Pollution control today is a favorite topic for campaign promises by American politicians. If the present public interest in the environment and problems of overpopulation continues, it may one day replace motherhood as the single safest subject for political rhetoric. Everyone, including polluters, is against pollution. But once that philosophical belief has been passionately embraced, the problem of achieving this highly desirable public policy goal remains. On that subject many politicians and all polluters are much less articulate. So many different opinions exist as to the best method for achieving air pollution control, water pollution abatement, and sanitary, efficient solid waste disposal, that one begins to understand why it is that little progress has been made despite the seemingly universal belief in a clean environment.

Political science has generally been divided into the fields of political theory, comparative government, international relations, public administration, policy formation, state and local government, and public law. The public law or legal process field has also been called the law and politics field to emphasize that it is the study within political science of the judicial process, constitutional law, and related subjects. Law and politics research has changed greatly since 1955 in both methodology and substance. It is the purpose of the articles in this symposium to illustrate some of the more recent trends in law and politics research, particularly trends of interest to law professors, sociologists, and others in the broader area of law and society research.

As Mark Twain once remarked about the weather, everyone talks about law and development, but nobody does much about it. How does law “set off, monitor, or otherwise regulate the fact or pace of social change?” (Friedman, 1969). Atomistic studies relating specific norms of law to specific sorts of social change are plentiful. Holistic studies purporting to explicate general propositions relating rules and behavior can hardly be found. The few that do exist do hardly more than assure us, most sincerely, that yes, there really is a relationship between law and social change.

What is needed is a general model relating law and social change. Here, we discuss (1) the definition of the problem; (2) its parameters; (3) an heuristic model; and (4) a variety of “middle-level” hypotheses that can be suggested. The specific focus of this discussion is on Africa.

Police-community relations programs are intended to be long-range, full-scale efforts to acquaint the police and the community with each other's problems and to stimulate action aimed at solving problems; they have been criticized, however, as being concerned mainly with raising the professional image of the police in the minds of the public (President's Commission, 1967a: 100). In some ways, they seem to have functioned to slow down change and to maintain present police policies and practices.

The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967b: 178) has indicated that some of these policies and practices cannot be justified. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968: 158) comments that some activities of even the most “professional” police departments may heighten tension and enhance the potential for civil disorder.

During the past few years there has been a refreshing wave of studies of the relationship between policy inputs and outputs in American urban and state politics. These studies have attempted to go beyond the analysis of the political processes of a unit of government, to analyze its relationship and that of other factors such as socio-economic characteristics to the policy outputs of that unit. They have gone beyond the analysis of “who governs?” to the analysis of “what difference does it make who governs?” and “what difference do certain socioeconomic characteristics make?” (Wilson, 1964: 133). In other words, what are the consequences of these inputs for the life of the average citizen? These consequences have been analyzed in terms of the policy outputs and services of these governments in areas such as education, welfare, criminal justice, planning programs, and general social welfare measures.

Understanding pollution is only partly a matter of becoming informed about technical variables and processes. It is also — or even predominantly — a matter of gaining knowledge about social and economic systems. As is the case with many other issues, we need to know why these systems “produce the results they do and how we can use understanding of them to produce more desirable ones” (Kneese, 1970: 190).

The current emphasis on environmental problems has resulted in the passage of new legislation and increasing public pressure upon individual companies seen as polluters. However, the factors which influence organizations to change their ways are rather hazy. In the absence of clear market controls, particular businesses may fight environment-oriented legislation, complying only when political and legal avenues have been exhausted. Other businesses may announce their intent to help clean up the environment and initiate action in this regard with relatively little prodding on the part of the public, state and federal bureaucracies, or conservation groups.

The publication in July, 1969, of the “Principles of Corrective-Labor Legislation of the USSR and the Union Republics” was notable for a lack of fanfare. This was in itself not surprising, since in the area of corrective-labor law, even since the death of Stalin, unpublished statutes have been the main guides for the operation of corrective-labor colonies and prisons. The old corrective-labor codes of the union republics, while still legally in force, had admittedly lost any real legal power.

While the new Principles came upon the scene with little advance announcement, this fact should not obscure the more important one that “reform,” clarification, and codification have been on the minds of Soviet jurists for the preceding thirteen years — years which have seen the promulgation of two successive statutes (polozheniia) to guide the operation of the corrective-labor system in the RSFSR but, until 1969, little by way of publication or systematization of new provisions.

In recent years, police conduct has rapidly emerged as a major social and political issue. Although both the nature and the outcome of this controversy have important consequences for law and society, its most immediate effects have been evident in changing public attitudes toward police activities. Policemen have become the targets of growing and frequently irreconcilable popular demands both for the maintenance of “law and order” and for the elimination of “police brutality.” Law enforcement agencies, therefore, have seemed to encounter a mounting crisis of public confidence in police practices.

Although the effects of mounting public concern about crime and police protection probably have been most evident among whites (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967: 144–149; Ennis, 1967; Feagin, 1970), a desire for increased police protection has also emerged among black Americans. In fact, black attitudes toward police practices have appeared to reflect a perplexing enigma. While many black citizens have complained about harsh or brutal police behavior, they also have expressed intense criticism of a lack of police protection.

The labeling theory approach to the analysis of deviance depicts stable patterns of deviant behavior as products or outcomes of the process of being apprehended in a deviant act and publicly branded as a deviant person. The involvement of an individual in this process is viewed as depending much less upon what he does or what he is than upon what others do to him as a consequence of his actions. Deviant persons are regarded as having undergone a degradation ceremony with the result that they have been relegated to membership in a deviant group. In the process, they are thought to have come to acquire an inferior social status and to have developed a deviant view of the world and all the knowledges, skills, and attitudes associated with that status.

“Students of law and society have grown increasingly aware of the contribution to the character of the legal system made by the attorney in his professional role.” In his capacity as “gate keeper to the courts” the private attorney is a significant actor in the judicial process, especially at the community level (Jacob and Vines, 1963: 251). His decisions, formulated within limits set by the norms, rules, and expectations of the profession (i.e., bar associations) initially determine who has a right to lodge a grievance, at what cost, under what conditions, and to what ends.

The Legal Services Program of the Office of Economic Opportunity provides a unique opportunity to explore the professional values and attitudes of lawyers, because the Program challenges the traditional prerogatives of bar associations in controlling access to the legal resources. The three aspects of the Program representing the most serious challenge to the traditional practice of law are: (1) OEO's insistence that local programs utilize the legal process as an instrument of social and political reform on behalf of the poor; (2) the conscious, though wavering, effort to structure programs so as to insure their independence from local bar domination; and (3) the concept and practice of “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in the actual management of local programs. The response of private practitioners to the OEO challenge provides some insights into such matters as the profession's criteria for gatekeeping and the lawyers' instruments of control.

Interest in contemporary disruptions of human services administrations by involuntary clients, from welfare recipients to draft inductees, warrants an empirical investigation of prison rioting for two reasons. First, interest derives from a crisis of normal services involving such key foci of recent administative research as informal organizational behavior, the nature of professionalization of roles, and the ambiguities of clientelism. Second, the prison, while certainly not a microcosm of society, is a self-contained unit more amenable analysis than more diffuse social service milieus such as “the ghetto,” another prime locale of involuntary clientelism. The present exploratory study reviews alternative theories of the disruption of prison administration in the light of data collected on over a hundred inmate disturbances in the period from 1863-1970.