processes when occurrence reporting in European Union (EU) civil aviation. Drawing on Tylerian procedural justice theory, the study finds that, perceived procedural justice is more strongly associated with legitimacy (perceived as support for rules and authority) than legal anxiety among the maintenance engineers. Country-based results reveal differences in engineers' legal experiences of occurrence reporting with perceived procedural justice strongest in Sweden and legal anxiety most influential in Portugal. The article contributes with a first exploration of “just culture” as a procedural justice-infused legal intervention to improve compliance to regulated occurrence reporting by negating legal anxiety in a European aviation context.

Changes in government litigation during the past fifty years are treated as an indicator of changes in policymaking priorities of various national administrations during that period. Policies of direct government intervention (enforcement) are distinguished from policies of indirect intervention (regulation). They are measured here by U.S. plaintiff and U.S. defendant litigation trends in federal district and appeals courts from 1937 to 1986. Trends in administrative appeals from regulatory agencies, boards, and commissions to the appeals courts are used to estimate the intensity of regulatory activity. There is some evidence of systematic variation in government litigation and administrative appeals due to an “administration” effect, but there are also secular tendencies suggesting a more general “government” effect cutting across various administrations. The implications of the analysis for the theory of the state are discussed.