At one time the Law and Society Association might have been loosely defined as “a group of people who subscribe to the Law & Society Review” Today the Review is properly described as the journal of the Association, for the Association has developed into a true fellowship of scholars, and publishing the Review is only one of the Association's activities. For more than a decade the Association was governed by a Board of Trustees that chose its own leaders and successors. Today the trustees and the president are elected by the membership at large. Early trustees meetings were often “piggybacked” onto meetings of the AALS or APSA—meetings that a substantial proportion of trustees were likely to attend in any event—and it was a triumph of intellectual interchange if some other social science association could be persuaded to add to its annual meeting a panel or two devoted to “Law and . …” Today the Association's trustees and president are elected by its members, and the Association holds well-attended annual meetings filled with more interesting research panels than any one person can accommodate. In addition, the Association supports an active executive office that regularly publishes a newsletter and participates with other social science associations in explaining the business of social science to the public and in seeking the support needed for the important work we do. All of this reflects the fact that for an increasing number of scholars the Law and Society Association has become a primary rather than secondary discipline affiliation.

The early social scientific effort to understand law and the legal system is largely associated with attempts at grand theory. The names of Durkheim and Weber, in particular, stand out, but Maine, Pashukanis, Timascheff, and others all offered encompassing perspectives. The renewed interest in law and social science, which began in the United States in the 1950s and came to flourish in the sixties and seventies, has had just the opposite character. It has been largely an empirical enterprise. In tracing the rebirth of social scientific interest in law and the legal system, one speaks not of theories but of studies; for example, Schwartz's (1954) research into the legal orders of two Israeli communities, Ball's (1960) study of rent control violations in Honolulu, and Macaulay's (1963) inquiry into non-contractual relationships among businesses.

The growth of research in psychology and law during the last decade is easy to document. The Annual Review of Psychology has included two chapters on the subject, the first in 1976 and the second in 1982. In 1981 the American Psychological Association approved a new Division of Psychology and Law and selected that theme for the 1982 Master Lecture series at its convention. New journals (e.g., Law and Human Behavior) and collections of articles (e.g., Sales, 1981; Kerr and Bray, 1982; Konečni and Ebbeson, 1982) have reported on the burgeoning literature.

This paper examines the last 12 years of research on trial courts. It focuses on three shortcomings of that research. The first is a failure to examine distributional questions about what kinds of benefits and sanctions are apportioned to which members of American society as well as the place of adjudication in the course of dispute processing. The second shortcoming is a failure to integrate the various theoretical perspectives which have won widespread acceptance. The third is an undue concentration on comparative designs to the neglect of longitudinal analyses within single jurisdictions.

The most comprehensive efforts to develop a new evolutionary approach to law are found in the work of Nonet and Selznick in the United States and Habermas and Luhmann in Germany. While these theorists are concerned with a common problem—the crisis of formal rationality of law—they differ drastically in their accounts of the problem and their vision of the future. This paper tries to resolve these differences by first decomposing and then restructuring the diverse neo-evolutionary models. Using a more comprehensive model of socio-legal covariation, the author identifies an emerging kind of legal structure which he calls “reflexive law.” Reflexive law is characterized by a new kind of legal self-restraint. Instead of taking over regulatory responsibility for the outcome of social processes, reflexive law restricts itself to the installation, correction, and redefinition of democratic self-regulatory mechanisms. The author identifies areas of private law in which reflexive solutions are arguably emerging, and he spells out the consequences which a concern for reflexivity has for a renewed sociological jurisprudence.

Building on our earlier work testing the stability of punishment hypothesis, we here combine the general modeling strategy previously employed with more behaviorally grounded models of actors' expectations and preferences. Using these tools, we model the historical attempts by criminal justice actors in California to balance prison admissions and releases in an equilibrating manner. We find that there have been efforts to regulate the flow of individuals through prison and that, contrary to expectations, these processes are not very different for males and females.

Michigan's Felony Firearm Statute (Gun Law) imposed a two-year mandatory add-on sentence for defendants convicted of possession of a firearm in the commission of a felony. The Law was widely advertised with proponents claiming that it would introduce greater equity in sentences, ensure certainty of punishment, and decrease violent crime in the state. We examine the processing of these Gun Law cases in Detroit Recorders Court, as well as the effects of the law on crime, and find that most of the goals of the Law's proponents are not met. Notwithstanding a rigid prosecutorial policy which prohibited plea bargaining in these gun cases, alternative mechanisms developed to mitigate the Law's effects and, in most instances, to preserve the “going rate” for various crime categories. Similarly, using an interrupted time-series model, we are unable to uncover effects of the law, or the associated publicity campaign, on violent crime.

