Field data from a longitudinal study of drug dealing reveal the importance of interpersonal networks in determining the impact of criminal sanctions. The level of perceived sanction severity was in large measure dependent on the degree of disruption created in interpersonal relations and on the resilience of these relations in adapting to the sanctioning process. Perceived certainty of sanctions was likewise dependent on characteristics of interpersonal interactions. Perceived certainty and severity of sanctions combined to define the level of fear. Sanction-induced fear increased network density and closure. These network properties were largely responsible for the paradoxical impact of sanctions. The relevance of these findings for deterrence research is noted throughout.

In an era of supposed judicial imperialism, the decline of judicial involvement in an important policy area raises questions about the dynamics of legal change. In the past thirty-five years, despite large increases in the volume of loans and delinquent debts, there has been a sharp decline in contested debt cases in state supreme courts and an apparent decline in trial courts as well. In seeking an explanation, this article concludes that for both creditors and debtors, litigation has become more costly in relation to alternative courses of action such as renegotiating payment terms, declaring bankruptcy, or writing off unpaid debts. The attractiveness of nonlitigational alternatives is attributed to (a) the “legal rationalization” of credit transactions by institutional lenders, (b) increased litigation costs stemming from enhanced debtors' rights, and most importantly, (c) “systemic stabilization”—welfare state measures, economic regulation, insurance arrangements, and market diversification that facilitates the attenuation and spreading of financial losses.

In this paper disputes are seen as varying along a dimension of admitted liability, that is, the extent to which defendants admit some obligation to plaintiffs; they may admit no liability, partial liability, or full liability. This conceptualization was used in an empirical study of a small claims court. The results paint a portrait of the court that is at variance with most of the previous literature. Consumer issues constitute a substantial portion of the court caseload. On average, defendants, including individual consumers, do well when they dispute claims. Among disputed cases, small rather than large businesses predominate. Prior literature has suggested that, in comparison to adjudication, mediation of claims produces compromise outcomes and higher rates of compliance. This research shows that mediation yields a large percentage of all-or-none results, but to the extent that there is compromise and compliance, it can be partly ascribed to admitted liability characteristics. Some data on defaulted cases are also presented.

In Maine defendants in small claims court are nearly twice as likely to comply fully with mediated outcomes as with judgments imposed by the court after adjudication. Some of the explanation can be attributed to specific features that are more common to mediated and negotiated settlements than to adjudicated outcomes. In addition, consensual processes lead to social psychological pressures for compliance that are not associated with authoritative judgments. Our findings point to the value of consent—the most central difference between mediation and adjudication—as an adjunct to command in promoting compliance with rules and orders.

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of perceived injustice in generating dissatisfaction with legal authorities. Using data collected in interviews with a sample of defendants in traffic and misdemeanor court, I compare the influence of case outcomes upon attitudes toward judges and courts to that of distributive and procedural justice. The results suggest that among the defendants studied the major determinant of satisfaction with legal authorities is perceived fairness. Once the influence of perceived fairness is considered, case outcomes explain no additional variation in attitudes toward courts and judges. In the conclusion, possible implications of this finding are discussed.

In “Sander County” Illinois, concerns about litigiousness in the local population tended to focus on personal injury suits, although such cases were very rarely brought. This article explores the roots of these concerns in the ideology of the rural community and in the reactions of many residents to social, cultural, and economic changes that created a pervasive sense of social disintegration and loss. Personal injury claims are contrasted with contract actions, which were far more numerous yet were generally viewed with approval and did not give rise to perceptions of litigiousness or greed. The distinction is explained in terms of changing conceptions of the community itself and in terms of the problematic relationships between “insiders” and “outsiders” in Sander County.

The growth of state interventionism, especially in the post-war era, has been associated with the proliferation of legal innovations. This paper examines the development of novel hybridizations of civil and criminal forms, developed largely to facilitate state regulation. Such hybrids, referred to here as civil offenses, combine civil proceedings, often referred to as prosecutions, with notions of convictions for which penalties are imposed. The advantages accruing to the state from such “ambiguous” forms include favorable standards of proof, rules of interpretation, extending responsibility, retroactivity, suspension of mens rea, and a wide array of novel sanctions.

An ecological model based on evolutionary game theory is developed to analyze the role of egoistic cooperation in regulatory enforcement. The model demonstrates that socially beneficial cooperation depends on 1) a combination of cooperative and deterrence routines in an enforcement strategy that is at once vengeful and forgiving, 2) firms concerned enough about future enforcement encounters to forgo short-term gains from evasion, and 3) institutional arrangements that provide suitable sanctions and cost tradeoffs for existing enforcement and evasion technologies in the particular enforcement arena. Factors limiting the advantage of cooperation are also reviewed, and other applications of the model are suggested.

Illegal behavior responding to subjective probabilities of arrest and consequent costs is modeled within a framework of individual choice under uncertainty. The model is formulated for the case of driving while intoxicated and tested with data that include all arrests for drunken driving in Sweden from 1976-1979. Results indicate that an arrest experience reduces the probability that a person will drive while drunk. The results suggest that an arrest increases a person's perceived probability of arrest and/or the unpleasantness of an arrest and thus leads to a reduced chance of acting illegally.

This paper examines transcriptions of tape-recorded plea bargaining sessions. It treats plea bargaining as a naturally occurring activity and seeks to discover formal decision-making patterns. In plea bargaining, participants have ways of exhibiting and responding to positions on how the case they are involved in should be handled. A decision is reached when the negotiating parties agree on a single position, and this is achieved by one of three different patterns or modes. Each pattern involves the presentation of (A) an opportunity for arriving at a mutually acceptable disposition and (B) the option of delaying determination of the disposition by continuance or trial. The ordered ways in which opportunities and options are related to each other constitute a discourse system for negotiation. This system exerts a “pressure” for the here-and-now resolution of cases, independent of negotiating parties' desires and inclinations. The focus on patterns of decision-making reveals a diversity of results and an interesting distribution of cases among the decision-making patterns.

Previous research suggests that differences in judicial decisions stem from differences in personal characteristics of the decision-maker. Dutch private law proceedings permit a research approach in which the judicial decision-making task is simulated by presenting written decisional problems to judges. Judges (N=114) made decisions on the same nine cases and completed questionnaires on role conceptions and personality.

Findings suggest that judicial decisions are only moderately influenced by the personal characteristics of the judges. The judges, however, differed considerably in their decisions. Neither the influence of personal characteristics of the judges nor the characteristics of the cases can explain to a substantial extent the differences in the decisions. It was concluded that judicial decisions stem from an interaction of personal and case characteristics.

Despite a number of valuable scholarly contributions made in recent years, we still lack a precise understanding of the determinants of voter choice in low salience nonpartisan judicial elections. Utilizing a multivariate technique that controls for the varying numbers of candidates frequently found in judicial elections, this analysis examines the contributions of incumbency, occupational ballot labels, campaign spending, newspaper and bar association endorsements, voter information pamphlets, and the ethnic and sexual voting cues provided by candidate surnames to the outcomes of the 123 contested primary and run-off elections held for California's major trial court from 1976 to 1980.

The results suggest that the determinants of voter choice are quite different in the relatively well-publicized run-off elections than they are in the low visibility primary races. Additionally, judicial voters in the less populated California counties were found to rely upon different guides to voting than voters in California's metropolitan counties. The reasons for and implications of these differences are explored.