The rhetoric of the Juvenile Court Movement has emphasized the individualized, non-criminal handling of youths who commit delinquent acts. While the procedures for handling youth in the juvenile court were decriminalized (which basically means that constitutional guidelines applicable to criminal trials were disregarded), the alleged delinquent acts have remained, for the most part criminalized. That is, delinquent acts are defined by the law as basically criminal acts committed by youth. A partial exception to this perspective is the juvenile status offenses. For the most part these acts (truancy, curfew violation, ungovernable, etc.) are viewed as “pre-delinquent,” i.e., pre-criminal kinds of behavior.

In his recent book, Charles E. Silberman underscores the role of the law as an educating institution. “Since means shape ends, the kinds of legal procedures the society develops shape the goals and values and indeed the whole character and ethos of the society” (Silberman, 1970: 42). He convincingly argues that the attempts in recent years to provide legal services to the poor have necessitated radical changes in the conception of the lawyer's role. “For one thing, he becomes an educator in a much more specific way, since the first (and perhaps most important) part of his job may be to educate the poor to what their rights are” (Silberman, 1970:43). Yet it is not only the poor who have difficulty when it comes to understanding the laws of society, and many people have been confronted with situations in which they have, after the fact, discovered that what they have done was illegal. The My Lai trials may be simply an extreme case in point. In the defense of Lt. Calley, the lawyers in the case were expected to argue that the defendant did not know the difference between a legal and illegal order and such an argument was used successfully in the similar Diener case. Yet the old adage has it that “ignorance of the law is no excuse.” In many lesser situations citizens are unsure as to what their legal responsibilities are or what others legally have the right to do or not do.

Despite the scholarly and popular interest in the administration of criminal justice, there are few theoretical discussions of the process. Consequently, this paper is an attempt to develop an explicit theoretical framework by which the practices in the administration can be depicted and explained. In it I characterize the criminal justice system in terms of the theory of large-scale organizations, and then examine some of the tasks of administration in terms of established concepts and criteria supplied by this perspective. Following Etzioni, by organization I mean “social units devoted primarily to the attainment of specific goals” (1961). In this case the formal task of the criminal justice system is to process arrests, determine guilt or innocence, and in the case of guilt to specify an appropriate sanction. The major actors in the organization include the defendant, prosecutor, defense counsel, judge, arresting officer, court clerk, and to varying degrees, other persons such as witnesses, additional policemen, clerks, parole officers, court psychiatrists and social workers, and the defendants' families and friends. A system of the administration of justice, whether it is adversarial or inquisitorial, entails the key elements of organization: institutionalized interaction of a large number of actors whose roles are highly defined, who are required to follow highly defined rules and who share a responsibility in a common goal — that of processing arrests.

E. Adamson Hoebel is justly honoured for the contribution he made to the study of tribal law by insisting on the recording and study of what he, with the late Karl N. Llewellyn, called “trouble-cases” in their innovative book, The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence (1941). The fruitfulness of this method was demonstrated also by Hoebel in another book, published at virtually the same time, on The Political Organization and Law-Ways of the Comanche Indians (1940), and argued further in his The Law of Primitive Man (1954). We may see the form of these studies as emerging partially from the method of case-law in Anglo-American jurisprudence, and here the influence of Llewellyn was probably important. But concentration on specific “cases”, “situations”, “incidents”, et alia, was also part of a general tendency in social science from the 1920's onwards: the increasing focus of analysis on untangling the structure of specific situations against the general social background was marked in political science and economics (see e.g., Devons, 1960, 1970) and sociology (see e.g., Gouldner, 1954). I have discussed the general development in social anthropology (Gluckman, 1959, 1965b, 1967).

An important intersection of the disciplines of law and social science is the social setting of law enforcement. The point of application of the law is almost completely social, with the exception of the totally automated justice of parking violations (Skolnick, 1966). The social factors in the enforcement encounter which produce the official definition of crime have been discussed in studies of police discretion (Skolnick, 1966; Cicourel, 1968), police/suspect interaction (Piliavin and Briar, 1964; Wertham and Piliavin, 1967; Black and Reiss, 1970), and the influence of complainants' wishes and demeanor on police action (Black, 1970). A second social setting that greatly influences the extent of law enforcement and the resultant official crime rate is the setting of victimization. This setting occurs prior to the enforcement encounter and is quite distinct from it except in cases of police observation of crime. The setting of victimization has received relatively little research attention. Questions pertaining to the perception of victimization and the subsequent decision by the victim on ways to handle the situation have not been systematically addressed. The goal of this study is to decribe why, and under what conditions, victims decide to invoke formal sanctioning procedures in response to criminal victimization.

Of the many enduring myths which serve as the foundation for American democracy, none is as pervasive as that of judicial objectivity. While the assertion that justice is blind is probably met with understandable cynicism, most Americans still believe that their judges, especially those in the appellate courts, should approach their responsibilities with a certain myopia. The rules and customs that are the foundation of Anglo-American legal practices may be considered the basis upon which judicial objectivity rests.

“The reasonable man is recognized as the central figure in all developed systems of law, but his presence in simpler legal systems has not been noticed.” With this two-pronged assertion Max Gluckman (1955: 83) introduces a major theme of his analysis of the judicial process in Barotseland. The book in which he attempts this task has been widely and deservedly acclaimed, not only as a landmark in the study of primitive law, but also as an important contribution in the field of comparative jurisprudence. It has also been a work fruitful of controversy; in this paper I do not enter into the wider aspects of these controversies, but confine myself to discussion of the concept of the reasonable man. Gluckman's use of this idea is central to his description and analysis of the Lozi material, but it has had a rather mixed reception among anthropologists and lawyers alike. Thus Nadel (1956: 167), for example, while expressing certain reservations, approved on the whole and found the emphasis on reasonableness seemingly consistent with certain typical features of Lozi jurisdiction, but doubted whether this would help much in understanding practice in, say, Moslem courts. By contrast, Hoebel (1961: 437), in an otherwise favourable review, found himself unable to share Gluckman's hopes that the concept would find wide methodological use because “as an analytic concept the reasonable man is not an effective tool for the job.” Among lawyers and jurists the response was equally varied.

