During World War II, young African Americans from southern cities left their homes for what appeared to be patriotic job opportunities harvesting sugar cane in Florida. When returning workers described peonage and slavery instead, parents worried about their children's safety. After attempting to contact their children directly, the parents appealed to the federal government. Their decision to mobilize the federal government and the strategies they used to do so reveal important aspects of wartime African American protest that historians have previously overlooked. This article focuses on families instead of atomized individuals, revealing the importance of families, neighborhoods, and communities to the emergence of rights consciousness. It also complicates the historiographical dichotomy between rights consciousness and patronage relationships. Patrons served as liaisons with law enforcement agencies and provided links to a law-centered rights consciousness. For many historians, until protest exits the realm of patronage ties, it is not really protest, and once interactions with government themselves become bureaucratized they cease to be protest any longer. The efforts of the peons' families challenge both ends of this narrow category of protest; they both used patronage relations to lodge their protests and also forged rights consciousness within the legal process itself.

This article examines a long-forgotten controversy about lawyers' duties to evaluate the justice of their clients' causes in civil cases that took place among the members of the Committee of the American Bar Association (ABA) that drafted the 1908 Canons of Professional Responsibility. The article presents an analysis of newly discovered internal working documents of this important, but never before examined, ABA committee, supplemented with primary historical research into the views and backgrounds of the committee's members. The article demonstrates how a clash of perspectives among these men—traceable in part to their backgrounds but also to their unpredictable allegiances to conflicting trends in legal thought at the turn of the century—prevented the committee from reaching a satisfactory resolution on the duty's to-do-justice issue. The committee members instead adopted ineffectual compromise language in the Canons, leaving us with a legacy of concealed ambivalence on the question of lawyers' “duty to do justice” in civil cases.

In addition to providing an arena for dispute resolution, the courtroom serves lawyers and judges as an important site for the construction and maintenance of their Professional identity. It is mainly through the strategic use of language within the constraints on courtroom discourse that this process takes place. Within the framework of feminist theories of language as constituent of social identity, this paper analyzes courtroom interaction to determine how gender affects the construction of the Professional identity of lawyers and judges in Israeli district courts. Quantitative analyses of terms of address, intrusions, judges’ takeover of examinations, challenging comments, and the forms and use of directives indicated that women judges and women lawyers were accorded less deference than men, and that the Professional competence of women lawyers was challenged and undermined. The qualitative analysis of the off-the-record comments by judges, lawyers, and witnesses to lawyers revealed that all participants questioned the professional performance of women lawyers in gender-stereotypic ways. The devaluation of women professionals and the gendered interpretations of their behavior enacted through the discourse in the courtroom may have implications for the outcomes of trials.

This article reexamines the well-known debate over the origins of de jure segregation in the American South, which began in 1955 with the publication of C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Arguing that the debate over Woodward's thesis implicates familar but outmoded ways of looking at sociolegal change and Southern society, the article proposes a reorientation of this debate using theoretical perspectives taken from recent work by legal historians, critical race theorists, and historians of race, class, and gender. This article examines the advent of railroad segregation in Tennessee (the state that enacted the nation's first railroad segregation statute) in order to sketch out these themes, arguing that de jure segregation was brought about by a dialectic between legal, social, and identity-based phenomena. This dialectic did not die out with the coming of de jure segregation; rather it continued into the modern era.

If we use the word land to refer to the physical substance, and reserve the word property for the intellectual apparatus that organizes rights to use land, we can say that in colonial New Zealand, the British and the Maori overlaid two dissimilar systems of property on the same land. That difference in legal thought structured each side's perception of what the other was doing, in ways that illustrate unusually clearly the power of law to organize our awareness of phenomena before they reach the level of consciousness. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as the balance of power gradually swung to the side of the British, they were largely able to impose their property system on the Maori. The centrality of property within the thought of both peoples, however, meant that the transformation of Maori into English property rights involved much more than land. Religious belief, engagement with the market economy, political organization—all were bound up in the systems by which both peoples organized property rights in land. To anglicize the Maori property system was to revolutionize Maori life.

This paper examines the phenomenon of conflict escalation in business relations. A theory of when conflict between firms will proceed from informal relationship-preserving norms to more formal and destructive end games involving litigation is developed and tested. The central theoretical claim is that substitution costs serve as an impediment against the escalation of conflict. Data on market concentration and dollar flows between aggregate markets in the economy are used to develop measures of substitution costs. Measures of substitution costs and trade figures are also used to describe power advantages in markets. The theory is tested through a series of regression models. The main findings are that (1) when substitution costs are high, parties are less likely to escalate conflict and (2) asymmetric market relations result in less conflict escalation than symmetric ones. Empirical analysis indicates that substitution costs are related in predictable and meaningful ways to conflict escalation and business litigation.

This paper concerns the relationship between power and the ability to defend the night of privacy. The discourse of public and private spheres has shifted historically, engendering arbitrary and changing legal and cultural definitions of the boundary between public and private. Historic specifications of this boundary have become untenable as increasing numbers of women entered the paid labor force. Recent formulations define the boundary of privacy as an area within each individual's life. However, greater social power increases the ability to protect personal privacy because it offers the ability to define and protect the “private” from scrutiny.

After outlining the history of the shifting public/private boundary, this argument is applied to sexual harassment. Explicitly sexual types of harassment are related to the public/private boundary in two ways. First, they challenge the boundary itself, representing the occurrence of “private” conduct in the “public” sphere of work and education. Second, sexual harassment reveals the importance of social power in defining and defending one's privacy. Sexual harassment represents the extreme on a continuum of communication patterns between status unequals, and an invasion of the sexual privacy of the target.

