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.

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.

This study is a reexamination of the effect of situational characteristics on police arrests in domestic disturbances. Using observational data, we replicate recent research based upon official police reports. We also consider the implications of variables not available in the earlier study, especially the role orientation of the intervening officer. The results support the previous finding that the arrest decision turns on situational cues, but it suggests that the salience of such factors differs for officers whose role orientations differ.

Research on the implementation of criminal justice reforms, such as sentence guidelines, determinate sentence laws, and no plea bargaining policies, has proliferated in recent years. This research raises a variety of concerns about how one should evaluate the effectiveness of policy innovations. We deal here with recurring issues in the evaluation of criminal justice innovations, including the problem of specifying goals against which to measure “effectiveness,” the need to interpret research findings in light of theories about how criminal courts operate, and the importance of choosing appropriate time periods in which to conduct implementation or evaluation studies.