Common law doctrines may have as significant an impact on everyday life as those of the U.S. Supreme Court. This paper focuses on the abrogation of the doctrine of charitable immunity, which has occurred in 32 states since World War II. We investigate the impact of this change on average hospital room rate charges in each state. Both static and dynamic analyses are conducted. In both we control for economic and inflationary variables by using state per capita income data. Static analysis involves year-by-year comparison of room rate charges in abrogating states with those in states which retain the doctrine. The results are inconclusive. In dynamic analysis we identify those states which abrogated the doctrine and note changes in their average room rates at periods two, four, and six years subsequent to the abrogations. We also identify states which underwent no change in doctrine over the same periods. The amounts of room rate change in the two categories of states are then compared. We had expected the amount to be greater in abrogating states, and in fact this is almost universally the case. This strongly suggests that abrogation of charitable immunity has produced a demonstrable increase in hospital room rate charges.

This study addresses the issue of rule departures and law-making activity by juries adjudicating guilt in felony cases. Analysis of data from a sample of jury trials suggests considerable conformity to rules. That is, jury verdicts are influenced by evidence of the defendant's guilt and credibility as a witness. Rule departures appear to be limited. They reflect a concern not only with the defendant per se, but also with his choice of a victim and with the seriousness of the prosecution charge against him. The findings suggest that, as actually performed, the jury role is neither clerklike nor discretionary. Rather, it conforms more closely to Kadish and Kadish's (1973) notion of a recourse role, where rule departures occur only under certain circumstances.

This article uses Friedman and Percival's (1976) longitudinal survey of the caseloads of two California courts as a vehicle for addressing two conceptual issues that must be resolved in studies of the dispute settlement function of courts. First, one must decide whether the focus of inquiry is on the way courts function (i.e., act) or on the function that courts fill for some larger community. The methodological implications of this decision are discussed. Second, one must decide what counts as judicial contributions to dispute settlement. Seven possible contributions are identified. This article then reanalyzes Friedman and Percival's data on the Alameda and San Benito County courts, controlling for adult population. Reanalysis indicates that these data do not support the conclusion that the courts Friedman and Percival studied became functionally less important to community dispute settlement with increasing socio-economic development. This portion of the article suggests possible causes of some of the patterns observed, and discusses some of the problems that arise in working with longitudinal data culled from court dockets.

As late as the eighteenth century, ordinary jury trial at common law was a judge-dominated, lawyer-free procedure conducted so rapidly that plea bargaining was unnecessary. Thereafter, the rise of adversary procedure and the law of evidence injected vast complexity into jury trial and made it unworkable as a routine dispositive procedure. A variety of factors, some quite fortuitous, inclined nineteenthcentury common law procedure to channel the mounting caseload into nontrial plea bargaining procedure rather than to refine its trial procedure as contemporary Continental legal systems were doing.

This article summarizes a decade of comment on the most common form of “media ombudsman” in the United States and Canada, the newspaper action line. Widely adopted after 1965, action lines were expected by journalists and newspaper owners to play a significant role in increasing social justice, improving the commercial viability and public image of the press, and reforming the news business. The picture of social problems and proposed solutions presented in the printed columns reflects a reformed version of traditional newspaper populism. However, the available evidence suggests that the characteristics of the people who complain to action lines, as well as the economic, bureaucratic, and ideological forces within media organizations, prevent the fulfillment of the promise of social justice implicit in populist rhetoric. Instead of aggressive defenders of the rights of “John Q. Public,” action lines are primarily passive referral services which transmit complaints to traditional public and private authorities. Action lines attract a great many users not only because they promise practical assistance in settling disputes, but also because a response from the newspaper is a significant form of personal recognition and a confirmation that one's problem is legitimate. However, the unsystematic way newspapers process disputes assures that the column is unlikely to have much effect on the institutional sources of chronic grievances. The article concludes with a comparison of action lines to the use of the media by “moral entrepreneurs” to increase the impact of reform movements.

Plea bargaining apparently arose independently in a number of urban criminal courts in the nineteenth century. These simultaneous developments were presumably related to a number of broad structural changes that characterized American criminal justice at the time. Chief among them were the creation of urban police departments for the arrest of criminals and the development of a prison system for punishment or rehabilitation. Other developments included the reduced role of the victim, the relative independence of criminal justice from legal norms, and the corruption and political manipulation of the criminal justice system. The paper explores ways that such developments may have provided the context for the institutionalization of plea bargaining as a method of case disposition.

The convergence of the forces of national competition among ideologically diverse political parties with the development of a squatter settlement movement brought the issue of neighborhood courts to national attention. In the face of Congressional stalemate over a national decentralization, two local experiments emerged, one employing professional judges holding regular informal hearings beyond their normal judicial duties for poor urban residents, the other involving left-organized squatter settlements' establishment of their own “extra-official” court systems using locally elected lay judges. The organizational and political contexts of the two, and their implicit ideological distinctions, led to somewhat different caseloads and distinct dispute processing styles. The professional court tended to routinize disputes, arbitrate, and rely on state police power; the lay court tended to mediate, focus upon sociological and political causes of disputes, and use formal and informal enforcement power. Each encountered severe constraints inhibiting development and institutionalization. These stemmed from lack of organizational resources and clear-cut goals, and the priorities of the organizational contexts in which they attempted to function. These priorities were, in turn, reflected in the class-based conflict encompassing Chilean politics during the Allende period.

This study uses the recently published correspondence of Thurman W. Arnold to examine his work in legal realism, symbols, power, and antitrust. It focuses on how Arnold, seeing symbols as functional, not merely insubstantial, was quite comfortable in pursuing a successful career within the system and using symbols to affect behavior, as in his antitrust work.

In this paper, some recent findings about the nature of plea negotiation in the Birmingham Crown Court in England are discussed. These findings, to which the legal profession in England reacted with hostility, raise doubts about traditionally accepted assumptions concerning the role of plea bargaining in English criminal justice.

Many routine criminal cases in central Europe are concluded by an abbreviated process known as the penal order. The penal order is a written proposal by the state to a defendant stipulating the crime committed and the penalty to be levied if the defendant does not object. This paper describes the West German version of the penal order and argues that it avoids some of the negative practices allegedly inherent in American plea bargaining.

The reasons for the termination of plea negotiation in El Paso County, Texas, are explained. The statistical consequences of doing so are discussed.

A field experiment in Dade County, Florida, evaluated the use of a pretrial settlement conference as a means of restructuring plea negotiations. All negotiations took place in front of a judge and victim, defendant, and arresting police officer were invited to attend. The conferences were brief but generally reached at least an outline of a settlement. They usually included at least one lay party although lay attendance rates were quite low. The change in the structure reduced the time involved in processing cases by lowering the information and decisionmaking costs to the judges and attorneys. No significant changes were observed in the settlement rate or in the imposition of criminal sanctions. There was some evidence that police and victims who attended the sessions obtained more information and developed more positive attitudes about the way their cases were handled.