This is a study of the criminal trial court as a formal organization. The processing of defendants through court can be seen simply as a task for the courtroom personnel—the cases presenting not only occasions for moral outrage or legal acumen but also presenting problems for the legal bureaucracy as such. From one perspective, defendants are as deviant if they do not conform to the routines of the court as they are if they do not conform to the rules of the state. Like the wider society it supports, the court has a social integrity which can be disrupted. The court processes persons alleged to have been deviant in the larger society. The defendants are then subject to the moral exigencies of the court itself. The discussion treats the court as a business as well as a prime sanctioning center for the outer society. But the control of crime is more than a business; it is an industry. The immediate suppliers of the court—the police—act upon and in turn are conditioned by courtroom configurations. Several features of this police-court interrelation also form a part of this study.

In 1959, Wolf, Lüke, and Hax published Scheidung und Scheidungsrecht (Divorce and Divorce Law), dealing with the effects of revision of German divorce laws in 1900 on the rates of divorce and petition for divorce. This paper is a reanalysis of Wolf, Lüke, and Hax's data with newly developed inferential statistical models, and a reappraisal in light of appropriate statistical analyses of then-conclusions and those of Max Rheinstein (1960) in his review of their work.

The argument of this article is that where a transient college student is arrested, financial bail is seldom necessary to assure the defendant's presence in court. However, in such a case, financial bail is almost always required by the court, since in the area of bail, as with other criminal law problems, the pragmatic exigencies of the traditional American criminal law system place a heavy burden on any transient to realize the same protections, privileges, and rights provided the indigenous population (Foote, 1965: 1129-1130).

One welcome by-product of a major comparative study of recent state constitutional conventions has been a series of interviews with the judges who served as convention delegates. They are particularly interesting, not only because of the paucity of interviews with sitting judges, but because they permit us to directly compare the attitudes of judges with those of other political elites. To date, this has not been possible.

We are in the midst of a quickening, if inchoate, dispute as to whether Americans are an inherently violent people. Whatever the merits of this metapsychological discussion, there is no disagreement that Americans have a propensity to interpret both officially and unofficially the violence we do have (Waskow, 1966; Silver, 1968). The final report of the “violence commission” stands in this tradition, and by its size and scope, taken together with its supporting studies, aspires to culminate it.