Writing in 1950, Hurst (1950: 183) noted that there was far more opinion on the function of courts than actual knowledge of their work. Thirty years later his assessment was only slightly more encouraging, but he noted at least some positive developments. Among them was “a substantial increase in ordered collection and assessment of facts about the flow of court business” (1980–81: 407), some of which tried to cover broad areas of the country and reached back into the nineteenth century. Much of this came from a number of longitudinal studies of court business the findings of which began appearing in publications in the mid-1970s. These were ambitious, pioneering, and often theoretically challenging studies that have spawned a thriving subfield in both the United States and Europe. One of these works is a sixteen-state study of supreme courts covering the years 1870 to 1970, conducted by Robert A. Kagan, Bliss Cartwright, Lawrence M. Friedman, and Stanton Wheeler. My purpose here is to provide an overview of the seven articles reporting on this study that appeared between 1975 and 1987, and to provide a critical review of the four central articles in the series.

Few would disagree that ideology is a loaded term. Some who see the title of this special issue may toss it aside as a waste. Others may reach gladly for it, thinking “At last the Review has seen the light.” I don't think either reaction will prove justified based on my reading of the papers here. What you will find in these pages is a careful attempt to identify and demonstrate both the potential in and confusion surrounding this gadfly of a word.

The longer I serve as editor, the more frustrated I feel at turning down good or promising manuscripts. Whether there has been a change in my own standards or a change in submissions, my overall impression is that I have had to turn away an increasing number of high quality papers. I have dealt with this by reducing the type size in volume 22 and exceeding the page limits by a bit. The result in this issue should be obvious just by the feel of it—it is longer.

Stephen Daniels' essay examines the series of studies of state supreme courts by Bliss Cartwright, Lawrence M. Friedman, Robert A. Kagan, and Stanton Wheeler, studies that report the results of what I will call the State Supreme Court Project. In this comment, I will not focus on the critique that Daniels makes of these studies; rather, I will consider a broader set of issues that his essay and the articles that he discusses raised for me.

The intellectual odyssey of the concept of legal pluralism moves from the discovery of indigenous forms of law among remote African villagers and New Guinea tribesmen to debates concerning the pluralistic qualities of law under advanced capitalism. In the last decade, the concept of legal pluralism has been applied to the study of social and legal ordering in urban industrial societies, primarily the United States, Britain, and France. Indeed, given a sufficiently broad definition of the term legal system, virtually every society is legally plural, whether or not it has a colonial past. Legal pluralism is a central theme in the reconceptualization of the law/society relation.

Can professional groups, such as lawyers, be incorporated within class analyses? Results from a Toronto survey indicate that lawyers can be usefully located within class categories operationalized in terms of power relations. The class structure of legal practice in Toronto is dominated by older, Anglo-Saxon Protestant males with degrees from Canada's elite law schools, who are practicing corporate and commercial law for predominantly corporate clients. Notwithstanding evidence of recently and substantially improved mobility prospects, we found an absence of Jewish lawyers from the capitalist class and a tendency for women to remain in a legal working class. We also discovered the emergence of a new working class in the legal profession that, perhaps unexpectedly, includes young associates in the corporate and commercial departments of large firms. The exploitation of this “professional proletariat” is as clear as are their relatively high salaries and promising prospects of sharing in the power relations that facilitate their domination and limited autonomy. We argue with qualitative data that it is the combination of high salaries, good mobility prospects, and a highly competitive environment that allows this group to be exploited with very little chance of rebellion. More generally, this kind of class analysis opens new possibilities in the comparative and historical study of lawyers and other professional groups.

Others have identified client differences as the primary structuring factor in the legal profession. Because of highly differentiated client groups, it is argued, the bar has become fragmented into a multiplicity of professions. Such a conclusion is based on research limited to metropolitan settings. Data from practitioners in rural Missouri and in a middle-sized Missouri city show that community context has a prior structuring influence. Community context appears to affect the probability of entrepreneurial practice, the variations in meaning associated with such practice, client mix and subsequent lawyer self-understanding, work characteristics, and extent of involvement in civic affairs. Further evidence suggests that the legal profession is indeed an “overdetermined social system” with roots that are set deeply in the primary economic and social structures of the setting in which it practices. The bar mirrors in its practice the issues typical of that setting and reflects in its social structure the degree of complexity found in the community. Community context appears therefore to be an additional force fragmenting the legal profession.

Ideology is a difficult term to discipline. That is one of the things members of the Amherst Seminar learned when editing this collection during the last year. Our call for papers was our first concession to the difficulty of disciplining that term. The call for papers suggested ideology might be used to refer to (1) false consciousness associated with and produced by particular structures of domination; (2) systems of belief of a group or class; (3) coherent meanings encoded in social relations and institutions; (4) consciousness linked to material conditions; (5) contested areas of social life as opposed to those that are taken for granted; and (6) the processes by which meanings and ideas are produced. Not surprisingly, the call generated a broad range and a large number of responses.

