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.

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 interplay between professionals and clients has been examined in a number of settings (Etzioni, 1964: 87-89; Becker, 1952; Willie, 1960; Schur, 1968; Myers and Roberts, 1959) and the impact of laymen on professional behavior is well-known to the sociologists (Friedson, 1960). In this research report these insights are applied to police-citizen interaction in an effort to explain the dynamics of discretionary decisions by police officers and the role such discretion plays in their quest to attain higher professional stature. Specific attention will be paid to variations in the willingness of policemen to develop and utilize informers or “stool pigeons.”

In his presidential address, Frank Munger (2001) asks us to consider a reconciliation between inquiry and activism. Although Munger uses the broader and more inclusive term “social inquiry” as his counterpoint to activism, I would like to focus on a particular type of inquiry, one that has deep roots in the Law and Society Association (LSA) and one that is most opposed to activism: social science inquiry. In short, I would argue that tensions that historically have kept the projects of inquiry and activism separate emerge out of a particular brand of inquiry known as empiricism and, among other things, its commitment to value freedom.

Statistics has been called the science of uncertainty. Central to this science is the concept of probability. Operationalizing probability, however, has provided statisticians with many difficulties over the years, and to this day no complete agreement has been reached on this extremely important issue.

Prior scholarship has established that controlling space is central to policing, while highlighting various ways in which this form of social control can be racialized. Extending this work, we advance a theory on the racialized control of space that predicts a higher level of police stops and lower standards of suspicion along neighborhood racial boundaries, the areas where racial composition changes between adjacent neighborhoods. Our theoretical argument sheds light on the selective enforcement of law and order in these transitional spaces, which is a form of racialized spatial social control. Integrating data from New York City’s Stop, Question, and Frisk program from 2008 to 2012 with extensive neighborhood measures, our analyses reveal that White neighborhoods along boundaries experienced substantially elevated levels of police stops even after conditioning on a wide array of potential confounders. This relationship is partially mediated by elevated crime along neighborhood racial boundaries. Still, a sizable direct effect persists, indicative of the racialized social control of spaces. Further, the police tended to require less suspicion before deciding to conduct stops in White neighborhoods along racial boundaries, but only for Black and Hispanic suspects. Implications for the study of race and policing, law and society, and urban and racial inequality are discussed.

Lower state courts are the focus of both international and national access to justice policies and programs but remain understudied in Uganda. Drawing on 3 years of ethnographically informed research on citizen engagement with a busy magistrates' court in post-war northern Uganda, we show the diverse reasons why citizens appeal to the rule-of-law in places where state authority is contested. In a context of limited statehood, against a backdrop of high-levels of corruption and inefficiency in the judicial system, people turn to lower state courts for normative, pragmatic, and tactical reasons that are not well captured by conventional measures of procedural justice. Our findings extend theory on citizen-authority relations in a global context, shedding light on contextual meanings of legitimacy, trust, and corruption in places where lower state courts are deeply problematic sites for achieving justice.