The observation that Great Britain and the United States are two countries separated by a common language has been variously attributed to Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas, and Winston Churchill. The Law and Society Association's (LSA) Presidential Addresses tend to be one of the occasions when this overworked observation clearly rings most true. More precisely, since language is but one dimension of culture, an equally widely credited truism, it is always the point in the Annual Meetings at which an alien tends to feel most alien. For me, the achievement of Kitty Calavita's Address lies in the way that it helps me to define that feeling of strangeness.

The work of defence lawyers in civil litigation has been neglected by law and society studies. Research on personal injury cases, in particular, has usually focused on the alleged failure of legal systems to compensate plaintiffs as fully and as quickly as they believe proper. The defence lawyer is conventionally portrayed as a pettifogger in the classic sense, one who seeks points of detail on which to argue, delay and confuse issues until the plaintiff reduces their demands, dies, loses heart or otherwise goes away. Recent work has been widely taken as proposing that the most effective plaintiff response is to harry defendants in an aggressive and uncompromising fashion–so-called ‘hard bargaining’. This paper combines data from two studies of personal injury litigation carried out in the late 1980s and the mid 1990s to question this conclusion. Although the procedural environment has changed in England since the implementation of the Civil Justice Reforms in April 1999, it is argued that the general points on methodology and on the starting assumptions of socio-legal research remain valid.

Serious criticisms have been raised about divorce mediators' claim that they act as purely neutral facilitators of party-driven agreements. This paper reports on a study, based on tape recordings of mediation in the United Kingdom, intended to describe the strategies used by mediators and clients in the attempt to resolve disputes. It identifies a technique, labeled “selective facilitation,” through which clients may be steered in particular directions chosen by the mediator. This poses important questions for future evaluation studies and for the regulation of mediation practice.

This paper takes up three particular themes in the historical development of the present pattern of social service provision in the United Kingdom and argues that existing accounts are somewhat misleading in their treatment of these issues. The three themes are the relationship between collectivism and individualism in social policy legislation and practice, the influence of centre and periphery in British political life and, to a lesser extent, the occupational roles available to women in the social services. These questions are examined through a study of the history of health visiting. It is argued that the fluctuating fortunes of the health visiting service allow us to see more clearly the changing influence of collectivist and individualist philosophies on government policy and the degrees to which definitions of problems and possible solutions have either been imported from the national periphery to the national centre or vice versa. Insufficient attention has been given to the defeat of metropolitan individualist philosophies by the peripherally-based public health movement at the beginning of the twentieth century and to the conditions which have led to their subsequent re-emergence and the waning influence of collectivist approaches.