The sociological study of deviant behavior has begun to focus less on the deviant and more on society's response to him. One of several implications of this perspective is that a major concern of the sociology of deviance should be the identification and analysis of different kinds of systems of social control. Particularly important is the analysis of the impact of different kinds of control systems on the way deviant behavior is perceived and expressed in societies.

By playing down the importance of intrinsic differences between deviants and conventional people, and between the social situation of deviants and that of nondeviants, the focus on social response implies much more than the commonplace idea that society defines the kinds of behavior that will be considered odd, disgusting, or criminal. It implies that many elements of the behavior system of a given kind of deviance, including such things as the rate of deviance and the kinds of people who are identified as a deviant, will be significantly affected by the kind of control system through which the behavior is defined and managed.

The last two centuries have witnessed a worldwide movement toward centralized, bureaucratic, professionally-staffed legal systems, sponsored by and closely allied with nation-states. One concomitant of these developments has been the emergence (or growth) of bodies of independent professionals whose members mediate between these systems and the populations they regulate. Thus the “expropriation” of the making and application of law into a purely governmental function has been accompanied by the growth of a corresponding “private sector”—the lawyers. The intimate involvement of lawyers in the emergence of modern nations has been recognized, but there has been little systematic comparative study of them. This issue contains a series of studies of one of the largest of these professional groups—Indian lawyers. These studies were prepared for a Conference on the Comparative Study of the Legal Profession with Special Reference to India, sponsored by the Committee on Southern Asia Studies of the University of Chicago, held at the Moraine-on-the-Lake Hotel in Highland Park, Illinois from August 10-12, 1967.

Social research frequently encounters the task of evaluating change produced in nonrandomly selected groups by events which are beyond the researcher's control. The social scientist must verify that there has in fact been a change, and that the indicated event is its cause. Illustrations are manifold: a state terminates capital punishment, and proponents of this type of punishment predict an increase in the murder rate; a school is integrated, and supporters of the reform expect to find an increase in the positive self-evaluation of Negro pupils; a natural disaster occurs in a community, and altruistic behavior is expected to increase. Because in these situations the investigator has no control over the assignment of individuals or groups to “experimental” and “control” situations, the logic of the classical experiment must be reexamined in a search for optimal interpretative procedures.

In late 1955 in Connecticut, the number of fatalities per 100,000 population in motor vehicle accidents reached a record high for the 1950s. On December 23, 1955, Governor Abraham Ribicoff took unprecedented action to reduce traffic fatalities. Ribicoff announced that persons convicted of speeding would have their licenses suspended for thirty days at the first offense, for sixty days at the second offense, and for an indefinite period (subject to a hearing after ninety days) at the third offense. Data on traffic fatalities before and after the Connecticut crackdown on speeding can be regarded as a time-series quasi-experiment with some significance for the social sciences. When supplemented with traffic fatality data for the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey, the collection of observations can be viewed as a multiple-group time-series experiment.

This paper reports some preliminary findings on the role of lawyers in the modernization of Indian society. Lawyers in district towns were interviewed for the purpose of discovering what contribution lawyers make to political socialization appropriate to a democratic polity.

On May 15, 1967 the United States Supreme Court rendered, in In re Gault, its first decision in the area of juvenile delinquency procedure. Commentators have repeatedly construed the rulings in Gault as requiring juvenile courts to adopt new and more liberal practices. The privilege against self-incrimination, and the rights to notice of charges, counsel, confrontation, and cross-examination were heretofore primarily regarded as the cornerstones of an adversary system of justice. The extension of these rights to juvenile courts would have seemed to require an overnight transformation of the court procedures.

In addition to containing religious centers of pilgrimage, regional and local markets, and educational establishments, a district headquarters town in India is, virtually by definition, the seat of a whole complex of law courts. The personnel whose activities contribute to the patterning of social life in such towns includes as an essential feature a small brotherhood of local legal practitioners. The present paper describes one such brotherhood: the advocates who practice in a district headquarters town in Haryana. The main problem with which I shall be concerned is that of isolating and describing the system of social relations, the interconnected set of behavioral patterns, that occurs in the daily interactions among a hundred or more professionals in the district courts. It follows that the paper looks to lawyers rather than law.

That the legal profession is not monolithic, but consists of a group of specialties, is well-known. In this respect, the legal profession's structure is similar to that of other professions that have been studied. The structural conditions conducive to the growth of specialties arise from the inability of any individual to master all the techniques and knowledge of a complex occupation. In law, the specialties are usually organized around a field of legal doctrine, such as probate; tasks, such as litigation and legal research; or client relationships, such as house counsel and government lawyers. A given law practice or career, of course, may and typically does include more than one specialty. Public office-holding is another prominent part of the work that lawyers do, but it has so far hardly been taken into account by the legal profession as part of its work. Indeed, many discussions of lawyers' work barely mention their involvement in politics, except for offhand references. Yet the evidence shows that public office-holding figures importantly in the lawyer's world of work. Even beyond occasional office-holding, evidence to be cited in this paper suggests that for some lawyers public office-holding takes on some characteristics of a career, perhaps amounting to another specialty within law. Admittedly, the uncertainties and risks of public office mean that few men who go into politics give up their other means of livelihood entirely. Yet some men become sufficiently involved in public office-holding for both them and observers to think of it in career terms.

