Thus far I have attempted to describe what social science might offer to law and what law might offer to social science. In each case some caveats were offered. At this point, further warning flags should be posted.

In the last issue of this journal I asked, “What has social science to offer law?” When asking the converse (what has law to offer social science?), there is a repeated need for definition and translation: What social science? What law?

The changing of the editorial guard is an occasion that compels—not merely suggests—some stocktaking. One who essays to fill any role formerly performed by Richard Schwartz does well to plan carefully.

This paper is based on an exploratory study of the Office of Prosecuting Attorney, King County (Seattle), Washington. The lack of social scientific knowledge about the prosecutor dictated the choice of this approach. An open-ended interview was administered to one-third of the former deputy prosecutors who had worked in the office during the ten year period 1955-1965. In addition, interviews were conducted with court employees, members of the bench, law enforcement officials, and others having reputations for participation in legal decision-making. Over fifty respondents were contacted during this phase. A final portion of the research placed the author in the role of observer in the prosecutor's office. This experience allowed for direct observation of all phases of the decision to prosecute so that the informal processes of the office could be noted. Discussions with the prosecutor's staff, judges, defendant's attorneys, and the police were held so that the interview data could be placed within an organizational context.

A survey of child custody cases and commentary yields the following, most depressing conclusions: everyone agrees that awarding custody is one of the trial judge's most delicate responsibilities; almost everyone is unhappy with prevailing substantive and procedural doctrines; yet no one seems to believe that the situation can be improved substantially. Too many appellate opinions begin, or end, with a plaintive plea for the reader's sympathy.

What is it that sets legal systems apart from other kinds of systems of social control? Traditionally, legal philosophers have tried to answer the question in terms of some uniquely essential quality which distinguishes law from everything else. It now seems clear that the concept of law is best understood, not in terms of any single feature to be taken as the essence of law, but as a whole set of family resemblances between the various things we call legal systems (Hart, 1961: 1–17, 234). What I propose to do here is to deal with one particular facet of the concept which, I think, has not been given sufficient attention by the currently dominant positivist school of legal philosophy.

Sargent Shriver, the first Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, forecast at the outset that the lawyers in the legal services program would come to be recognized as the heavy artillery in the war on poverty (Shriver, 1966: 219). Shriver's success as a soothsayer was considerable. Poverty lawyers have proven to be among the most effective weapons in the war on poverty's arsenal. In practice it seems that many of the lawyer's skills and much of his legal training are helpful and even powerful when directed at the legal problems of the poor. Nevertheless, one wonders how much credit for the poverty lawyer's success can properly be attributed to OEO's leadership. There never really was reason to doubt the lawyer's fire power. But the record reveals much reason to doubt whether his potential power has been used efficiently and with maximum efficacy. An examination of OEO's belated efforts to orient the local legal services offices toward more meaningful targets leads to the belief that the strength of the program lies in the professional training and prodigious labors of the lawyers in the field and its weakness lies in the manner in which OEO has constructed and conducted the legal services program.

Almost two decades ago Reisman (1951) published an article in which he criticized the lawyer for his ethnocentric view of law and invited the anthropologist to study the organization and functions of American legal institutions and the activities of lawyers. Very few anthropologists have done so. In fact, few anthropologists have made the general study of law their special area of research. In this country, there are perhaps a dozen or two. However, the field is now beginning to attract more people. As a look at the tables of contents and the indexes of ethnographic monographs published in recent years will show, most anthropologists still neglect to report on the law of the people they have studied—yet rarely fail to have chapters on social organization, economy, religion, and the remaining traditional categories with which we “domainize” the culture of a society. Legal scholars, on the other hand, often in cooperation with sociologists and political scientists, have increasingly turned to the kind of research which Schubert (1968) has called, “behavioral jurisprudence.” Outside the United States, this interdisciplinary focus in the study of law and society has been very productive in Scandinavia (see Blegvad 1966).

