A prominent feature of the landscape of American sociolegal research is Marc Galanter's scholarship on the civil justice system. Galanter began his academic career in anthropological research on India, and his studies of the American legal system reflect these origins. Like an anthropologist at work in his native land, Galanter's contribution has been to illuminate the properties of the American legal system as a social whole. No other scholar has so effectively comprehended the organic character of American law—how the operation of the formal rules system depends on the strategic interplay among actors in the system, the significance of indigenous or embedded systems of normative ordering that pervasively emerge in the shadow of the formal legal system, and the relationship between the law as a system of symbols and a system of bargaining endowments. “Why the Haves Come Out Ahead” (Galanter, 1974) remains the most ambitious and comprehensive attempt to explain the relationship between the litigation system and patterns of inequality in American society. Not only did the article develop a useful set of grounded categories for social actors in the system (the famous distinction between “repeat players” and “one-shotters”), it also specified the mechanisms through which these social categories could achieve dominance in the system. In broad sweep, it suggested those strategies of legal change that would have the greatest redistributive effects on society, as well as the limitations that would confront attempts at social change through the law. Given the nature of this early accomplishment, it seemed natural when Galanter (1983b) reasserted his role as the preeminent commentator on the civil justice system with “Reading the Landscape of Disputes.”

A critical review of two recent discussions of problems in the law of the welfare state helps to explain the contemporary appeals of a theory of legal evolution originally developed by social democratic theorists in conjunction with the rise of collective labor law in settings as disparate as Germany and the United States. Influential contemporary formulations treat collective labor law as merely one example of a generalizable decentralization of regulative and constitutive law, taken as a distinguishing feature of a new evolutionary stage. But the question is raised whether the plausibility of this model does not tacitly depend on a positive reading of the labor experience, and consequently whether its present relevance is not seriously put into question by the deep crisis of the labor movement, whose social and political power was acknowledged by the original theorists to underlie the legal structures taken as paradigmatic.

Some of us see law as largely marginal to American life (see, e.g., Macaulay, 1984), but other colleagues assert that law constitutes society. One position does not contradict the other because we are talking about different things. Cases, statutes, and enforcement agencies very seldom directly influence everyday life. At the same time, law is an important part of culture. Despite many debates (see, e.g., Hall, 1977; Harris, 1980; Ortner, 1984), legal culture affects everyday life in important ways. At the very least, it provides a vocabulary with which we rationalize our actions to others and ourselves. As Geertz (1983: 173, 232) insists, “law is not a bounded set of norms …, but part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real.” Law is “meaning … not machinery.” It is “a species of social imagination.” It “is constructive of social realities rather than merely reflective of them.”

Official and unofficial forms of social control are usually considered substitutable responses to individual acts of deviance. This analysis of the lynching and execution of blacks in North Carolina indicates that these two forms of social control, one official and the other unofficial, served not simply as substitutes, but also as complements during much of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Only after the disenfranchisement of the black population did the relationship between official and unofficial killing begin to imply substitution. This relationship, and its transformation following disenfranchisement, are more easily understood from a social conflict perspective than from an approach that emphasizes social control as a response to individual deviance. These results imply that future inquiries into relations among forms of social control might profit from an increased sensitivity to the dynamics of macrosocial conflict.

Using the cognitive mapping approach, I investigate the genesis of criminal law norms against economic crime in West Germany. Four theoretical approaches can be derived from the interaction of two dimensions: differentiation versus Marxist theory, and functionalist versus conflict-group theory. Focusing on interests, anticipated functions, and conflict lines, I analyze the argumentation structures in the judicial committee of the Bundestag concerning the criminalization of price fixing in cases of public tender. The results show that the rationalities of politicians are oriented to dominance groups and power, not policy; communicative relatedness between representatives of different political parties is low; and cognitive maps are restricted and do not indicate policy rationality but legitimatory purposes.

This article details the history and philosophy behind attempted major changes in police tradition and organization that were fostered by women between 1920 and 1931 in Germany. Women police, led by Josefine Erkens and influenced by their background as social workers, tried to develop a social-work–oriented policing. Erkens held successive leadership positions in Cologne, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. With each new position she pioneered ways of thinking about the role of women in police work and about the relation between social work as a profession and policing as a profession. She became a controversial figure and was finally dismissed from her position in Hamburg. The case examined in this paper shows the influence on police of gender role uncertainty, interest group pressures, the political environment, and conflicting views of police professionalism. The article also discusses the difficulties involved in trying to integrate within one organization two disparate professional paradigms: that of law enforcement, with its emphasis on deterrence, and that of social work, with its emphasis on rehabilitation.

This essay identifies social conditions associated with the compensatory style of conflict management, addresses variable aspects of compensation itself, and examines the modern trend toward a greater degree of compensatory liability of organizations for the misfortunes of individuals. Several propositions are discussed: Compensation is a direct function of groups and a curvilinear function of relational distance, and is greater in upward and group-directed cases than in downward and individual-directed cases. In addition, liability varies directly with social distance and is greater in group-directed than in individual-directed cases. The modern trend toward greater organizational liability appears to be a devolution toward a pattern of collective dependency characteristic of earlier societies before the decline of kinship.

This paper discusses Japanese research on legal consciousness (ho-ishiki) and civil disputing. The author presents a recent explication of Takeyoshi Kawashima's concept of legal consciousness as a cultural factor and also proposes to explore the possibility of treating it as an individual, attitudinal factor. He also reviews large-scale surveys of aggregate-level culture and studies on individual-level disputing behavior. The need and possibility of a longitudinal study of individual disputing behavior that uses individual-level attitudes and regional culture as explanatory variables is suggested.

This article examines the interconnection between legal conflict and class structure in American agriculture. Law, as seen in the example of the California strawberry industry, is intimately involved in the transformation of economic systems and class relations and is itself affected by those changes. The impact of the law on social class varies across industrial subsectors and over time. In this case legal distinctions, in the context of changing political pressures and technoeconomic constraints on production, have encouraged the adoption of sharecropping. This form of production alters the legal status, economic interests, and subjective identification of workers, thus creating a new basis for future class interrelations.