Most research on social control decision-making takes the individual case as the sole unit for the analysis of decision outcomes. Yet under a variety of organizational circumstances, social control agents process and respond to cases in relation to, or as part of, some larger, organizationally determined whole. This paper identifies three such larger units of cases found in social control decision-making—case sets, caseloads, and collections of cases grouped by the demands of establishing precedent and consistency—and suggests conditions which increase and decrease the effects of such holistic units on decisions made in particular cases.

In this study the instrumental and symbolic perspectives on public support for the death penalty were directly compared within the context of a single survey of citizen attitudes. The results suggest that both instrumental and symbolic concerns influenced death penalty support. When the relative influence of the two factors was directly assessed, the symbolic perspective was found to exercise the major influence upon support for capital punishment, while the influence of instrumental crime-related concerns was small. These results suggest that death penalty support is one aspect of general political-social ideology, rather than a response to crime-related concerns or experiences.

Cuban popular courts have been a subject of widespread interest among Western scholars. This paper analyzes the factors which led to the development of this judicial experiment as well as the reasons for its demise. The success or failure of this experiment was closely tied to long-term economic and political goals of the Cuban government, which eventually came to require an institutionalized bureaucratic cadre to operate its judicial system. This shift doomed the popular courts and led to the emergence of the legal profession as one of the most influential groups within Cuban society.

Data covering a ten-year period in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, are used to estimate the effect of race and other variables on sentences given to persons charged with armed robbery and burglary. Longitudinal data, coupled with interviews of participants, are used to overcome problems of sample selection bias usually associated with cross-sectional studies of the determinants of sentencing. The research shows that race had a clear effect on both the decision to imprison and the length of prison terms in the earliest period (1967-1968) but not in the two later periods (1971-1972 and 1976-1977). The racial neutrality of sentencing in the later periods appears to be the result of changes in the composition of the judiciary, a greater bureaucratization of the prosecutorial and defense bar, and the rise of decision rules that reduce the effect of judicial ideology on outcomes.

Perceptual deterrence researchers have used simple cross-sectional correlations between prior behavior and current perceptions to study the effect of legal threats on social control. Such designs are inadequate because they: (1) confuse the causal ordering of perceptions and behavior, and (2) fail to take into account other inhibitory factors in an explicit causal model. In an analysis of panel data, the methodological simplicity of earlier studies is shown to have led researchers to reach erroneous conclusions. Our data suggest that past studies report an experiential effect, not a deterrent effect, and that the effect of perceived sanctions on criminal involvement is minimal once social definitional factors (moral commitment, informal sanctions) are controlled.

In 1980, Phoenix, Arizona, experienced a “crime wave.” A structural equation model based on a two-wave survey of the population shows that the crime wave had a powerful impact that was almost a mirror image of what the fear of crime literature would predict. Demographic groups thought to be most fearful (e.g., women and the elderly) were least affected while groups thought to be least fearful (e.g., well-educated whites) were affected most. In addition to demographic factors, our analysis demonstrates that crime rate perceptions and confidence in the police are integral components of fear, especially in the context of a crime wave. These findings have important implications for crime policy specifically and for criminological research generally.

Since most crimes investigated by police result from notification by victims, crime victims can be viewed as the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system. This paper describes the results of a series of studies which employed multiple methodologies to investigate the decisions of property crime victims to notify the police. The four methods used in this research included (a) an archival analysis of police records, (b) interviews with crime victims, (c) simulation studies using college students, and (d) experiments in a field laboratory. Two convergent findings emerged from the data. Social influence was found to be an important determinant of both the decision to call the police and the delay in such notification. If others advised the victim to call the police, the crime was more likely to be reported, but, ironically, the greater the number of people consulted, the longer the delay in reporting the crime. The second convergent finding was that situational factors played a stronger role in affecting delay in notification than did characteristics of the victim. Situational factors included the type of crime and the time of day when it was discovered, as well as the number of others talked to and the type of advice received from them. Several divergent findings across methods raised questions about the relative adequacy of each method for the problems being investigated, and helped identify sources of similarities and differences in the conceptual and operational definitions employed.