At the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Boaventura de Sousa Santos delivered an invited plenary address in which he challenged sociolegal scholars to consider the current state of our field. Perhaps, he argued, the paradigms that stand behind the conventions of much current scholarship are inadequate for understanding critical aspects of the law-society relationship. He proposed three metaphors to describe paradigmatic crises and possibilities: the frontier, the baroque, and the South. Santos provoked considerable discussion in the corridors of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, but a jam-packed meeting program did not offer an opportunity for any sort of public commentary from those who heard him.

The authors outline a sociology of narrative—an analysis of the role of narrative in various social contexts, including academic sociolegal scholarship. Narratives are social acts that depend for their production and cognition on norms of performance and content that specify when, what, how, and why stories are told. Because narratives are situationally produced and interpreted, they have no necessary political or epistemological valence but depend on the particular context and organization of their production for their political effect. The analysis specifies the variable conditions that produce hegemonic tales—stories that reproduce existing relations of power and inequity—and subversive stories—narratives that challenge the taken-for-granted hegemony by making visible and explicit the connections between particular lives and social organization.

There is a long-standing debate over the role of human and social capital in explaining the gender gap in the earnings of professionals. Expanding on current research on sex differences in the incomes of male and female lawyers, we show how the process of earnings determination varies by sex and organizational sectors differing in sex composition and bureaucratization of decision making. Using data from a random sample of lawyers, we demonstrate that the effects of human and social capital on income vary among males and among females practicing law in private, corporate and government organizational sectors of the legal profession. We also show that there are sex differences in the effects of human and social capital on income within these sectors. Together, these findings suggest that stratification processes in the legal profession are based on both sex and organizational segmentation.

Current research in sociolegal studies focusing on resistance provides one way to continue the progressive politics of studying social transformation through law. In response to earlier concerns that the turn to postmodernism and the focus on individual acts of resistance has deflected scholarly work from attention to progressive politics, this article advocates broadening the question to examine a range of forms of resistance and their impact on cultural meanings as well as political mobilization. Through the examination of three examples of resistance that take place within and by means of legal institutions, the article endeavors to expand the frame of analysis to include the myriad processes by which the cultural world is made and remade.

We are entering a period of paradigmatic transition. From the paradigm of modernity we have come to a new paradigm which by now can only be defined inadequately. The inevitability of such inadequacy lends to the name of postmodernity its grain of truth. Periods of paradigmatic transition are periods of fierce competition among rival epistemologies and knowledges. They are, therefore, periods of radical thinking—both deconstructive and reconstructive thinking. When viewed from the old outgoing paradigm, they are periods of unthinking or of utopia. When viewed from the new, incoming paradigm, they are periods of temporary and fragile scaffoldings, emergent ruins sustaining nothing but themselves, witnessing nothing but the future. In periods of paradigmatic transition, all competing knowledges reveal themselves as rhetorical in nature, bundles of arguments and of premises of argumentation which circulate inside rhetorical audiences. Indeed, what distinguishes the audiences are the specific arguments and premises of argumentation that they consider valid and convincing or persuasive. In the specific paradigmatic transition we are now entering, any given discipline, be it sociology of law or archeology, tends to be constituted by a larger or smaller number of rival rhetorical audiences. The level of real communication among them is very low and whatever they do in common—books, journals, and conferences—has much more to do with the dominant institutional production of knowledge than with the knowledge produced. In the early stages of the paradigmatic transition, such as the one we are in now, the most fundamental cleavage is between the audiences that deny the very existence of the paradigmatic transition—these we may call the subparadigmatic audiences—and the audiences that assume the existence of such transition. The latter I call the paradigmatic audiences. I would imagine that in this room we have both types of audiences. My argument, being a paradigmatic one, will no doubt be unequally convincing for the different audiences present here today; as such, it will contribute to confirming the different audiences in their differences.

We make lots of things into texts these days (movies, conversation, dreams) in order to bring them into our discussions. The hope is that something is gained. Here we have a public speech that has become an essay. I hope we don't lose too much in treating it that way. In addressing the written text of Santos's “Three Metaphors …” (1995), I would like to recall the speech of which the text is a part. The speech took place in a large and fabulously ornate room in the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. It was a luncheon speech presented to gathered scholars who had, as I recall, just completed a chicken salad plate and run through a series of awards. The speech came near the end of the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association.

Based on the findings of a research project in a Nahua Indian area of central Mexico, this article focuses on the relationship between customary law and state law in the context of the administration of justice by and toward Indians. By showing how customary and state law interact and conflict in the everyday life of Indian people, it questions the idealized vision of customary law that appears to be taken for granted in the current debate over Indian rights in Mexico and Latin America. Thus a paradox is revealed between the intertwining of law and custom in social praxis and the revival of an ethnic discourse which calls for an autonomous indigenous legal system based on customary law.

