Origin stories are a distinctive form of narrative. In their account of how something “began to be,” such stories connect past and present, clarify the meanings of important events, reaffirm core norms and values, and assert particular understandings of social order and individual identity. The parents of children with disabilities tell strikingly similar origin stories about the day their child was first diagnosed. Such stories not only explore the meanings of a transformative event but also draw implicit connections between past encounters with medical specialists and present encounters with educational specialists as mandated by an important federal statute. This article, based on an ethnographic study of parents, children, and educators, traces the implicit references in the parents' origin myths to a set of key oppositions that reflect their experiences within the statutory framework of special education: cooperative versus unilateral decisionmaking, lay versus professional knowledge, and authority versus legal empowerment. The article also compares the ways in which law and myth address the conflicting perspectives of disability specialists and of the parents and children themselves.

Using insights from poststructuralist literary theories, writings on ideology, and theories of practice, this article develops an interpretive perspective on political tolerance for nonconformity. Viewing Supreme Court expression doctrine as ideology, it suggests that legal discourse, in combination with intersecting social, political, and scientific discourses, socially constructs political difference and constitutes a political spectrum. Research indicating differences in tolerance between elites and the public is interpreted as arising from dual ideological strands within legal discourse that are appropriated depending on one's location in social relations. The theoretical approach is used to situate law and legal institutions in American culture and extend previous work on legal doctrine as ideology emerging from the Critical Legal Studies movement.

This article extends recent theorizing on 19th- and early 20th-century social control to the punishment of minor offenders in the American South. Despite surface differences in state control and in court contexts, the punishment of convicted misdemeanants strikingly resembled its more serious counterpart. The racial composition of both chain-gang and penitentiary populations was similar, as were trends in the rate at which the public and private sector forcefully expropriated the labor of black and white males. Depressed economic conditions adversely affected all punishment rates, regardless of race. Although more circumscribed in impact, racial inequality and labor supply and demand also affected incarceration in the chain gang. The author considers directions for future research and theory.

This article examines the Supreme Court's use of social science research evidence in 28 capital punishment cases decided between 1986 and 1989. The study describes the frequency and major correlates of the justices' citation of social science authorities in the 1986–89 sequence of cases. Social science evidence figured significantly in several death penalty cases, although a majority of the justices were more eager to discredit and discount research conclusions than to use them as premises for their decisions, and prevailing case opinions generally promoted principles that had little to do with empirical evidence concerning the administration of capital punishment. Social science citation patterns in majority and dissenting opinions, and in the opinions of “liberal” and “conservative” Supreme Court justices, in significant respects parallel the Court's shifting doctrinal premises in capital punishment decisions.

We address capriciousness in decisions by prosecutors to charge homicide defendants with a capital crime. We suggest that it is useful to think of such decisions as a kind of lottery in which one should focus on the distribution of outcomes when considering both the nature of capriciousness and the degree of capriciousness. After our conceptional framework is introduced, we illustrate our ideas with the analysis of a data set from San Francisco.

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.

Although always an integral part of sociology, the study of social control has waxed and waned. Originally, the concept was defined broadly as any structure, process, relationship, or act that contributes to the social order; indeed, the concepts of social order and control were indistinguishable. A consensus is now emerging that distinguishes social control from the social order it is meant to explain and that distinguishes among social control processes. One basic distinction is between processes of internal control or socialization and processes of external control. Recently, the study of social control is equated more with the latter than the former.

In their article in this symposium Berk, Weiss, and Boger (1993) have presented a unique approach in the examination of the issue of capriciousness in capital charging decisions. They define capriciousness as one of two forms of arbitrariness. One form of arbitrariness, discrimination, concerns the use of inappropriate factors such as the defendant's social class or victim's race. In the second form of arbitrariness, capriciousness, it is not the use of inappropriate factors that is problematic; rather it is the inability to identify the factors that “meaningfully” differentiate the few defendants given a capital charge from the many who could have been charged with a capital crime but were not. Berk and his colleagues only concern themselves with capriciousness.

Despite the obvious and repeated failures of biopsycho-criminologies, looking at and inside individuals for the causes of crime persists as the politically more tolerable and economically more rewarding (for grantsmen) alternative to the kind of theoretical and empirical work featured in this symposium. Instead of looking for what is wrong with people, these researchers are looking for what is wrong with society—and why. Once again the causal importance of contextual factors and social forces is being investigated and demonstrated. To theorists who have perceived and posited causal linkages among structured inequalities, social conflicts, and the definition as well as the occurrence of crimes, such research deserves the highest priority. These are indeed welcome contributions because they are asking the right questions. Now let us consider the answers they offer.

We appreciate Professor Paternoster's evenhanded review of our article and consider many of his concerns legitimate differences of opinion. But it is, nevertheless, useful to specify the key points on which there is agreement or disagreement.

This study situates the response of various segments of the bar to the New Deal era of administrative expansion in the context of contemporary theories of the legal profession. I focus on the theoretical formulations of a market monopoly approach, a functionalist approach, and a systems approach to the study of professionalism and professional competition. I consider each approach in light of two foundational prisms: (1) the stratified composition of the bar necessarily leads to a corresponding variation in the response to changes in the legal environment; (2) at the elite level of the profession, there is considerable attention to changes that affect the law as a system of knowledge and as a resource around which lawyers establish their professional legitimacy as exclusive experts. I draw attention to the strategic mechanisms that lawyers invoked in order to deal with the inter- and intraprofessional competition that accompanied the expansion of the regulatory state.

A survey of a random sample of attorneys in the New York Regional Metropolitan Area reveals that they have a lukewarm attitude toward newer, more businesslike client-getting strategies—advertising, prepaid legal plans, nonprofit plans, and closed legal plans; respondents also strongly agree that these techniques have a negative impact on the public's image of the profession. Do structural factors of the profession explain attitudes toward professional practices? To find out, I examined the effect of three dimensions of the profession: organization of work, geographical location of organization, and demographic factors. The findings show both persistent intraprofessional tensions around the impact of these new practices on the image of the profession and tension between older and younger attorneys over advertising and development of legal plans. Also these analyses document a structural dimension of the legal profession not identified in earlier research: suburban practitioners are much more skeptical about the newer client-getting practices than are their urban colleagues.

In its 5–4 decision in Tison v. Arizona (1987), the Supreme Court put forth disputable empirical assertions about where community sentiment stood on the death penalty for felony-murder accessories. The Tison majority claimed that the community would support the death sentence for an accessory where (1) major participation and (2) reckless indifference to human life were shown. Two experiments were run to test these empirical assertions, and the results indicate quite the opposite. By a wide majority, community sentiment rejects the death penalty for such an accessory and rejects equal treatment of principal and accessory. Even beyond the death penalty question, to the issue of conviction under the felony-murder rule per se, attributions of causal and moral responsibility showed the principle of proportionality reigning supreme. Implications for how the Supreme Court goes about doing social science are discussed.