Kadijustiz is a concept well known from the work of Max Weber. Its essential element, the means by which judicial discretion and equitable assessments are actually made, is, however, less clearly documented. Drawing on a detailed study of a qadi's court in contemporary Morocco, the present article shows how cultural assumptions give shape to the judge's modes of reasoning, factual assessments, and choice of remedies. The study suggests that if careful attention is given to the broader cultural precepts within which judicial discretion is located, Kadijustiz, whether represented by an Islamic court official or a Western justice of the peace, will be seen to possess definite regularities.

Data from two 1979 potential juror surveys concerning three criminal cases in Yolo County, California, form the basis for an analysis of opinions indicative of prejudgment in those cases. Strong bivariate relationships are demonstrated between knowledge about a specific case, general attitudes on crime, gender, and education level, on the one hand, and two measures of propensity to prejudge a defendant's guilt, on the other. Further, multivariate discriminant function analysis is used to show that these four independent variables taken together are able to produce significant increases in the ability to make predictions of prejudging opinions on the part of the respondents and that knowledge about a specific case is by far the most important variable in determining such predictions.

Despite increased research into court operations, reliable knowledge about court functions continues to be scant. Case volume has grown, but court dispositions account for a small part of all dispute resolutions. Most matters which reach disposition in court end at some stage of trial court proceedings. Judges also continue to be makers of general public policy. Common law growth has dwindled. But courts contribute much to the content of public policy through their interpretation of statutes and their review of executive and administrative action. Judicial review of the constitutionality of legislation has declined sharply in fields centered on the economy, while expanding in areas of civil liberties.

To date, most disposition studies have been limited to exploring the effects of male defendants' social characteristics on severity of disposition; the few studies that have included female defendants have done so primarily to see if the sex of the offenders differentially affected sentencing. Utilizing the propositions set forth in The Behavior of Law (Black, 1976), this research looks at the role played by a woman's social status in determining the type of criminal court disposition she receives. Conviction data from a sample of 1,034 female defendants are explored to estimate the effects of (1) economic rank (2) prior criminal record, (3) age, and (4) employment status, controlling for the offense of conviction, on severity of criminal court disposition. The analyses indicate that women's various social characteristics are in fact good predictors of the nature and extent of their sentences and, further, that indicators of respectability and stratification/social integration contribute most to explaining these criminal court dispositions. Accordingly, the propositions of Black's theory of law are generally supported by the results of this study.

If the law's traditional road to reform were the only path available, we would still be trying to improve the administration of justice by theorizing and “reasoning” our way to betterment. That is no longer the only way. Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of systematically gathered data to identify problems and devise responses to aid the justice system. This new path takes the investigator into the field rather than into the library, relying on the skills of the social scientist and statistician as well as those of the legal thinker.

Neo-Marxian critiques of Max Weber's theory of rationality have stressed the ideological role of legal formalism. At the analytic level, however, Weber's theory points to sources of potential conflict between legal formalism and economic rationality. This paper critically reconstructs Weber's perspective for analyzing the boundary maintaining categories of legal discourse. A case study of the 1971 federal loan guarantee to Lockheed Aircraft Corporation demonstrates that while both market ideologies and administrative principles partially bounded the debate over the legislation, this debate did not resolve the question of which businesses should potentially receive government support. This substantive issue raised problems of legal particularism that undermined the universal claims of legal rationality and required an expansion of boundary categories beyond legal formalism, yielding a more economically and politically open discourse.

An experiment was conducted to assess the preferences of undergraduates and inmates for two possible modifications of plea bargaining: allowing the defendant to participate and including a state-paid or community-volunteer mediator in the negotiation. Respondents were asked to role-play a defendant who was either innocent or guilty of a murder and confronted with either weak or strong state's evidence. Results indicate that all defendants preferred plea bargaining procedures which included the defendant. Undergraduates preferred procedures which involved a mediator, but inmates were neutral toward this modification. Undergraduates preferred a state-paid mediator, while inmates preferred a community volunteer. Several interactions qualifying these effects are discussed in the paper.

