This study explores two issues about police legitimacy. The first issue is the relative importance of police legitimacy in shaping public support of the police and policing activities, compared to the importance of instrumental judgments about (1) the risk that people will be caught and sanctioned for wrongdoing, (2) the performance of the police in fighting crime, and/or (3) the fairness of the distribution of police services. Three aspects of public support for the police are examined: public compliance with the law, public cooperation with the police, and public willingness to support policies that empower the police. The second issue is which judgments about police activity determine people's views about the legitimacy of the police. This study compares the influence of people's judgments about the procedural justice of the manner in which the police exercise their authority to the influence of three instrumental judgments: risk, performance, and distributive fairness. Findings of two surveys of New Yorkers show that, first, legitimacy has a strong influence on the public's reactions to the police, and second, the key antecedent of legitimacy is the fairness of the procedures used by the police. This model applies to both white and minority group residents.

This research examines confessions and criminal case disposition in China. It describes how wider economic reforms in China and subsequent changes in its legal system may have affected the nature and consequence of criminal confessions. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of a sample of 1,009 criminal court cases reveal that the majority of offenders confessed to their crime and that confession is associated with less severe punishments (e.g., lower risks for imprisonment, shorter sentences). Changes in the nature of confession and its impact on criminal court practices are also examined before and after legal reforms in the mid-1990s. These context-specific findings are then discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the interrelationships between legal structure, legal culture, and case disposition in communitarian-based societies.

Lower courts in the United States are generally responsive to specific precedents and trends in the decisionmaking of their judicial superiors. In this article, we ask why. We test one popular explanation—that compliance can be attributed to judges' fear of having their decisions reversed—through an analysis of search and seizure cases decided in the U.S. Courts of Appeals between 1961 and 1990. Since the Supreme Court cannot reverse a decision unless it agrees to review it, we ask whether circuit judges are more likely to decide as the Supreme Court would be expected to when they face cases that are otherwise more likely to be reviewed by the Court. Finding that they are not, we conclude that fear of reversal cannot account for widespread circuit court compliance in these cases, nor, presumably, more generally. More broadly, our findings point to the importance of factors apart from supervisors and the threat of sanctions in determining subordinates' compliance.

This research is an exploratory test of two hypotheses emerging from debates about how police behavior may influence domestic violence victim reporting. From a procedural justice perspective, victims should be more apt to report victimization when previous encounters with police are viewed as procedurally fair. From a distributive justice perspective, denying victims their preferred outcome may discourage future police utilization. We find that satisfaction with police is related to both distributive and procedural justice but that re-utilization of police is conditioned by preferred outcome. Specifically, if the offender was arrested in accordance with victim preference, the victim is significantly more apt to utilize police in the future.

Research on the U.S. Supreme Court suggests that judges' decisions are influenced by their policy preferences. Moreover, judges behave strategically to facilitate outcomes that conform as close as possible to those preferences. We seek to generalize this assertion to judicial actors in two very diverse social systems: Canada in the post-Charter years and apartheid-era South Africa. Specifically, we analyze the use of panel assignments by the chief justices in both countries. We find that chief justices do behave strategically. Chief justices in both countries do not assign judges to panels randomly but rather are influenced by the tenure and ideology of the sitting judges and the issues presented in the case.

Ethnographic study of American poverty from the Progressive Era to the present has provided a sympathetic window on the lives of the poor. Ethnographers bear witness to the world of need, oppression, and survival, but the best ethnography has always provided more than the stark facts of life in poverty. Carol Stack, Elliott Liebow, Joyce Ladner, and earlier generations of scholars helped us do more than put faces on the poor; their mission was to understand poverty in its social and institutional context—how the institutions of a democratic society create poverty and limit the capacity of the poor to participate fully in social life. Their scholarship grew first from a powerful moral and political principle: unless such institutions “work” for the poor as well as the better off, we cannot say that the poor have received an equal opportunity to become autonomous, successful participants in our society. Second, their scholarship exposes the myth of universal citizenship rights in the American welfare state, revealing such rights to be contingent upon identity.