The poor pay more than the non-poor for many consumer products, and this disparity seems to be ignored by such consumer protection regulation as disclosure laws. Indeed, several lines of argument suggest that the poor will not benefit from disclosure regulation either because they lack the ability to use information effectively (“market irrationality”) or because they are restricted to particularly flawed markets and products (“separate markets/products”).

This paper examines income stratification in the used car markets in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. We found that the poor did pay more for used cars, got less redress for defects discovered after purchase, and were less satisfied and more likely to believe something was misrepresented. Differences in product quality did not account for these results because the patterns persisted even after the model, age, and price of the purchased vehicles were held constant. Further, no evidence was found for “market irrationality” among the poor. No income differences were seen in buyers' discovery of defects before or after purchase, and low-income buyers complained at higher rates, albeit with less success, than did higher-income buyers. Furthermore, the adoption of disclosure regulation in Wisconsin did not increase or decrease price discrimination against the poor. These findings point to the need for more research on the causes of price discrimination and more attention to the problems of the poor in the design and implementation of consumer protection regulations.

The authors of this article attempt to examine jury performance by collating and comparing views on the jury's verdicts drawn from other participants in the trial. This research is based on a study of jury trials heard in the Crown Court at Birmingham, England, together with additional material drawn from a sample of cases in London. It shows that doubts about both acquittals and convictions by jury were expressed with a surprising frequency. An examination of the remedies available to correct miscarriages of justice demonstrates the ineffectiveness of current appeals procedures. The authors conclude that it is necessary to evaluate the jury's function within a political context.

While undergoing training in professional school, students are assumed to experience attitude change, internalizing the norms of their future profession. In law school this change is thought to be particularly conservative, reflecting a business orientation and a minimal concern with pro bono and social reform work. This paper examines these assumptions by presenting data from a panel study of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. Although some changes in attitudes are found, they are much smaller than suggested by recent critical literature on legal education. These findings lead to the proposal of a research agenda that stresses the contribution of the job market as well as that of education in fostering a traditional orientation toward the role of lawyers and the law.

Plea bargaining is finally coming to be recognized for the important institution it is. There is a rapidly growing body of research that describes its variations, reports on its impact, and discusses its implications. Despite these advances, however, much of this literature is fragmented, anchored in separate disciplines, and often lacking in broad context and historical perspective. And although much of the empirical research on plea bargaining has a distinct reform orientation or offers important implications for reform, this is often implicit or presented in a way that is neither convincing nor useful to practitioners.

An analysis of the strategies of disputing pursued by the residents of a polyethnic American urban neighborhood reveals that they frequently resort to courts to manage interpersonal and crime-related disputes. Because the legal machinery available to them rarely resolves these disputes, however, the court functions as a sanction rather than a dispute settlement forum. In the absence of effective alternative informal or formal modes of resolving disputes, disputants resort to violence, avoidance, and endurance, a pattern of tolerating ongoing conflict.

Empirical tests of Durkheim's legal theories can neither confirm nor refute their central hypotheses. Rather than serving to substantiate or refute theoretical propositions, empirical evidence is best conceptualized as providing for the specification and elaboration of a research program. In the case of Durkheim's legal theories, the programmatic effort is to use social science to help resolve the major social, moral, and legal tensions characteristic of modern society. In this light, Durkheim's legal theories are viewed as comparative and contextual, containing insights into the relationship between law and the social constitution of morality.

The place of law in the state is largely the result of political struggle, which can be understood better by looking at social and political rather than cultural variables. Informed by Weberian models of legitimacy and political structure and by Marxist concepts of class conflict, the article analyzes efforts to establish an Indonesian “law state” in the context of middle-class assaults on patrimonial assumptions of political order. It concentrates primarily on issues that arose in the consideration of a new law on judicial organization and authority. Groups that favored fundamental political and legal change focused on the judiciary as a means of gaining access to and influence in the state and of imposing limits on the exercise of political power. They failed, but the struggle goes on, complicated by strains within the growing middle stratum of the population.