Punitive sterilization has once again returned to the lexicon of American legislative debate. While there is no denying that the America of the social Darwinians and the extreme hereditarians of the late 19th and early 20th century has vanished from our midst, the residue still remains. The early eugenics literature was often punitive in tone, aimed at “purging” the nation of its so-called criminal, degenerate, and other “cacogenic” classes, not by physical extermination but rather through the use of surgical castration or sterilization. Notwithstanding the fact that the early hereditarians were concerned with the alleged inheritance of criminality and social degeneracy, the main thrust of the eugenic sterilizations laws which were passed (beginning with Indiana in 1907) was the reduction and eventual elimination of insanity and feeblemindedness. These laws were clearly gauged to prevent America from being deluged or “inundated” by those socially undesirable classes or categories of persons that the state legislators of that period believed to be the most serious threat to the stability, even the survival, of the nation as they conceived it. The eugenic character of these early laws was often compromised by the inclusion of habitual criminals, rapists, sexual perverts, social degenerates, and other groups where the intent of the legislation was clearly punitive.

Under British rule, the indian legal profession was alone in offering to the talented an opportunity of gaining both wealth and prestige, and its lure to the young was equalled only by the Indian Civil Service. But the foundations upon which the profession's preeminence was based have now eroded. Rent suits, the principal source of its rural income, have all but disappeared. In 1935, of the 224,709 civil suits instituted in the courts of what is now the state of Bihar, 80% were rent suits, by 1962 the number of civil suits instituted in the courts had dropped to 43,978, and only 5% of these were rent suits. The departure of the British opened new, competing, career alternatives, and a widening net of education undercut the advantages of wealth, family and caste. New social conditions have not only required the advocate to rely upon different sources for his legal income—they have begun to transform the nature of the profession itself. There has been a steep decline in the relative prestige it once enjoyed.

It is obvious that overpopulation is the most critical social problem of our time. As such, it is necessarily the greatest legal problem of our time and the greatest challenge which faces the legal profession today. Since the population problem is fast becoming the population crisis, it is essential that our laws and our legal order must now be subject to reexamination. We dare wait no longer in studying, formulating, and augmenting the proper and precise laws and legal machinery both to help restrain the population growth and to alleviate the ills inherent in overpopulation and unwanted population.

But we must, in our quest for the best laws, be wary of the trap of talking solely in terms of population curtailment. We must take as our guiding principle the words of population expert, John D. Rockefeller, III: “Our constant goal is and must be the enrichment of human life, not its restriction.” In other words, our new laws on the population problem must at the same time make for a better society.

As I told you yesterday, I can't figure this out. A criminal lawyer, who is famous for making big fees-maybe he'll make $15, $20, $30 or $40,000-will go in and represent a person on a multiple murder, arson, rape, and four or five other crimes, and the public has some kind of fondness for that. But if some guy will take, if a lawyer will take a case and he says, “I'm going to represent this communist because I think he has a right to express himself, and I'm going to do it just for the love of doing it,” you get a little bit of an odd-ball stigma put on you. I think-I may be wrong on that. But ... it's a strange thing that when you do it for money, the public seems to accept it; when you do it for more lofty reasons, I'm not sure that the public does accept it. What do you think?

The effort to provide aid for development, undertaken on an unprecedented scale by the United States after World War II, provides an excellent opportunity for social scientists to contribute to the clarification and implementation of public policy. The relationship between given policies and the desired process of development has not been adequately understood. Nor has the nature of development been clearly identified or conceptualized.

In recent years, there has been an increasing awareness of these problems in Congress. This is particularly manifest in the hearings, debates, and reports which led to the passage of title IX of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1966, and the public statements of the Congressmen who were responsible for the passage of the title. Efforts at implementation of this section indicate the complexity of the problem and the need for a major contribution from the social sciences if the policy embodied in the act is to be effectuated.

Certain recent technological developments may soon make possible new alternatives to the incarceration of offenders. These alternatives clearly present some hazards as well as benefits. The purpose of this paper is to discuss briefly a few of the difficult and complex issues that may soon arise as a result of these new alternatives.

Some of the most relevant advances in technology are occurring in areas other than that of corrections. For example, an electronic rescue and rehabilitation system now being developed will permit the monitoring of the heart rate and geographical location of cardiac patients in an urban environment as they move through the prescribed monitored area. In the event of acute cardiac infarction, the patient could transmit an emergency signal to the base station and help could be sent immediately. Even if the patient were unconscious, the base station might automatically be alerted to his condition and location. The location would not need to be determined unless an emergency occurred. A similar system might also be used to help rescue persons subject to other types of medical emergencies, to protect mentally ill or retarded persons who might easily become lost or confused in the city, and to help safeguard persons with suicidal tendencies.