Recent years have seen a rapprochement between research on organizations and research on law. One goal of such research is a better understanding of how the structures of complex organizations and the normative and cognitive structures of law interact within different cultures. This article is part of that enterprise. We report results from surveys conducted in Moscow, Tokyo, and Washington in 1993 that asked respondents to judge acts of wrongdoing within corporate hierarchies and then asked them to propose sanctions for the wrongdoers. Most important, respondents' views of sanctioning reflect cultural differences in conceptions of the individual, the organization, and the rule of law. The discussion locates this research within the larger context of normative-cultural approaches to the study of organizations and indicates how this research tradition can be enriched by studying the attribution of responsibility.

This article explores the reemergence of the Law and Development Movement in the post–Cold War era, with special reference to the impact of foreign legal assistance programs on legal and political reforms in Vietnam. Relying on extensive interviews conducted in Vietnam, as well as traditional academic research, the article focuses on changes in Vietnam's legal culture in the first decade of political “renovation.” It then describes foreign legal assistance to Vietnam. Finally, it applies the critiques that emerged from the law and development debate to present-day legal assistance efforts in Vietnam, in an effort to determine the validity of those critiques in the post–Cold War era of foreign legal assistance.

Research on juvenile and adult sentencing has been characterized by theoretical, methodological, and empirical limitations that preclude adequate description, prediction, or assessment of decisionmaking processes and outcomes. Five limitations are prominent: emphasis on atheoretical, empirical attempts, generally unsuccessful, to increase predictive accuracy; limited conceptualizations of dependent variables (e.g., incarceration versus nonincarceration); overreliance on individual, offender-level data with minimal reference to victims, practitioners, or contextual factors; failure to incorporate analytically multiple research methods; and inattention to intended and unintended uses and effects of sentencing. These limitations can be highlighted by focusing on a context—-juvenile justice—in which the goals of sentencing are varied, conflicting, and, due to recent reforms, changing. Using interview and survey data, the present research examines juvenile sentencing reform in Texas to highlight these limitations and to oudine an analytical framework for improved description, modeling, and assessment of sentencing.

This article tells the story of the establishment of the Law and Society Association in the early to mid-1960s. To tell the story, the authors concentrate on the personal stories of the individuals active in that early period and on four university campus sites—the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Denver, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin—at which much of the impetus was focused. They also examine key institutions that funded and/or encouraged links between law and social science—the Russell Sage Foundation, the Walter E. Meyer Research Institute of Law, and the American Bar Foundation. The article seeks also to investigate more generally the factors that came together to build a field of law and social science—which in turn helped to provide the ideas and build the institutions involved in the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. The field was created in part by a process involving both competition and cooperation between law and social science over the new terrain of social problems of racial discrimination, poverty, and crime. The authors suggest that, over time, the center of gravity of the field moved toward law, leaving the social science disciplines for the most part outside. The development of the field generally was also affected by the strong shift in the relative values of these social sciences—especially sociology—in relation to economics in the 1980s.

State-society differentiation and political centralization interact to influence the amount, focus, and effect of legal activity. Using case studies of anti-nuclear power litigation in the 1970s in the United States, West Germany, France, and Sweden, this article develops a general theory of political systems and legal activity. While the United States, West Germany, and France all had considerable amounts of antinuclear litigation, in France and Germany such litigation was directed almost exclusively at the state. In the United States, the targets of antinuclear litigation were much more diffuse. Centralized Sweden with its corporatist political system had significantly less antinuclear legal activity than the other three countries, which were roughly comparable. Germany was the only country in which the state took an active role in shaping the content of legal cases, and it was the only country where litigation became a critical factor in modifying national policy. Through these case studies, this article explores how contextual factors such as the political frames of nation-states, which exist apart from individual litigiousness and even apart from legal systems themselves may create particular cross-cultural variations in patterns of legal activity.

This article examines the impact of state-level school finance litigation conducted in the wake of San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez. State supreme courts have handed down decisions in 36 states since the Rodriguez decision in 1973. The article looks at how these decisions have affected the distribution of educational resources in eight states—five states in which school finance activists have won and three in which they lost. The author shows that state supreme courts can have a significant impact on both the equity of school finance systems and their adequacy. This finding rebuts scholars who have recently argued that courts, acting alone, cannot achieve significant social or political change in the face of public opposition. The article also explores why some state supreme courts are more successful than others, putting forward a policy-centered model of judicial efficacy that takes into account the peculiarities of school finance as a policy issue.

This article examines the overall success of 1,428 proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation's Law and Social Science Program between 1986 and 1997. On average, proposals were successful 30% of the time. The research examined a number of variables that might have influenced the success rate. The type of institution in which the Principal Investigator (PI) was employed and from which the proposal was submitted, the number of years since the PI had earned his or her Ph.D., and membership in the Law and Society Association at the time the proposal was submitted were significant factors. Variables that were not predictive of success included membership in the American Psychology-Law Society, the gender of the PI, and the type of institution from which the PI earned his or her terminal degree. Finally, persistence is a valuable strategy; proposals resubmitted for consideration after having been declined were more likely to be funded.