European and American scholars of law and society apparently have problems in communicating with each other. To invoke Lewis Carroll's authority on a piece of legal theory indicates how serious the problems are. After all, traced to its true origins, “Jabberwocky,” the famous “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry” (Carroll, 1855; 1871: 191), means “weeks of woe” in its original German version (Scott alias Chatterton, 1872). And inextricably involved in the interpretation of the poetry is a certain Hermann von Schwindel . . .

Ernst Benda. Sozialrechtliche Eigentumspositionen im Arbeitskampf: Ein Beitrag zur Diskussion um die Änderung des § 116 Arbeitsförderungsgesetz (The guarantee of private property and its extension on claims based on social security law in situations of industrial action: A contribution to the discussion on the amendment of section 116 of the Employment Promotion Act). (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1986).

Manfred Bobke and Herbert Grimberg. Der gewerkschaftliche Warnstreik im Arbeitskampfrecht: “Neue Beweglichkeit” gegen rechtliche Begrenzungen der gewerkschaftlichen Handlungsfreiheit (The warning strike organized by trade unions as reflected in the law on industrial conflict: “New mobility” against legal limitations of trade unions' freedom). (Cologne: Bund, 1983).

Volker Jahnke. Tarifautonomie und Mitbestimmung (Freedom of collective bargaining and codetermination). (Munich: Beck, 1984).

Volkhart Kriebel. Zentralisation und Dezentralisation im Tarifsystem: Möglichkeit und rechtliche Zulässigkeit einer dezentralen Tarifpolitik (Centralization and decentralization in the system of collective bargaining: Factual and legal possibility of a decentralized collective bargaining policy). (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1984).

Fritz Ossenbühl and Reinhard Richardi. Neutralität im Arbeitskampf (Neutrality in industrial conflict). (Cologne: Heymanns, 1987).

Eduard Picker. Der Warnstreik und die Funktion des Arbeitskampfes in der Privatrechtsordnung (The warning strike and the function of industrial action in the system of civil law). (Cologne: Heymanns, 1983).

Ulrich Runggaldier. Kollektivvertragliche Mitbestimmung bei Arbeitsorganisation und Rationalisierung (Codetermination of work organization and rationalization by collective agreements). (Frankfurt: Metzner, 1983).

The economic crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s has led to a continuous questioning of established patterns of labor law in the Federal Republic of Germany. Until the mid-1970s full employment was one of the basic characteristics of the German labor market. Since then, an unemployment rate of approximately 10 percent has become part of the picture. In spite of the fact that the economy has recovered to a great degree, unemployment persists. Evidently, economic growth by itself does not imply job creation, and rationalization has become the key word of management policy. Since economic growth is more easily reached by new technologies than by the use of more manpower, job security is endangered irrespective of economic prosperity. In order to remain competitive in the world market, German companies have no choice but to reduce costs and to increase productivity.

Empirical tests of the deterrence doctrine have suffered from two deficiencies: (1) they have rarely been conducted within the context of a more general theory of social control, and (2) they have confounded the effects of sanction threats on different kinds of offending decisions. In this paper, deterrence variables (perceived certainty and severity) were incorporated into a rational choice model of common (minor) delinquent offending. The rational choice perspective presumes that crime and delinquency are the products of imperfectly informed choice and that decisions to offend are made, assessed, and remade. It was assumed here that decisions to offend and cease offending would in part be affected by the contemplation of sanction threats in addition to material, affective, and moral considerations. The data in support of the inclusion of deterrence variables in a rational choice model were equivocal. Although perceptions of certain punishment had a significant effect on the decision to commit and desist from some offenses, the observed effects were marginal and far less consequential than were the effects of social costs and other considerations. The data did indicate that certainty of punishment (but not severity) affects some offending decisions.

This paper examines a public housing eviction board and asks how the decision to prosecute cases informally affected both board action and the implications of that action. It argues that board decisions were patterned and that apparently similar procedures produced different outcomes at different points in time. Informality is seen as compatible with rule-oriented decisionmaking and as a factor that affects the ways that rules and outcomes may be changed and manipulated. Informal justice is not defined, but certain features, such as the quality of discourse in a tribunal, are posited as keys to judgments of informality. It is argued that these keys determine whether a tribunal is perceived as formal or informal but that the actual quality of tribunal need not fit this neat dichotomy, for it is a complex function of whether prosecutors, defendants, and judges take informal or legalistic stances toward the procedural and substantive issues that arise in a case.