“Telling the Difference” focuses on two legal opinions from the nineteenth century that carefully distinguish between those who should be racially marked as nonwhite and those who should not. In the first instance, a Michigan judge decides the appropriate “blood fraction” of African-American heritage that would prohibit a free man from voting. In the second, a New Mexico judge rules that the Native Americans of Cochiti Pueblo are not legally “Indians,” and therefore not entitled to federal protection of their land. The article uses these examples to advance two central claims: that we must pay close attention to the narrative logic of racial identification in order to understand the powerful contradictions still at the heart of our conversations about race, and that in doing so we should consider that race has always been multiply constructed in the United States.

This article builds on recent field research to articulate a principle-based approach to environmental regulatory design that is applicable to a wide variety of circumstances, irrespective of political and social particularities. At its core, this approach recognizes that an excessive reliance on “single-instrument” policies is misguided, because all instruments have strengths and weaknesses, and none is sufficiently flexible and resilient to successfully address all environmental problems in all contexts. A better strategy is to harness the strengths of individual mechanisms while compensating for their weaknesses by the use of additional instruments. That is, in the large majority of circumstances, a mix of regulatory instruments is required, tailored to specific policy goals. The article identifies a series of regulatory design principles that sequentially address the problems and opportunities arising from the application of multi-instrument mixes and engaging a variety of first-, second-, and third-party participants in the regulatory process. The importance of choosing inherently complementary instrument combinations is also highlighted, with practical guidance provided to policymakers. Although the focus of the article is on environmental regulation, the general principles articulated should also be applicable to other areas of social regulation.

This paper examines the extent to which Pennsylvania county courts are prepared to implement the judicial bypass provision of the state's abortion statute. Under the Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act it is illegal for physicians to perform abortions on pregnant minors without parental consent. The constitutionality of this requirement has been upheld, but only when states provide a mechanism allowing a minor to bypass parental involvement. The Pennsylvania statute includes a judicial bypass provision that is formally consistent with legal precedent. However, based on a study of how county courts respond to inquiries into the judicial bypass procedure, this paper demonstrates that most courthouses are not prepared to implement or provide accurate information on bypass proceedings. Since the constitutionality of parental involvement requirements is conditioned on the availability of a bypass option, the paper argues that the courts' lack of readiness poses a significant threat to the rights of pregnant minors.

Edna Bonacich's (1972) theoretical formulation of Split labor market dynamics as underlying the content and process of ethnic antagonism is expanded and applied to an historical analysis of the development of antidrug laws in the United States. The campaigns and resultant legislation against opium, cocaine, alcohol, and marijuana are subjected to a split labor market analysis that incorporates the notion of moral panics and an understanding of the ways in which law may be used as a “weapon” in the furtherance of class interests. The article concludes that each of these campaigns came about as the result of an underlying split labor market dynamic and adds to Bonacich's original formulation the response of criminalization of the threatening labor group by the higher-paid labor group.

We examine police decision making by focusing on police stories and drawing together contemporary thought about identities and police subculture. Our inquiry suggests that police decision making is both improvisational and patterned. Cops are moral agents who tag people with identities as they project identities of their own. They do engage in raw forms of division or stereotyping, marking some as others to be feared and themselves as protectors of society, while exercising their coercive powers to punish “the bad.” Due, in part, to the many ways that they identify themselves, cops also connect with people as unique individuals, including individuals whose categorical identities (e.g., drug dealers) put them at the margins of society. Rather than using their coercive powers to repress these individuals, cops infuse them with certain virtues (e.g., good family men) while cutting them breaks. As they complicate representations of themselves, cops also project complex notions of law and legality. Moral discourse seems to infuse their judgments, while they invoke law strategically as a tool to enforce their moral judgments.

This work examines how a particular response of Stalin's victims had the effect of transforming them from mere pawns to participant agents in the system of repression. The disenfranchised (in Russian lishentsy, or literally, the deprived) were identified as anti-Soviet elements shortly after the revolution, and in the Stalin years of 1929–31 were stripped of all political and economic rights. Some wrote petitions to Soviet authorities and appealed for the reinstatement of rights. The newly opened Soviet archives contain hundreds of thousands of petitions from the disenfranchised, and they are the only widely accessible Soviet source that reveals the voice of Stalin's victims at the time of their persecution as they directly engaged state agents, formulated appeals, created personal identities, and offered testimonies of defense. The denunciations that appear in these petitions reveal how victims can be-come victimizers, and demonstrate that the damaging social identity of the enemy exploiter was ascribed and propagated not only by the regime and those who occupied society's favored roles. Damaging accusations against others were also made in the process of victim talk, as the disenfranchised invoked the official image of an enemy in order to enhance their own self-image as an innocent.

In thinking about justice in a pluralistic world, there are a number of potential theoretical resources. Derrida's thoughts on justice provide some tools with which to support social movements while avoiding the political and theoretical problems of identity politics, I argue; but the antihistorical frame-work of the philosophical ethics used and refined by Derrida is unhelpful to anyone working in social movements. By contrast, Foucault's later work on the ethics of freedom offers tools useful for thinking about embodiment, desire, and the historical specificity of ethical life. And yet, by remaining focused almost solely on liberté–backgrounding égalité, fraternité, and solidarité–Foucault's ethical reflections also remain open to supplementation. Thus, both thinkers'reflections on justice, freedom, and history have elements that are potentially very useful to those social movements that are unhappy with essentialist identities; but along the way we will have to invent our own additional, site-specific tools, in particular insofar as we are interested in building networks of solidarity.