Legal reform sometimes has unanticipated, even ironic, results. A good example is federal legislation adopted in the 1980s that was supposed to enhance equity in sentencing. Congress, like many state legislatures in this period, reduced judicial control over sentencing by adopting presumptive sentencing guidelines for all serious criminal offenses and mandatory sentences for some specific crimes. Reformers did succeed in reducing judicial discretion in the sentencing process, but racial disparities have gotten much worse. Unprecedented numbers of minorities, particularly black men, are going to jail for long terms. The situation leaves trial judges in a difficult position. They are legally bound to implement a sentencing regime that many of them believe is racially discriminatory. Herbert Jacob's work on criminal trial courts provides a framework for investigating this problem. As Jacob's organizational approach predicts, judges were initially more troubled by the diminution of their powers than by the emerging pattern of increased minority incarceration. Nevertheless, some judges have criticized the racial implications of the sentencing law, protesting in various, resourceful ways. Judicial resistance to a law on moral grounds, though rare, is significant because it represents a break in the ranks of officialdom that enhances the moral credibility of critics of the current law.

The purpose of this paper is to make a case for a new political criminology—that is, to argue that a meaningful and coherent intellectual enterprise is developing across disciplinary lines. This new political criminology is distinctive in three ways:

• It is criminology in that it is rooted in conceptions of, and concerns about, the ramifications of street crime.

• It is political in that its focus is on the way crime control strategies both reflect and influence the distribution of power within the polity.

• It is new in that it is influenced by postmodern understandings of, and disillusionment with, the liberal state.

What role do litigation and trial court decisions play in shaping policy? This article explores that question by examining recent litigation against tobacco manufacturers filed by state attorneys general, plaintiff lawyers in class actions, lawyers for cities, unions, health plans, individual smokers, and others. I suggest how this litigation contributed to agenda setting, new ways of defining the problem of tobacco and the policy alternatives, political mobilization, new legal norms, and new political and legal resources for opponents of tobacco. Addressing theoretical debates about the power of the courts to effect change, I distinguish between causal and constitutive arguments and suggest how both can be incorporated in social analysis.

Institutional change in America's trial courts is poorly understood. Herbert Jacob in his 1982 presidential address to the Law and Society Association recommended that future research might consider intensive studies of single courts over time to trace the causal links between the courts and sociopolitical events outside the courtrooms. This essay explores Jacob's recommendation but ultimately takes a different tack. Instead of conducting natural histories of particular trial courts, this essay speculates that trial courts can be viewed as contested terrains made up of various sites. Proponents of particular ideas, interests, and institutions struggle to impose their policy preferences on these sites. These disputes, which wax and wane over time, constitute the regime politics that shape the probabilities of who wins in America's trial courts. The outlines of this perspective are sketched using the political science literature on agenda politics and on how policy ideas become institutionalized. Illustrations of this perspective are drawn from studies of civil and criminal court reforms.