The interplay between professionals and clients has been examined in a number of settings (Etzioni, 1964: 87-89; Becker, 1952; Willie, 1960; Schur, 1968; Myers and Roberts, 1959) and the impact of laymen on professional behavior is well-known to the sociologists (Friedson, 1960). In this research report these insights are applied to police-citizen interaction in an effort to explain the dynamics of discretionary decisions by police officers and the role such discretion plays in their quest to attain higher professional stature. Specific attention will be paid to variations in the willingness of policemen to develop and utilize informers or “stool pigeons.”

In a previous essay I sought to make a distinction, not an original one, between two processes of dispute settlement: adjudication, and negotiations (Gulliver, 1969: 17). This was not intended as an absolute distinction, for clearly there are certain features common to both. But I was emphasizing what seems to be a key factor: the existence or absence of a third-party adjudicator. Whilst recognizing that this distinction is not acceptable to some scholars in the sociology of law, and that some would not wish to give such importance to that key factor and to other associated processual characteristics, it is nevertheless worthwhile to examine further the processes of negotiation. There are at least two reasons for this. First, anthropologists have given rather little attention to the description and analysis of negotiations in the variety of societies and cultures which is their concern. Secondly, processes of negotiations occur in all societies, including of course our own Western ones, and I believe that there are common patterns to them, cross-culturally, which merit attention.

One special public which presumably pays a good deal of attention to the United States Supreme Court is the bar. As part of the “company” attached to the judiciary, attorneys may have a philosophic interest — and surely have a bread-and-butter interest — in the activities of the country's highest tribunal. This article seeks to explore that concern.

In 1963 and 1964, New Zealand and Great Britain adopted the first modern crime compensation programs. These programs compensate for injury and death caused by a criminal attack upon an innocent victim. Although the reception given to these programs has been quite favorable and there have been additional adoptions by other jurisdictions, the total number of program adoptions remains small. New Jersey's adoption in October, 1971, brought the total number of program adoptions in the United States to six (New York Times, October 25, 1971: 28c). In addition, Nevada and New York City have adopted partial compensation programs called “citizenship” or “Good Samaritan” programs that compensate only those injuries or deaths incurred while assisting law enforcement officers or while attempting to prevent the commission of a crime or in trying to apprehend a criminal. This means that six general crime compensation programs have been adopted in the United States during the past six years. These program adoptions have been by California, New York, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

In this essay, I propose to pay attention to Karo-Batak dispute settlement in the framework of regional manifestations of musjawarah, the Indonesian way of popular decision-making. To that end, I shall begin with a brief description of the Karo categories of kinship and affinity, followed by an exposé of the Karo institution of dispute settlement, called runggun adat as well as by the description of a specific case which I recorded in 1969, almost thirty years after it occurred.

This paper is about the administration of justice in drunk driving cases. It is the second in a series (Little, 1971a) stemming from an intensive study of law enforcement and judicial systems in operation. The data reported here were obtained in 1970 and 1971 in a study carried out in the State of Vermont with the purpose of learning about how justice is administered in DWI cases in the context of a known legal framework. The method of the study was to obtain representative samples of DWI offenders and violators of other serious motor vehicle offenses, and trace what happened to them with the police, in the courts and with licensing agencies. The complete chronicle of what happened to each offender was carefully scrutinized, beginning with the time of arrest and ending when the case had been disposed of. The earlier paper contained a number of preliminary descriptive statistics, and this one follows up that background with more detailed analysis.

In our highly centralized political system, with its advanced technology and communications apparatus, it is tempting to think that legal innovation can effect social change. Roscoe Pound perceived the law as a tool for social engineering (1965: 247–252). Some version of this idea is the current rationale for most legislation. Underlying the social engineering view is the assumption that social arrangements are susceptible to conscious human control, and that the instrument by means of which this control is to be achieved is the law. In such formulations “the law” is a short term for a very complex aggregation of principles, norms, ideas, rules, practices, and the activities of agencies of legislation, administration, adjudication and enforcement, backed by political power and legitimacy. The complex “law,” thus condensed into one term, is abstracted from the social context in which it exists, and is spoken of as if it were an entity capable of controlling that context. But the contrary can also be persuasively argued: that “it is society that controls law and not the reverse …” (Cochrane, 1971: 93–4). This semantic morass is partly the result of the multiplicity of referents of the terms “law” and “society.” But both ways of describing the state of affairs have the same implication for the sociological study of law. Law and the social context in which it operates must be inspected together. As Selznick has said, there is no longer any need “to argue the general interdependence of law and society” (1959: 115). Yet although everyone acknowledges that the enforceable rules stated and restated in legal institutions, in legislatures, courts and administrative agencies, also have a place in ordinary social life (Bohannan, 1965), that normal locus is where they are least studied. (See, for example, the emphasis on the study of official behavior in the recent Chambliss and Seidman, 1971, and on dispute settlement in much of the recent anthropological literature, cf., Moore, 1969. A significant exception is the emphasis on “law-in-society” in Friedman and Macaulay, 1969.)