Defendants in criminal cases were asked to evaluate the fairness of the treatment they received. Several correlates of defendant evaluations are discussed, including “predisposing” variables (race, past record, and political alienation) and “case-specific” variables (sentence received, disposition by trial or plea, and a defendant's sense of how his sentence compares with those given to others). All are related to a sense of fair treatment, sentence received and comparison level most strongly. The implications of these findings for recent discussions of plea bargaining and greater sentence equity are discussed.

Laws that decriminalize public drunkenness continue to use the police as the major intake agent for public inebriates under the “new” public health model of detoxification and treatment. Assuming that decriminalization introduces many disincentives to police intervention using legally sanctioned procedures, we hypothesize that it will be followed by a statistically significant decline in the number of public inebriates formally handled by the police in the manner designated by the “law in the books.” Using an “interrupted time-series quasi-experiment” based on a “stratified multiple-group single-I design,” we confirm this hypothesis for Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis, Minnesota. However, through intensive “microanalysis” of these two jurisdictions, we show that Minneapolis, in responding to strong business pressure, developed several alternative means of keeping the streets clear of transient public inebriates while Washington, D.C., treated decriminalization as an opportunity to shift police priorities and relied on informal “safe zones” to handle the inebriate population.

This article traces a panoramic picture of the changes in family law in Italy during the last decade, with special reference to: the problems of adoption, divorce, abortion, and family counseling; the profound innovations introduced into the Civil Code in 1975 concerning relationships between spouses, between parents and children, and between children born in and out of wedlock; and the consequent problems of inheritance.

The transformation of positive law is analyzed from a sociological point of view that explores both changes in the socioeconomic environment in which, and the political debate through which, they occurred.

On the basis of a broad examination of relevant empirical research and theoretical studies, the authors conclude that, even though the reforms may represent normative innovations in the context of the plurality of family models in contemporary Italy, their practical efficacy is limited by the amount of social and economic support, which until now have been inadequate.

Many commentators have explained the shift in policy from the quietude of Legal Aid to the aggressive advocacy of Legal Services by pointing to a change in personnel. This paper presents data on the background of a national sample of Legal Services lawyers in 1967, and through a variety of analyses argues that, though Legal Services differed from Legal Aid, neither the organization as a whole, its reformist elements, nor its local administrators were dominated by a “new breed” of activist lawyer with elite credentials. Instead, Legal Services in both 1967 and 1972 was characterized by a remarkable heterogeneity of staff. Implications of these findings for the delivery of lawyers' services to the poor are discussed, and it is suggested that the “radical” character of the program is due more to the opportunities Legal Services has offered lawyers to pursue client interests than to background characteristics of personnel.

Most Western European legal systems contain a rule obligating adult children to support their parents, which derives from a Roman statute promulgated at the time that the extended family system was disintegrating and the nuclear family emerging. Such maintenance does not appear to be inconsistent with contemporary social circumstances and kinship relationships. But those for whom it is invoked are highly vulnerable people excluded from the social security system. Although the amounts of maintenance ordered under this rule are small, such orders create problems for the aged, their children, the responsible agencies and their employees. The result is a social paradox: the rule purports to motivate families to care for their aged parents, but the families upon whom the obligation is imposed actually suffer from such imposition.

Explorations of differential justice suggest that apparent relationships between class, race, and legal treatment may be explained by the more extensive conviction histories found among lower class and minority populations. But these findings have emerged without adequate exploration of the antecedents of a defendant's criminal record. This article examines the determinants of accumulated criminal histories, viewing the conviction awarded a defendant as the first stage in the construction of a prior offense record. Path analytic techniques were applied to data drawn from a sample of persons arrested for murder in order to examine the nature of relationships among the demographic characteristics of defendants, their prior offense records, access to legal resources, and ultimate dispositions. Patterns evident from the analysis suggest that the operation of the criminal record in the legal system constitutes a continual cycle in the confirmation of criminality. Prior record, itself partly a product of discretionary treatment, becomes a salient factor in the accumulation of additional convictions not only through its direct effect but also through its influence on access to private counsel and bail, which in turn significantly affect outcome.

Lawyers in the federally funded Legal Services program for the poor have distinguished themselves from their predecessors in privately funded Legal Aid societies by discounting long-range career perspectives while expecting work to be involving. In the first part of this paper I analyze how the social status of poor people creates pressures toward routine treatment, and how reform litigation contributes to the Legal Services lawyer's involvement. In the second part I use this career analysis to understand the dilemmas currently confronting Legal Services leadership as it addresses problems of staff turnover. Recalling the social movement origins of the Legal Services program, I treat the turnover problem as a challenge to the institution to define its historical role. The dilemmas confronting institutional leadership in responding to turnover reflect tensions experienced by all reform organizations as the social movements initially supporting them deteriorate.

Taking as our starting point Renato Treves's book on sociology of law (1977), we try to give an overview of the way in which a sociological perspective developed in Italy. We deal with sociology of law as an example of this process, insofar as it reflects the ambiguities and contradictions confronting the social sciences in Italy. These disciplines are torn by contradictory forces: on the one hand, they are “naturally” attracted to and stimulated by projects for planning, rationalizing, and modernizing society; on the other, they often find themselves unable to cope with the limitations, precariousness, and abstraction of these projects, and therefore tend to seek refuge within the academic world. However, the urgent need for analyses of Italian social reality has spurred research activity and debate over the role of the social sciences, especially since the end of the 1960s, compelling them to expand their scope beyond traditional academic and scientific boundaries.

In this article I argue that several conceptual and methodological deficiencies have plagued research on racial discrimination. Discrimination is usually conceptualized as a function of societal or institutional forces rather than as an attribute of individual decisionmakers, resulting in research designs that analyze decisions of courts, rather than those of individual judges. However, a finding of no discrimination in aggregate court data does not preclude the possibility that individual judges discriminate against or in favor of minorities. Thus the selection of the unit of analysis, and other methodological choices, can significantly affect substantive conclusions. Finally, research has largely been concerned with description, rather than explanation, and has therefore failed to illuminate the decisional processes that produce discrimination.

Each of these critiques is substantiated with data from the Fulton County (Georgia) Superior Court. My findings suggest three patterns of sentencing among judges: pro-black, anti-black, and nondiscriminatory. Anti-black judges are strongly tied to traditional southern culture, concerned about crime, prejudiced against blacks, and relatively punitive in their sentencing philosophies. In addition, they tend to rely more heavily on the defendant's attitude and prior record in making their sentencing decisions. Thus, discrimination seems to flow from both the attitudinal predispositions of the judges and the process they employ to make decisions.

Proposals for the decriminalization of heroin are examined and then analyzed in terms of the ideology of tolerance which informs anti-psychiatry, labeling sociology, and the concept of the victimless crime. Marcuse's discussion of repressive tolerance is brought to bear on this issue in order to suggest that tolerance for deviance may have consequences not immediately expected by those who advance reformist proposals regarding narcotics policy.