The articles in this issue of the Review offer some unusual insights about the costs, obstacles, and opportunities encountered in sociolegal research. Sociolegal scholarship recognizes and regularly attempts to remove the blinders from doctrinal legal analysis, but it often neglects the blinders that arise from the familiar analytic approaches of its own traditions. Traditional doctrinal legal analysis is criticized for relying on untested assumptions about human behavior, equating law on the books with law in action, and attending only to the public face of law. But there are also limitations in the methodological approaches used in standard empirical analysis, and they too can profoundly distort our images of sociolegal phenomena. The articles in this issue show how careful and skeptical analysis of imperfect data can reduce these distortions and increase our knowledge about legal phenomena.

Does referring a case to juvenile court or diverting it affect a person's future delinquent/criminal behavior? Labeling theory suggests that it does, arguing that formal processing by the juvenile justice system is part of a deviance amplification process that ultimately results in increased criminal/delinquent activity. But critics point out that a higher rate of future offending among those referred to court, often interpreted as evidence supporting the deviance amplification argument, could be nothing more than a selection artifact. Specifically, those referred to juvenile court may have more attributes that are related to future offending than do those who are diverted from the system. Under this scenario, differences between these groups in later offending could simply reflect preexisting differences in criminal propensity. This article discusses approaches for testing the deviance amplification argument against the alternative hypothesis of a selection artifact.

Researchers often rely on published opinions to draw conclusions about cases decided by the courts, determinants of court decisions, and broader social phenomena. We demonstrate that 80 to 90 percent of employment discrimination cases filed in federal court do not produce a published opinion. There are good theoretical reasons to believe that the process generating a published opinion is not random and thus that samples of published cases will not be representative of all cases. Through a direct comparison of published and unpublished cases, we show that the two actually do differ in significant and predictable ways. Examining several studies that use cases with published opinions for a variety of purposes, we show how our understanding of the operation of employment discrimination law changes—in some instances, dramatically—when we look at all cases, whether or not they have published opinions.

Much of the judicial process literature assumes that appellate courts routinely publish all decisions they make. In fact, even with the proliferation of case law in the United States, since the 1970s many appeals court decisions have not been published. In England, however, selective publication of appellate decisions has always been an integral part of how courts interact with the broader legal and political system. This article explores some theoretical implications of selective reporting of appellate decisions within common law systems that rely on the published appellate ruling as a primary mechanism of communication between courts and the broader legal and political environments. The focus is on how appellate decisions are selected for publication, especially in the English Court of Appeal. The author proposes an empirical model that conceptualizes reporting as a communications process. He hypothesizes that the basis of selection can be viewed in the context of a cue theory that dichotomizes the communication of passive and dynamic cues between senders in the Court of Appeal and receivers within the community of law reporters.

Those who champion the representation of blacks on the bench argue that black judges may make a difference. Indeed, some suggest that increasing the proportion of black judges might result in more equitable treatment of black and white defendants. In this study we test these expectations. Using data on defendants charged with violent felonies, we compare the sentencing decisions of black and white judges in Detroit. We find remarkable similarities and conclude that judicial race has relatively little predictive power. More important, we find that both black and white judge sentence black offenders more severely than white offenders. Our results raise questions about the appropriate interpretation of racial disparity in incarceration rates and suggest that the harsher treatment of black offenders cannot be attributed to the racism of white judges.

“Legal secrets” are secrets that the law of torts or contracts either require to be—or protect from being—divulged. The secrets themselves are without limit: a professor's past as a former priest, things learned while in a previous job, that a house has running water only twelve hours each day, that land was worth more than its owner realized, that a patient told his psychotherapist that he planned to kill his girlfriend, that the Treaty of Ghent was signed ending the War of 1812, and on and on. The legal flags under which these battles for the control of secret information are fought reduce to the law of fraud, privacy, trade secrets, and implied warranties. And the underlying economic or other principles that are proposed to explain the decisions in these areas of law are even fewer.