Lawrence Friedman (1969: 29) has written that “many basic questions of the relationship of law to social change and to cultural development have been completely neglected. … How does law brighten or darken the road to political… stability. … What happens when laws are borrowed from more advanced countries?” This paper examines the reception of English administrative law in Anglophonic Africa in an effort to discover some general propositions to answer Professor Friedman's questions.

Action that occurs in a group or social context has always held a certain fascination for students of human behavior, partly because of our many notions about the powerful forces that groups exert on the individual. Impressions of group forces derive in part from Le Bon's (1895) early account of crowd behavior, which characterized the crowd's power over the individual as control that was essentially hypnotic, resulting in extremities of behavior, from brutal cruelty to altruism. More recent analyses of group influences have been concerned with the means by which groups elicit and maintain individual conformity to goals, values, and standards shared by the group. For example, Kelman's (1961) theoretical analysis of the processes of social influence has been a significant contribution to our understanding of the antecedents and consequences of conformity phenomena.

This is a study of the criminal trial court as a formal organization. The processing of defendants through court can be seen simply as a task for the courtroom personnel—the cases presenting not only occasions for moral outrage or legal acumen but also presenting problems for the legal bureaucracy as such. From one perspective, defendants are as deviant if they do not conform to the routines of the court as they are if they do not conform to the rules of the state. Like the wider society it supports, the court has a social integrity which can be disrupted. The court processes persons alleged to have been deviant in the larger society. The defendants are then subject to the moral exigencies of the court itself. The discussion treats the court as a business as well as a prime sanctioning center for the outer society. But the control of crime is more than a business; it is an industry. The immediate suppliers of the court—the police—act upon and in turn are conditioned by courtroom configurations. Several features of this police-court interrelation also form a part of this study.

This paper is the third in a series of articles describing the results of efforts to investigate ways in which the burdens of proof applicable in criminal and civil trials could be defined more precisely and more objectively. The burden of proof for determining guilt in criminal trials in American courts is the presentation of evidence which would lead “a reasonable man” to believe “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the defendant did indeed commit the act for which he was charged. This standard is applicable to all criminal acts irrespective of their heinousness or the circumstances under which they were committed. In civil actions the burden of proof necessary for determining negligence on the part of the defendant is “by preponderance of the evidence.”

Unlike other federally assisted public welfare programs, the Aid to Dependent Children program has periodically been subjected to sharp political and journalistic attack. The themes of these attacks center around assertions that the program has encouraged illegitimacy and contributed to an increasing number of female-centered families. Bound up in such criticism is the suggestion that the parents of many, if not most, of the children receiving public assistance are unworthy of it by reason of their conduct or their notions of proper conduct. Also included in this anti-ADC ideology are the sloganlike propositions that many poor women have illegitimate children simply to become eligible for ADC payments and that they have additional children to obtain increased payments. A closely related assertion is sometimes made that the availability of ADC payments, or the way in which they are administered, causes many men to abandon their families or to live separately but nearby, and that the program in this way promotes and perpetuates matrifocal family patterns.

In 1959, Wolf, Lüke, and Hax published Scheidung und Scheidungsrecht (Divorce and Divorce Law), dealing with the effects of revision of German divorce laws in 1900 on the rates of divorce and petition for divorce. This paper is a reanalysis of Wolf, Lüke, and Hax's data with newly developed inferential statistical models, and a reappraisal in light of appropriate statistical analyses of then-conclusions and those of Max Rheinstein (1960) in his review of their work.

The imposition of penalities for violation of criminal laws has been traditionally justified for such reasons as social justice and retribution. Today, perhaps the main justification for imposing severe penalties on those who violate the law is that such punishments serve as a specific deterrent to future violations by the offender and as a general deterrent to violations by others who might be tempted to follow his lead.

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.

Sociological perspectives in the study of law have a long history in German scholarship. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century the “Historical School of Jurisprudence” had insisted that the law is embedded in the developing patterns of social and cultural life, and that this aspect should guide the analysis of law as well as govern legislation. Still, it was only during the decades before and after 1900 that more specifically sociological analyses began to appear. German jurisprudence was not characterized by close contact and intimate interaction with social and economic reality. Among the reasons for this were the following:

1. (1) the coexistence of regionally fragmented and relatively traditional legal practice with legal scholarship shaped by the tradition of Roman law;

2. (2) the relative segregation of legal personnel by class and subculture from people without a university education and from business and enterprise; and

3. (3) the dominant role of government bureaucracies, staffed mainly by lawyers, which in many instances did not have to be particularly responsive to the demands of new groups with interests in the law.

The impact of what judges decide is a crucial part of what is studied by those sharing a political rather than only a legal perspective on the United States Supreme Court. It has become important as we have shifted our attention from “output, which is the decision of the Court including its orders and statement of policy” to consideration of “outcome, which is the final results or impact of output” (Barth, 1968: 315, note). This development is much more recent than the beginnings of the political perspective on the courts. Explicit attention to impact, backed by studies of impacts of particular decisions, is less than twenty years old, dating from the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which made political scientists aware that compliance with decisions of the Supreme Court was neither automatic, immediate, nor uniform. As Krislov (1963: 7) has remarked, from the standpoint of Court process, the decision in Brown v. Board of Education has had its greatest effect in educating “students as to the limits and operations of the court system generally.”

The argument of this article is that where a transient college student is arrested, financial bail is seldom necessary to assure the defendant's presence in court. However, in such a case, financial bail is almost always required by the court, since in the area of bail, as with other criminal law problems, the pragmatic exigencies of the traditional American criminal law system place a heavy burden on any transient to realize the same protections, privileges, and rights provided the indigenous population (Foote, 1965: 1129-1130).

Plaintiffs in civil cases and the prosecution in criminal actions generally have the “burden” of proving all factual issues material under the applicable substantive law. The effect of so placing this burden is twofold. First, it compels the plaintiff, or prosecution, to produce a quantum of evidence sufficient to persuade the judge that a reasonable jury could (not should), on the basis of that evidence, find that the burden has been “carried” and that the requisite facts have been proven. If the judge finds the evidence inadequate for that purpose, he will direct a verdict for the defendant. The second effect results from the revelation of this burden to the jury so that it may consider it in its deliberations. No matter how that burden is described to the jury, some disadvantage should accrue to the party bearing it. The Simon/Mahan study raises a number of interesting questions about the extent to which that disadvantage can be quantified and how juries will react to that quantification.