This paper is an attempt to review the body of social science writings of the last four and one-half decades on the petit jury. The major portion of this presentation will be limited to organizing the findings on the jury around the two major themes—competence and representation—which are most often discussed in empirical literature. A concluding section will offer some evaluative comments and present some tentative proposals for a new perspective on the sociological study of the jury.

The research we report here has had as its aim a study of the acquisition of political philosophy during the adolescent years. We have always known, in a rough and general way, that adolescence is marked by a rapid growth in the comprehension of political ideas. At the threshold of adolescence, at eleven or twelve, the youngster has only a dim, diffuse, and incomplete notion of the political order; by the time he has reached eighteen, he will be, more often than not, a fully formed political creature, possessing a stable and coherent understanding of political structures and functions, and in many cases, committing himself to a philosophy of government. How does this transition take place? In particular, how do learning and cognitive maturation interact to produce these sweeping changes? As a first approach to these questions, we undertook a developmental and cross-national study of adolescents. Youngsters of eleven, thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen were interviewed in three countries: the United States, England, and Germany. (German eleven-year-olds were not interviewed because of fund limitations. Hence, the cross-national analysis compares subjects thirteen through eighteen years of age.) By interviewing youngsters from pubescence to late adolescence we hoped to discern the maturation of political perspectives; by comparing youngsters in three countries with rather different political traditions we hoped to get some sense of the differential impact of social ideas.

A question of interest to political and legal scholars is: Does experience in a judicial role produce political perceptions and attitudes which systematically differ from those produced by the lawyer-advocate (nonjudicial) role? To date, the efforts of the judicial behaviorists have centered on an elicitation of attitudes from either judges or advocates, but few studies have been structured to examine both roles in respect to a common stimuli set. A rare opportunity to make such a comparative survey presented itself to the investigators in conjunction with their participation in a more extensive study of state constitutional conventions. In conjunction with a study of the New York Constitutional Convention of 1966-67, interviews were conducted with 175 of the 186 delegates to that convention. Of these 175 delegates, 22 were judges and 101 were lawyers. This situation was unique, for it allowed a direct comparison

Despite the general recognition of its importance, it has been noted that there is a paucity of theoretical treatment of the problems of compliance to law (Krislov, 1966). While there is a vast literature dealing with rule-specified behavior, a direct focus on the peculiarities of legal rules and compliance to them seems to have been skirted in favor of more general treatments of social norms, less-structured rule and compliance systems, and basic or constitutional rules. And when law and the problems of compliance have received specific attention, it has usually been in terms of a broad, societal level, relating legal norms to cultural norms or focusing on “trouble cases” and instances of noncompliance. Detailed empirical studies in sociology have tended to focus on deviant behavior and its correlates, while in political science the approach has tended towards even less-general descriptions and case studies of the impact and consequences of legislative and judicial policy-making.

The provision of legal services without regard for the individual's ability to pay has long been a tradition of the American legal profession. It is a basic tenet of a democratic society that the protection of individual rights cannot turn on a matter of income or social class, since justice then becomes a luxury, available to a privileged few. Our society has met this problem largely by relying on the sense of professional responsibility of private practitioners and by developing legal aid societies.

Legal scholars come to the problem of development somewhat tardily. But legal systems are clearly a part of political, social, and economic development, just as are educational systems and other areas of the culture. No major social change occurs or is put into effect in a society which is not reflected in some kind of change in its laws. Legal institutions are responsive to social change; moreover, they have a definite role, rather poorly understood, as instruments that set off, monitor, or otherwise regulate the fact or pace of social change. Many basic questions of the relationship of law to social change and to cultural development are completely neglected. Does the type of legal system and legal institutions that a society uses help or hinder that society in its march toward modernization? How does law influence the rate of economic growth? How does law brighten or darken the road to political wisdom or stability? How can a society improve its system of justice? What happens when laws are borrowed from more advanced countries?