The decision rules individuals use to judge wrongdoing committed inside corporations and other hierarchical organizations are not well understood. We explore this issue by asking random samples of individuals in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington, D. C., to respond to four short vignettes describing acts of wrongdoing by people in corporations. The vignettes are experiments that manipulate the actor's mental state, the actor's position in the organization, and whether the actor's decision was influenced by others in the organization. We examine (1) the distribution of responsibility among people in the organization, (2) how individual responsibility affects the attribution of responsibility to the organization itself, and (3) cross-national differences in attributions. We find that both what the actors did (their deeds) and the position they occupied (their roles) significantly influence the responsibility attributed to them. The responsibility attributed to the organizations themselves is a function of the responsibility attributed to the actors inside the organization, but not a function of the independent variables in the experiments. Cross-national differences emerge with respect to the responsibility assigned both to individuals and to the organizations themselves. We discuss implications of these results for past and future work.

During the Progressive Era, the U. S. state and federal courts considered constitutional challenges to protective labor legislation. While courts often struck down generalized protective legislation, they frequently upheld such legislation for women. I explore the reasoning in the cases decided between 1897 and 1923, showing that the courts developed understandings of liberty for women that differed from those for men. In opposition to traditional separate spheres reasoning, I show that the courts viewed men's exercise of liberty as depending on their private capacities to be free, while women's labor was subject to public control due to state interest in their reproductive capacities. I suggest that constitutional theorists who are studying substantive due process should place more emphasis on courts'conceptions of the subjects of due process guarantees rather than considering solely the challenged statutes' restriction of liberty. I develop a dynamic and complex understanding of liberty to capture this aspect of the relationship between constitutional theory and gender.

It is, of course, both a privilege and a challenge to have one's work attended to in the thorough and thoughtful manner exemplified by Professors Suchman and Edelman's and Professor Sutton's essays. The New Institutionalism in Organizarional Analysis has been subject of many review symposia—in journals of accounting, business, political science, and sociology. But the traffic has never been two-way: our work is typically imported into new domains, but here we also have the opportunity to see how law and society research might enhance institutional analysis. In reading and reflecting on these valuable commentaries, I am pulled by divergent reactions: “Why didn't we think of that?” and “that's not what we meant” are the most common. But rather than play out these responses in print, I plead nolo contendere and concur with Suchman and Edelman's contention that institutional analysis has treated the law and the legal environment in an overly determinist fashion. In focusing on the letter of the law and its purported impact, institutional analysis neglects the extent to which the law and the legal environment are subject to negotiation, interpretation, and contestation.