Patricia Steinhoff (1993) reviewed five books in her review essay “Pursuing the Japanese Police” but singled out my Forces of Order (Bayley 1991) for extended commentary because it was a “classic” that epitomized the “benign,” “friendly,” and “answers-for-America” (p. 830) school of writing about the Japanese police. Her review of my work, as well as the others, was insightful, knowledgeable, well argued, and fair. Some of her comments were strongly worded, but there's no fun in writing a review essay if you can't get off a few zingers.

During a three-year panel study, the job aspirations of University of Denver law students changed so as to reduce the economic supply of public interest attorneys. Elementary economic theory suggests that this reduction in supply has an important impact on the size and quality of the public interest bar. Both demand and supply must be considered in attempts to increase the number and quality of public interest attorneys. Although this study does not attempt to explain the reasons for changes in students' job aspirations, reformers attempting to increase economic supply should not ignore the potential impact of legal education.

Our purpose in this concluding analysis is to point up the various patterns which seem to emerge in these case studies. We are well aware that eight cities represent a small sample. They were selected more with reference to scholarly access than representativeness. As a result, all of the cities have universities in them. In the three cities which emerge as “most successful,” universities play a significant role—if not a dominant one—in the life of the community. Although direct participation of these universities, as such, is not emphasized in the case studies, their indirect influence may have been extremely significant in producing atypical results. Clearly we cannot hope to present any final and ultimate conclusions, but it is nevertheless possible to make a number of suggestive observations about why the school boards in some cities were able to respond to the problem of de facto school segregation more successfully and effectively than others. While there is, of course, virtually no invulnerable or uncontroversial method for measuring the relative success and failure of school boards confronted with racial imbalance in their schools, three possible yardsticks come to mind. First, do the statistics show either a decrease in the racial imbalance in some or all of a city's schools or a decrease in the trend toward increasing racial imbalance? Second, has the school system actually implemented some sort of desegregation program? Third, did the school boards (or superintendents) resolve conflict by satisfying or placating the various disputants?

Today, the original indigenous peoples of Australia comprise but one percent of the total population, numbering less than a quarter million. Living in rural communities, religious reserves and shanty towns, the greatest number are found in Queensland. However, in the Northern Territory, the subject of The Yolngu and their Land, the Aborigines make up twenty-five percent of the population.

When nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) encounter state resistance to human rights accountability, how do NGOs use international courts for their human rights advocacy strategies? Considering the overlapping phenomena of shrinking civic space within authoritarian, hybrid, and democratically backsliding regimes, and state backlash against international courts, NGOs navigate two potential levels of state backlash against human rights accountability. Building on the interdisciplinary scholarship on legal mobilization, we develop an integrated framework for explaining how states' two-level (domestic and international) backlash tactics can both promote and deter NGOs' strategic litigation at international human rights courts (IHRCs). States' backlash tactics can influence NGOs' opportunities, capacities, and goals for their human rights advocacy, and thus affect whether and how they pursue strategic litigation at IHRCs. We elucidate the value of this framework through case studies of NGOs' litigation against Tanzania at the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights, an understudied IHRC. Drawing on an original data set, interviews, and documentation, we process-trace how Tanzania's various backlash tactics influenced whether and how NGOs litigated at the Court. Our framework and analysis show how state backlash against human rights accountability affects NGOs' mobilization at IHRCs and, relatedly, IHRCs' opportunities for influence.

In the last issue of this journal I asked, “What has social science to offer law?” When asking the converse (what has law to offer social science?), there is a repeated need for definition and translation: What social science? What law?

We are in the midst of a quickening, if inchoate, dispute as to whether Americans are an inherently violent people. Whatever the merits of this metapsychological discussion, there is no disagreement that Americans have a propensity to interpret both officially and unofficially the violence we do have (Waskow, 1966; Silver, 1968). The final report of the “violence commission” stands in this tradition, and by its size and scope, taken together with its supporting studies, aspires to culminate it.

The work done by Sally Engle Merry around governance indicators provides a clear example of how her scholarship has been original and impactful. She devoted more than a decade to studying the emergence and use of indicators, a widely used strategy for assessing governance mechanisms. Her body of work on indicators includes three books and more than a dozen journal articles and book chapters. These contributions have reshaped the discourse and forced readers to confront the hidden truth about indicators: their imperfect nature as with any other human construct. I, selfishly, have borrowed from her work and used her lenses in contributing to the study and production of human rights indicators. I see my borrowing as a tribute to a must-read scholar whose ideas are worth entertaining and sharing through our work.

Income tax laws are the primary motivation for many to learn and use the basics of accounting. Three stages of preparing tax returns—collecting records, organizing the information into tax and accounting categories, and abstracting the information on tax returns—successively draw individuals further into the culture of accounting. The issues raised during tax audits provide a window into the problems taxpayers have understanding and following accounting concepts and procedures. An analysis of the stages of return preparation provides insights into how issues are handled during audits and how the accounting skills of taxpayers may affect their outcomes. Data from a sample of state audits generally confirm the hypotheses and illustrate the grounding of taxpaying in accounting. Tax laws may draw individuals into this culture, but the information taxpayers collect and process to meet the needs of the government often, after the fact, has utility for the taxpayers themselves.

It is commonly believed among criminal justice scholars that sentencing guidelines increase uniformity in sentencing at the cost of fairness. They reason that guideline systems rarely take all relevant case characteristics into consideration, and as a result, impose sentences in particular cases that are biased relative to the ideal or best sentence. This bias effect is one of the primary theoretical and practical challenges faced by courts and sentencing commissions in the last 30 years, and provides one of the strongest arguments against mandatory sentencing guidelines. This article identifies a second effect of guidelines on fairness, which has not been sufficiently acknowledged by the scholarly literature: the variance effect increases the fairness of sentences directly by increasing uniformity. This article uses statistical simulation to examine the relationship between the variance effect and the bias effect. The results provide substantial evidence that the variance effect is comparatively large, and that it may often outweigh the negative effects of bias. Under these conditions, sentencing guidelines will both increase uniformity and increase fairness.