This paper analyzes the politics of disputing in complaint hearings held by the court clerk in a district criminal court in Massachusetts. By examining struggles over the meaning of local conflicts, it suggests the implications of detailed studies of dispute processing for our understanding of how systems of legal and social meanings are constituted and reproduced. The paper argues that the work of the court, the roles played by court officials, and the meaning of law and of community at particular moments in time are shaped in the interaction of court staff with local citizens. At the same time, it argues that these interactions are constrained by culturally and historically embedded relations of class, ethnicity, and power. Thus the paper suggests how the practice of complaint hearings both reproduces and transforms systemic inequalities and oppositions, and points to the importance of interactive rather than dichotomizing approaches for studying the interconnection and interpenetration of law with society.

Merry's comprehensive review shows us how studies of plural normative orderings during the past twenty-five years have greatly enriched our understanding of the complexity of normative structures, their interdependence and the ways in which these structures are involved in human agency. At the same time her review illustrates how little conceptual progress has been made. We do not have a more acute understanding nor a refined conceptual usage of the terms law, normative order, or pluralism. In a way this is reassuring. It tells us that stimulating new research and methodological approaches can be developed without giving much thought to these conceptual problems. The best historical writings in legal pluralism in colonial societies, such as the Dutch studies on Indonesian societies, did not excessively ponder whether the local normative systems should or should not be called law. The neo-classicists of legal pluralism such as Macaulay (1963) and Moore (1973) explicitly did not present their data as legal pluralism, and when Galanter (1981) tells us about indigenous law in western societies he does not make much fuss about it.

Despite the widespread perception that lawyers exercise considerable influence over national policy making in the United States, their participation in the process has previously received little systematic empirical analysis. Based on a variety of evidence gathered in interviews with more than eight hundred Washington representatives, including data on their work, careers, contacts with government agencies, networks of acquaintance, and relationships with clients, we argue that lawyers are not as prevalent, active, or influential in national policy making as the popular image suggests. Rather, the findings indicate that lawyers occupy a relatively specialized niche in the system of interest representation, one that allows them to command substantial economic rewards and to maintain a measure of independence and autonomy in their work, but that limits their influence in policy formation.

This article examines the theory and empirical methods of recent studies of law and litigation. It argues that the recent interest in longitudinal studies of trial court dockets proceeds from a deeply rooted functionalist theoretical tradition in empirical work on courts. Functionalist theory, through its sophisticated application in the work of James Willard Hurst, is described as the direct or indirect source of theory for longitudinal litigation studies. Though there are many reasons for suspecting that fuctionalist theory is inadequate, it has seldom been rejected through proper empirical testing of its hypotheses. The theory, often poorly conceptualized, is discussed here in detail. Hypotheses derived from a careful reading of Hurst and others are operationalized, employing data from the dockets of three West Virginia trial courts between 1870 and 1925, and a test of the hypotheses is constructed taking advantage of the historical variation in the economic development of three neighboring counties. Conclusions supported by the analysis of these data are largely prophylactic. Research can address the widespread problems of poor conceptualization and data analysis that have limited the value of much longitudinal trial court docket research. If court function is to continue to be the focus, theory, it is argued, must take account of the social organization of relations between litigants outside the courts, as well as the organization of the courts themselves. Data analysis must address the measurement of the power, litigation capacity, and perception of usefulness of litigation held by litigants. Illustrating the value of hypothesis testing as employed here, it is contended, these conclusions about appropriate future directions and methods for longitudinal court docket research are based on properly supported findings.

Two categories of Muslim legal texts are utilized in Yemen. In the methodological literature I examine conceptions of common sense and consensus, and the relation of knowledge and ignorance. In the applied literature, I review egalitarian and hierarchical themes. The hegemonic qualities of such texts derive from their appropriation of ordinary wisdom and from the shifting polyvocality of the texts themselves.

During plea negotiations, attorneys use stories to tell what happened when a defendant was charged with an offense. This paper is concerned with how attorneys tell stories, and includes a consideration of narrative structure and how components of this structure are used in plea negotiations. Components of narrative include: (1) a story entry device; (2) the story itself which may contain a backgrounding segment, action report, and reaction report; and (3) a defense segment in which an attorney denies or explains the defendant's behavior. Systematic employment of these components results in four patterns of negotiations: (1) routine processing, (2) assessing character; (3) disputing facts, and (4) arguing subjectivity. Narrative structure is part of the interaction order of negotiations and is a mechanism through which participants assemble features of a case and aspects of the courtroom setting. Narrators reflexively become part of the stories they tell, which provides a structural motivation for them to perform well during negotiations.