A description and analysis of the Columbus (Ohio) Municipal Court is presented in the context of comparison with Malcolm Feeley's recent study of the New Haven lower court. The findings suggest that the Columbus court is much more severe in the sanctions imposed upon convicted defendants. These differences are attributed, in part, to contrasting local political cultures whose influence upon courts is mediated by police department orientations, police-prosecutor relationships, and methods of judicial assignment.

Civil courts and litigation, long a neglected area of legal scholarship (Hurst, 1981), have begun to receive more attention and due recognition of their important role in the legal system and society. Analyses of what the civil courts do, and fail to do, are taking their place beside the numerous studies of the criminal courts. A critical literature has emerged, with some arguing that our system provides no effective forum for many civil complaints (Nader, 1980) and others expressing concern that the adversarial mode of dispute processing—the hallmark of Anglo-American civil procedure—may be costly and inappropriate for many conflicts (Fuller, 1978; Horowitz, 1977; Simon, 1978). Critics have also pointed to rising litigation rates and court caseloads, generated spectres of a “litigation explosion” or “crisis in the courts,” and worried about excessive litigiousness (Barton, 1975; Manning, 1977; Rosenberg, 1972).

This paper describes the data collection strategy of the Civil Litigation Research Project. It discusses many of the practical problems of choosing and implementing the research design and assesses the results of the data collection effort.

This paper is a replication of the analysis undertaken in 1978 by James Q. Wilson and Barbara Boland. We use time-series data for nine cities for portions of the period 1948-1978 to test the effect of aggressive policing on the robbery rate. Contrary to Wilson and Boland, we do not find moving violations to be a useful indicator of police aggressiveness. We also conclude that using the arrest/offense ratio introduces artifactual negative correlations. When one examines police expenditures, the size of the police force, the arrest rate, and the concentration of the police on robbery arrests, one generally finds positive relationships rather than negative ones. We interpret these results to indicate that a focus on the problem of robbery by the police leads the police both to make more arrests and to record more offenses, thus producing the positive correlations we found.

Anderson and Hayden argue that meaningful policy implications cannot be drawn from research which lacks “structural, sociological, and conceptual verisimilitude.” Pointing to my article, “Impact of Procedural Modifications on Preferences for Plea Bargaining” (pp. 267-291) as an example of research which lacks such verisimilitude, they conclude that I am unjustified in drawing conclusions with policy implications. I disagree with them for four reasons. Anderson and Hayden have: 1) based their arguments on a misunderstanding of Lind and Walker's discussion of the circumstances in which research need replicate reality; 2) misconceived the nature of theory; 3) created an unnecessary and unsupportable distinction between “structural,” “sociological,” and “conceptual” verisimilitude; and 4) misunderstood and misrepresented my article.

The recent “discovery” of family violence, particularly violence between spouses, has elicited attention from social scientists and policy makers. Police intervention in domestic disputes is a primary focus. Critiques of police practice have often centered on police failure to arrest offenders in domestic violence incidents. Yet, the literature to date reveals little effort to examine systematically the discretionary role of police in domestic disputes. With data drawn from 262 official police reports concerning domestic disturbances, the propensity of police to make arrests is examined through a variety of exogenous variables. Police arrests, we find, reflect the immediate circumstances of police-citizen encounters.

This article addresses the role of quantitative evidence and methods in trials. Major arguments against the introduction of explicit computation information are considered and contrasted with findings about the characteristics of the unaided human decision maker. Emphasis is given to behavioral decision theory and the heuristic biases it reveals. Consideration is given to the symbolic versus “truth-finding” functions of trials, mathematical models (especially linear) of decision making, advocacy tactics that follow from what has been learned about how humans process information, the diagnostic value of aggregate probabilities, the notion of particularistic proof, and the evaluation of witness credibility. We conclude that unaided human decision making embodies certain normal and lawful errors, and that the exclusion of mathematical guides to aid a fact finder, while avoiding some problems, exposes the fact-finding process to the heuristic biases of intuitive decision making.