Theories about law have focused upon: 1) law's integrative function in society, 2) its role in maintaining dominant group ascendancy, and 3) its utilization by subordinate groups as a “jurisprudence of insurgency.” It is argued here that these three functions of law intermingle in distinctive fashion from society to society, in part because of the different perceptions of law that dominant and subordinate groups hold. Vying subgroups have different beliefs about the degree to which law is: 1) manipulable, 2) manipulated, and 3) necessary. Such perceptions must be charted if intrasocietal politics is to be understood. This article traces perceptions of law in one highly inegalitarian relationship in one complex society—male-female relations in Morocco.

For most of the history of the common law, Anglo-American courts did not encourage guilty pleas but actively discouraged them. Plea bargaining emerged as a significant practice only after the American Civil War, and it generally met with strong disapproval on the part of appellate courts. This practice nevertheless became a dominant method of resolving criminal cases at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, and it attracted significant attention and criticism as a result of crime commission studies in the 1920s. In recent years, American criminal courts have become even more dependent on the guilty plea, but the good press that plea bargaining currently enjoys in legal and social science circles is a very recent development. This article explores changes in guilty plea practices and in attitudes toward the guilty plea from the Middle Ages to the present.

The confirmation votes on the fourteen most controversial Supreme Court nominees of the twentieth century were analyzed. The data supported the conclusion that Senate opposition to Supreme Court nominees is due primarily to a predicted dissatisfaction with the policy-relevant voting of the nominee after confirmation. The policy position of senators supporting confirmation was found to be significantly different from the policy position of senators opposing confirmation even after controls were introduced for the political party and ethical standards position of senators.

This paper assesses the impact of changes in products liability law by measuring liability insurance expenditures. Expenditure for liability insurance premiums is used as an index of resource redistribution from sellers of defective products to individuals who have been harmed by such products. Using multiple regression, comparative state data are analyzed for the period immediately prior to the enactment of the Consumer Products Safety Act in 1972, when doctrines concerning manufacturers' liability for defective products were changing in the direction of stricter negligence standards and thus greater liability for the manufacturer. Three types of products liability policies were in effect among the 50 states at that time. They were strict liability in tort, negligence plus warranty with no privity requirement, and negligence plus warranty with privity of contract required. Data from states with strict liability policies are compared with data from states where the negligence plus warranty standards were used. In states where manufacturers were subject to greater liability for defective products, more money was spent on liability insurance. This example from one area of tort law shows that common law decisions can have important social effects, and suggests a method for measuring those effects.

A sample survey of 800 Oregon adults showed that nearly one in four admit they practice evasion. Higher percentages were found for people who were young, with low income, male, and who believed their chance of getting caught was low. Occupational prestige and belief that the tax system is unfair were unrelated to noncompliance. Differential opportunities to practice evasion is a promising explanation, and the deterrent effect of penalties seems uncertain. The evidence suggests conceptualizing tax evasion as a white-collar crime by the nature of the violation and not by the characteristics of the offender.

This paper, using mostly data drawn from a study of the criminal work of the Superior Court of Alameda County, California, from 1880 on, explores the history of plea bargaining. Plea bargaining, it turns out, was used in Alameda County from at least 1880, though it was by no means as common in the late 19th century as it is today. There is also ample evidence of “implicit plea bargaining,” that is, pleading guilty in expectation of a lighter sentence. The data from this study suggest that plea bargaining cannot be explained simply as a reaction to crowded court conditions. It is connected with structural and social changes in criminal justice, in particular, the rise of professional police and prosecutors.

Voters rarely take time to inform themselves about the candidates and issues in judicial elections. Uninformed, voters must rely upon some kind of voting cue, such as political party affiliation, incumbency, name familiarity, or the like, to help them cast their ballots in these low-salience elections. This article examines the effects these cues have in determining voter behavior in partisan and nonpartisan elections for state supreme court justices. The results show that party labels structure voter behavior along partisan lines. Without a party cue, however, voting decisions are relatively unstructured and, as examples show, often produce idiosyncratic results. The implications of these findings for the continuing debate over judicial selection are then explored.