Courts and legislatures often grant rights to clients of social programs so that the clients can protect their own interests in the programs. Previous research has questioned whether rights provide effective protections for clients' interests. In this study, I examine parental rights of school choice in Britain, showing that rights can provide effective protections for clients' interests under some conditions. However, this study also reveals the dilemma of rights: rights that are effective in protecting individual client interests can also undermine a social program's ability to serve the collective interests of all clients.

As part of the dramatic reforms now sweeping through Eastern Europe, a number of socialist states have enacted new legislation enabling courts to review the legality of administrative decisionmaking. In this essay, I will speculate about the likely development of a socialist rule of law. Using examples from capitalist and socialist law, I will argue that judicial review is at odds both with the long-range ideological goals of socialist societies and with the daily constraints operating on socialist officials and citizens. However, even if judicial review itself is unlikely to gain significant impact in socialist societies as we know them, other changes brought about by socialist law reforms will increasingly help to shelter a socialist citizen against the arbitrary use of state power.

In this paper we use a survey concerning a hypothetical taxpayer to analyze how certain features of the enforcement of the tax laws shape perceptions of the risks of detection and penalties for tax noncompliance. We also examine the effects of these perceptions on intended noncompliance behavior. Our findings provide strong support for various hypotheses concerning the effect of the enforcement process on perceptions. We also find, in contrast to prior results, that the perceived risk of criminal prosecution appears to act as a powerful deterrent to noncompliance. We explain why earlier studies might have failed to detect a deterrent role for the severity of punishment.

Niklas Luhmann is a troublemaker: he writes a great deal, and on very many subjects, and he is still expanding his theory. As a jurist, he started with studies on law and administration, but soon he reached the level of general sociology and published a wealth of books and articles on power, love, religion, morality, education, art, the economy, and the like. With his supertheory he is now on his way to inheriting the philosophical tradition of the Occident (cf. Habermas, 1985: 426–45). Luhmann has developed his own terminology, which sounds familiar, but in which the meaning of customary expressions such as “legitimacy,” “ideology,” “institution,” and “meaning” is intentionally distorted. He also uses new concepts like “autopoiesis” and has created models for a fashionable semantic: “reduction of complexity,” “legitimation by procedure”—now clichés for a social scientist. His compact-hermetic supertheory, his nicely constructed conceptual framework does not derive from a single source or principle only; rather, Luhmann has combined various theories and approaches in his super-mega-world view. Not only does he use cybernetics, formal systems theory (input-output models), sociological systems theory à la Parsons, Husserl's phenomenological epistemology, Gehlen's anthropology, and symbolic interactionism, but he has also recently borrowed from thermodynamics, biology, neurophysiology, theory of cells, and computer theory (cf. Luhmann, 1984: 27). Luhmann claims to have established a general systems theory, for which law and sociology of law are only a single field of application.

Lawyers in cases involving injunctions against picketing represent clients in situations of great immediacy. A significant number of injunction actions are settled with reductions in picketing despite a seemingly restrictive statute and a highly organized workforce. This study of legal culture examines the role of lawyers in striving to create predictability, especially in regard to judges and the police, and in transforming conflicts of value into disputes over interests that can be resolved without resort to formal adjudication.

No-fault divorce legislation fundamentally changed the formal legal requirements for divorce from grounds based on moral concerns to those showing that the marriage has broken down without attributing blame. The old laws, which required that the plaintiff be blameless and prove malfeasance by the spouse, would have greatly restricted the number of divorces if they had not been widely subverted through collusion and perjury. The no-fault legislation gives an opportunity to test whether the attempts to legislate morality had any impact on divorce rates. Many reformers and researchers have claimed that the fault provisions were so thoroughly subverted that their removal did not lead to more divorces. The present study explores the impact of no-fault laws in thirty-eight states by applying a time-series-cross-sectional design. When grouped into one variable the laws did increase divorces, but when individual laws are analyzed, only a minority, primarily in eastern states, evidence significant impacts. Finally, I argue that it is probably beyond the limits of feasible social science research to determine why some laws had impacts but others did not.