Over the past 20 years, international commercial arbitration has been transformed and institutionalized as the leading contractual method for the resolution of transnational commercial disputes. It has become an important institution of the growing international market. Although the process is far from unidirectional, this work of social construction can be described as a rationalization in the Weberian sense and also as an “Americanization” that has permitted U.S. litigators to shape the rules to favor their adversarial skills and approaches. An informal justice system has come increasingly to resemble “offshore litigation.”

Drawing on Bourdieu's analytical tool of the legal “field” and, in particular, using the notion of an “international legal field,” this case study reveals how the continuing competition for business and for legitimacy—between civil law and common law, “grand old men” and “technocrats,” academics and practitioners—constructs and transforms the system of (international private) justice. As is true generally with respect to law, the details of the competition serve to build the careers of practitioners, to develop the area of practice, and to produce and legitimate the relevant “law.”

The authors used two data sets based on interviews with families who suffered an adverse birth outcome in Florida—either a stillbirth, an infant death, or a permanent birth-related injury—to assess the decision to file a medical malpractice claim. These data were supplemented by medical evaluations of liability. The authors found that cases in which the physician evaluators thought the physician had been negligent were much more likely to have become claims, as were more serious injuries. Overall, the view of critics of the current medical malpractice system that innocent physicians are just as likely, or more likely, to be sued than the guilty ones and that patients sue when they do not obtain a “perfect result” is not confirmed. Claims were less likely to result when the family had health insurance, either private or public, and when families who had been told by the physician that there might be a problem with the child. The mother's educational attainment and family income had no effect on the probability of claiming. Mothers who admitted to consuming alcohol during pregnancy were more likely to claim.

Law has become a key signifier in British Virgin Islander nationalist discourse. British Virgin Islanders cast law as central to their identity as a people and celebrate the self-authoring of law. At the same time law writing has fostered continued colonial rule and subordination to the global market. The International Business Companies Ordinance, hailed as the BVI's first truly self-authored law, produced a marketable identity for the territory in the world of international finance, yet led to increased surveillance by metropolitan powers and contributed to the deferral of political sovereignty. This article considers the role of law in modern narratives of national uniqueness. It explores the paradox that modern law, with its accompanying rhetoric of progress, its formations of history, and its construction of “national” selves, is central to the cultural politics of difference, yet is also central to the processes of capitalist integration that both deny and demand difference.

In 1973 the Cuban government abolished the private practice of law, replacing it with a system of law collectives known as bufetes colectivos. These law collectives were designed to provide low-cost legal services to the public in ways consistent with the ideology of a nonadversarial relationship between lawyers and the state. I examine both the relationship between the ideological and legal bases for the socialist practice of law in Cuba and the actual practice of law in one bufete colectivo. Using a combination of documentary and ethnographic information to reconstruct the day-to-day practice of law in the bufete colectivo, I examine the ways Cuban attorneys I observed sought to serve their clients' interests and to pursue their own professional goals within an ideological framework that stressed a nonadversarial model of lawyering. I give particular attention to criminal defense which, more than civil cases, often required attorneys to balance their clients' interests against the socialist ideal of nonadversarial lawyering. These attorneys, as intermediaries between citizens and the state, often found ways to utilize the formal framework of substantive and procedural laws to represent clients' interests despite an official ideology that emphasized nonadversarial lawyering.

In his address to the 1995 Law and Society Association, Boaventura de Sousa Santos argued that times are changing and that “we”—the law and society audience, among others—must use “the imagination to explore new modes of human possibility and styles of will and to oppose the necessity of what exists on behalf of something radically better that is worth fighting for and to which humanity is fully entitled” (Santos 1995:573). Admirable sentiments, on which Santos elaborates via three suggestive metaphors introduced to help “reinvent maps of social emancipation and subjectivities with the capacity and desire for using them” (ibid.).

Income tax laws are the primary motivation for many to learn and use the basics of accounting. Three stages of preparing tax returns—collecting records, organizing the information into tax and accounting categories, and abstracting the information on tax returns—successively draw individuals further into the culture of accounting. The issues raised during tax audits provide a window into the problems taxpayers have understanding and following accounting concepts and procedures. An analysis of the stages of return preparation provides insights into how issues are handled during audits and how the accounting skills of taxpayers may affect their outcomes. Data from a sample of state audits generally confirm the hypotheses and illustrate the grounding of taxpaying in accounting. Tax laws may draw individuals into this culture, but the information taxpayers collect and process to meet the needs of the government often, after the fact, has utility for the taxpayers themselves.