Analyses of the National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study (N = 27,478), demonstrate that law schools enlarge entering academic differences across race, age, disability, and socioeconomic origins rather than reduce them, and that academic differences in turn impact bar passage. Such differences cannot be reduced to (1) academic preparation, effort, or distractions; (2) instructional or law school-type characteristics; (3) social class; or (4) acceptance of an elitist legal ethos. Rather, results suggest that (1) women, minorities, and other atypical law students confront stigmatization throughout legal education;(2) for women (entering law school in 1991), this stigmatization is new, rejected, and consequently unassociated with law school outcomes; (3) for minorities, this stigmatization is continuous with prior socialization, making resistance difficult and consequent impact sizable; and (4) for other atypical law students, this stigmatization varies with visibility of difference, as do resistance and impact. Implications for social stigma theory and legal education are discussed.

This article contributes to the current debate about why people follow the law even when they are not subject to legal sanctions, as when there are no police and little danger of a lawsuit. Most recent scholarship in this area takes the form of norms theories, suggesting that social norms rather than laws shape behavior and that deviations from the norm are punished by either social or internal sanctions. Robert Sugden, however, proposes that order may develop “spontaneously” in the many areas of life where abiding by the rules minimizes the risk of costly confrontations with others and is thus in the interest of all parties. When this is true, the threat of little or no sanctions plays no role in regulating behavior. This article tests Sugden's theory against a simple property system, that of the California gold mines, in which individual miners held small claims subject to strict work requirements. The evidence of eyewitnesses shows that the stability of the regime did not depend on norms, but on the reasonable prediction that other claim holders would themselves stand up for their rights under the local mining code. Disputes about the rules and their application were submitted to arbitrators, whose decisions were accepted by the parties and did not need to be enforced. The California experience thus provides an example of a stable property regime for which game theory has a more satisfying explanation than do any of the norms theories.

The received interpretation of the Mellon tax reforms in the 1920s describes a reactionary roll-back of the first, progressive, permanent income tax system in United States history. This essay revises that interpretation in important ways.

The Treasury Department of Secretary Andrew W. Mellon proposed and passed tax reform legislation in the 1920s that radically reduced marginal tax rates on wealthy individuals from World War 1 highs. The Mellon plan was developed by attorneys from the previous Democratic administration. Working with the foremost tax professionals of the day and deeply committed to the principles of progressive income taxation, they intended the establishment of a permanent peacetime tax system for a modern industrial society. They called their taxplan scientific taxation. The Treasury Department policymakers anticipated determined opposition to their program and consciously embarked on an extensive public relations campaign to convince the general public that reducing taxes on wealthy people was good for them because it made the whole society richer and more dynamic.

This essay tells the story of how the Mellon plan took shape, and of the public relations campaign waged to secure its enactment. This essay also suggests that the Treasury Department's campaign to sell scientific tax reform to the general public generated a dialogue that facilitated popular acceptance of modern industrial capitalism.