Very different assumptions guide the efforts of social scientists and comparative legal scholars interested in the development process. These assumptions form paradigms; the paradigms guide and structure research problem selection, choices of concepts to be used, and even the form and content of evidence held to be admissible. For instance, a political scientist may treat the legal system of a transitional society as the outgrowth or a function of cultural, social, economic, and political environment, but the legal scholar may not be comfortable with this wholly dependent placement of his analytic slice of “reality.” Social scientists increasingly accept basic aspects of the value system of science. This requires a concern for making generalizations which may be linked to theoretical constructs, and which are empirically testable in such a way as to allow intersubjective evaluation. Description, explanation, and prediction are typically cited as a social scientist's aims. “Relevance” is a term we hear much of today, but unless a social scientist is content to ignore the imperatives of the value system of science, relevance must remain a fundamental, from that of the social scientist. A. Singham's work furnishes an opportunity to reflect on these considerations.

On January 19, 1971, President Nixon, catching most White House observers by surprise, issued a terse, 275-word statement halting further construction of the Cross Florida Barge Canal. This was imperative, the President declared, “to prevent potentially serious environmental damages” and was done at the urging of the new Council on Environmental Quality; the Council v/arned that the project “could endanger the unique wildlife of the area and destroy this region of unusual and unique natural beauty.” Thus was the nation notified that the canal, weighed by the President against the newly minted values expressed in the National Environmental Policy Act, had been judged a $50 million mistake.

What happens when the occupiers abandon the city but the forces of liberation fail to show up? What should we do when the rebels lose the people in a thicket of doctrine and become terrorists, but the empire can't imagine how to strike back except with more terror directed at the same people?

The law, especially Anglo-American law, gives as a rule wide latitude to the determination of the sentence that follows the conviction of a defendant. The law may set the minimum or maximum sentence for the particular crime, it may set the range, or it may allow different types of sentences (fine, prison, etc.); at the very least, it provides a choice between two alternatives, for instance, after conviction of a capital crime, it now allows in most states a finding of death or life in prison.

As a rule it is the judge who determines the sentence, but in capital cases, and in some states in other cases, it is the jury. In one state, California, it is the prison authority to whom the sentencing decision falls, the judge merely pronounces sentence in terms of the range set by the penal code. But wherever the discretionary power lies, discretion is almost unlimited. Very seldom will an appellate court impinge on this discretion and change the sentence.

The “marihuana problem” has rapidly degenerated into the “marihuana muddle.” As the use of marihuana increases, and as this use expands into the middle and upper classes, officials are increasingly confronted with questions concerning the effects and dangers of marihuana. Unfortunately, the answers that can be given are limited. We really do not know very much about marihuana. Perhaps the most decisive point that can be made is that the possession and sale of marihuana are against the law.

One welcome by-product of a major comparative study of recent state constitutional conventions has been a series of interviews with the judges who served as convention delegates. They are particularly interesting, not only because of the paucity of interviews with sitting judges, but because they permit us to directly compare the attitudes of judges with those of other political elites. To date, this has not been possible.

Conventional wisdom assumes that the public wants judges that will simply interpret and apply the law as it is written. However, existing evidence shows a substantial portion of the American population supports the doctrine of popular constitutionalism. Using two experiments involving the use of social science in legal decisions, we show that popular constitutionalists evaluate the judiciary using a different set of criteria than legal traditionalists. For legal traditionalists, using social science in legal decisions is perceived as an undesirable nonlegal influence and reduces acceptance of a court decision. For popular constitutionalists, social science is perceived as objective evidence that can be used to understand the practical effects of a decision and increases acceptance. We conclude by discussing the need for more research on popular constitutionalists, as little is known about how this group evaluates the judiciary and interprets its actions.

This paper applies the methodology of economics to the analysis of resource allocation by households with actual or potential disputes. A model of household production of “legal welfare” is constructed. Household time and money investment decisions over time are analyzed within the household production framework. Finally, a simplified set of functions for measuring household demand for dispute resolution goods and services is presented and discussed.

