Using ethnographic data, I examine prosecutors' discourse on case convictability (the likelihood of a guilty verdict at trial) in sexual assault cases. The analysis shows how prosecutors construct discordant locales through their categorization of victims, defendants, jurors, and their communities and the location of crime incidents. It demonstrates how prosecutors use discordant locales to justify case rejection. By ascribing stereotypical characteristics of a neighborhood to victims, defendants, and jurors, prosecutors construct distinct groups with different cultures who live in geographically separate spaces and have different schemes through which they interpret the everyday world. To construct discordant locale categorizations, prosecutors employ race, class, and gender imagery. Through this imagery they construct multiple normative standards of moral character of persons and of places. I argue that through the categorizations of place as discordant locales, prosecutors inadvertently reproduce race, class, and gender ideologies in legal decisionmaking. I conclude with policy suggestions for expanding and equalizing citizens' access to justice.

The article connects two strands of the recent sociolegal debate: (1) the empirical discovery of new forms of spontaneous law in the course of globalization, and (2) the emergence of deconstructive theories of law that undermine the law's hierarchy. The article puts forward the thesis that law's hierarchy has successfully resisted all old and new attempts at its deconstruction; it breaks, however, under the pressures of globalization that produced a global law without the state, as self-created law of global society that has no institutionalized support whatsoever in international politics and public international law. Consequendy, the article criticizes deconstructive theories for their lack of autological analysis. These theories do not take into account the historical conditions of deconstruction. Accordingly, deconstructive analysis of law would have to look for new legal distinctions that are plausible under the new conditions of a doubly fragmented global society. The article sketches the contours of an emerging polycontextural law.

This study examines citation data in state wrongful discharge precedent cases from a network analytic perspective. The main question posed is whether, or to what extent, judges use citations as indicators of substantive influence on their decisionmaking versus devices primarily intended to justify decisions reached on other grounds (i.e., for legitimation). To address this question, I obtained evidence on the usefulness of distinguishing between “strong” and “weak” citations and between citation frequency and breadth. I conclude that citations in legal decisions are meaningful data and that there is evidence of both intercourt influence and legitimation at work.

There is little research on the relationship between adolescent motherhood and the criminality of the children. Data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development reveals that children from large families who were born to women who began childbearing early are at greatest risk of criminality. Three alternative explanations for this relationship are explored—the life course-immaturity account, the persistent poor parenting-role model account, and the diminished resources account. We find no evidence supporting the first account, but in various ways the analysis provides credible support for the latter two accounts, which themselves are not mutually exclusive.

In a reanalysis of the Milwaukee Domestic Violence Experiment, we examine whether the use of fair procedures on the part of police officers called to the scene of a domestic assault inhibits subsequent assault. Consistent with expectations, we found that procedural justice did suppress subsequent violence, even in the face of adverse outcomes. When police acted in a procedurally fair manner when arresting assault suspects, the rate of subsequent domestic violence was significantly lower than when they did not. Moreover, suspects who were arrested and perceived that they were treated in a procedurally fair manner had subsequent assault rates that were as low as those suspects given a more favorable outcome (warned and then released without arrest). The suppression effect of procedural justice did not depend on the personal characteristics of suspects.

The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 mandated major restructuring of federal sentencing through specific sentencing guidelines. New sentencing guidelines developed by the United States Sentencing Commission and adopted in 1987 explicitly linked sentencing to “relevant conduct”—offense characteristics—and sought to abolish unwarranted sentence disparity. The guidelines substantially reduced judicial discretion and resulted in a criminalization and sentencing process that is largely prosecutor controlled. The author has generated hypotheses that relate defendant characteristics, guilty pleas, and departures from sentencing guidelines to sentence outcomes under the federal sentencing guidelines. She first examined the variables influencing sentence severity for the drug offenders who were sentenced in 1991–92. She then explored the interaction effects by estimating the tobit equation separately for three groups—black, white, and Hispanic defendants—to discover whether defendant's ethnicity conditions the effect of other defendant characteristics, guidelines-defined legally relevant variables, guilty pleas, and departures on sentence severity. Her analysis reveals that disparity in federal sentencing of drug offenders is linked not only to offense-related variables, as structured by the guidelines, but also to defendant characteristics such as ethnicity, gender, educational level, and noncitizenship, which under the guidelines are specified as legally irrelevant.

Here I discuss the response of local state agencies to the problem of arson-for-profit as a way to address the debates in the white-collar crime literature over the problem of class bias and the political autonomy of state institutions. Arson-for-profit makes for an especially compelling case because of the inherent organizational difficulties involved with controlling this crime and the relationship this crime has to the perpetuation of social inequality in urban neighborhoods. I argue that arson-for-profit has been relegated to a nonissue status by law enforcement. Although this can be explained largely in institutional terms, this outcome suggests a selectivity on the part of the state where arson enforcement is concerned. The findings have implications for our understandings of equity in law enforcement processes and the question of class bias in state processes.

Le primary principle underlying the physician's oath is nonmaleficence: “first, do no harm.” These five books present the best contemporary thinking about trends in criminal sentencing and philosophies of punishment; taken together, they offer the physicians’ wise counsel to modem politicians, judges, and citizens across the globe.

This book by Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth, both a major empirical and theoretical contribution, has arrived at a propitious time for law and society scholars. If our discipline is not in crisis, it is certainly in a period of transition. As “globalization” has monopolized the attention of policymakers, journalists, futurists, politicians, and the business elite, scholars in law and society have not been far behind. Meetings of the Law and Society Association have become notably more international in their objects, if to a lesser extent in membership and attendance. As our scholarship ventures with more regularity over, under, and beyond the boundaries of nation-states, we encounter new conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges, as well as the exacerbation of some more familiar difficulties. The work of Dezalay and Garth represents one of the most advanced and concerted efforts in our discipline to rise to this array of new (and old) challenges. The book's scope and ambitions are such that a reviewer is compelled to ask whether the authors have presented us with a new paradigm for research in sociology of law in the context of globalization. As I am only presumptuous enough to pose but not to answer that question, this review essay will document both the considerable promise and some possible limitations of the approach developed by Dezalay and Garth, in the hopes of using their work to spark a wider debate on the future of law and society scholarship in conditions of globalization.

The American legal profession has experienced dramatic change in the late 20th century. Attorneys have witnessed vast growth in new entrants (Curran 1986; Curran & Carson 1991; Sander & Williams 1989), the abolition of restrictions on new methods of finding clients and price competition (Abel 1989; Reidinger 1987; Seron 1992), changes in the delivery of legal services and law firm organization (Nelson 1988; Seron 1992; Van Hoy 1995, 1997), the growth of large law firms (Galanter & Palay 1991), and an increase in employed lawyers (Abel 1989; Spangler 1986).

In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in “Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience.” He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is “impoverished theoretically” and “often not worth reading” (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the policy audience. He contrasts current scholarship with a golden age of police inquiry, the 1960s, in which theoretical breakthroughs were common, and scholars were driven by their critical instincts rather than by material interests. His review of current works is narrower than most published in the Review, covering only two monographs published in the 1990s, and holding out but one (Bayley 1994) as evidence of all that is wrong with contemporary, sociolegal inquiry of policing.