Islamic law, or shari‘a, has been incorporated into the legal systems of many states. In much of the existing literature, this process is understood as part of the colonial and postcolonial state's attempt to render law legible—that is, codified, standardized, and abstract. In this article, I show how some state actors chose to move in the opposite direction, actively discouraging the transformation of shari‘a into a formal and codified system of law. Using the case of colonial and postcolonial Sudan, I argue that these actors viewed legal legibility as a threat to state power, recognizing the jurisgenerative potential of an informal and uncodified law.

A common policy response to female genital mutilation/cutting (“FGM/C”) is the enactment of criminal prohibitions. The implementation of such prohibitions requires significant state capacity, which is often associated with the coercion. We examine compliance with anti-FGM/C law in Burkina Faso and Kenya, two countries which are thought to have markedly different state capacity and where the practice of FGM/C has been widespread. Using a hard-case comparison and both qualitative and quantitative approaches, including a list experiment to elicit accurate responses regarding the current state of FGM/C practice, we find that Burkina Faso and Kenya have achieved comparatively similar compliance with their respective anti-FGM/C laws. We explain this surprising finding by pointing to the different implementation approaches taken by each state, one coercive and one facilitative, and the degree to which those approaches were well-matched to the attitudes of their respective populations. This paired comparison suggests that coercively weak states may still be able to secure compliance with their laws. It also suggests that academics and policymakers alike should consider the numerous other capacities states possess beyond simple coercion.

Since the 1940s Takeyoshi Kawashima has been Japan's most distinguished legal sociologist. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that commenting on Kawashima's contributions to the sociology of law is almost equivalent to commenting on the sociology of law in Japan itself (1982–1986). International readers have not fully appreciated his work for two reasons. First, few of his writings are in English and those pieces that are translated do not encompass his major contributions. Second, there are relatively few works published in English on the sociology of law in Japan. Those studies that have appeared stress the uniqueness of Japanese legal culture. As a result, international readers have come to consider Kawashima's scholarship (while brilliant) irrelevant to theory building in the sociology of law.

Feierabend, Nesvold, and Feierabend (1970) suggest two major hypotheses relating the concept of permissiveness-coerciveness of political regimes to the occurrence of political instability. First, they expect that “Low levels of political coerciveness (that is, political permissiveness) and high levels of coerciveness are associated with internal stability while mid-levels of coerciveness are associated with political violence.” Second, they hypothesize that “The greater (lesser) the fluctuation in level of political coerciveness, the higher (lower) the level of political violence.” The justification of these hypotheses are largely in terms of the psychology of frustrations and aggression. Political coerciveness is conceptualized as a set of restraints on the behavior of individuals imposed by a political regime. The more restraints imposed by the regime the more likely is any particular individual to be inhibited from performing certain of his desired behaviors. This situation is seen as producing, in the aggregate, higher levels of system-wide frustrations. It is appreciated, however, that if the number of restraints imposed is sufficiently large, then along with higher levels of frustration there will also appear a deterrent effect. The deterrent effect will presumably prevent these frustrations from becoming manifest in politically violent behavior.

This paper presents a discussion of the revitalization processes of the peace pact system of intervillage relations among the Kalinga mountaineers of northern Luzon by means of celebrations given by the system's key personnel, the peace pact holders. Revitalization here refers on the one hand to the ways in which these celebrations regenerate support for the peace pact system, reinforce obedience to peace pact law, and strengthen the obligations of the people to the personnel of the system. On the other hand, revitalization refers to the reaffirmation and reformulation of peace pact law, which ensures the continuing effectiveness, validity, and relevance of the peace pact system to the changing world of the Kalinga. The revitalization processes inherent in peace pact celebrations have not been studied by earlier students of the Kalinga, yet close observation reveals this built-in revitalization to be a basic feature in the operation of the system.