Year: 1976
Type: editorial
Abstract: In a notable addition to the small number of broad-based cross cultural studies of legal institutions, ("Political and Psychological Correlates of Conflict Management: A Cross Cultural Study"), Klaus-Friedrich Koch and John Sodergren identify conditions associated with the presence of differentiated adjudicatory institutions.In contrast to this hologeistic perspective Allan Shapiro ("Law in the Kibbutz: A Reappraisal") and Richard Schwartz exchange views on the emergence of specialized legal institutions in the specific historic setting of Israel's collective communities.In his reassessment of Schwartz's (1954) classic study of social control in two Israeli communities.Bhapiro supplies new data on social control in the kibbutz.Their divergent readings of that data seem implicated in disparate theoretical characterizations of legal institutions, specifically of the relation of specialization to the distinctively legal character of institutions.These papers address the circumstances under which specialized and/or distinctively legal institutions arise; the other papers in this issue cluster around the effects of such institutions on the implementation of public policy and the ways in which people use such institutions in processing disputes, To a literature which is heavily weighted toward documenting and diagnosing the failures of legal measures, Leon Robertson's "An Instance of Effective Legal Regulation: Motorcyclist Helmet and Daytime Headlamp Laws" adds a straightforward success story.It is a double success: the new rules not only succeed in regulating behavior, but this regulation appears to achieve the goals for which it was enacted.This instance of the "triumph of law"! throws into starting relief the difficulties in implementing new legal policy described in the papers by Church and by Ross.Thomas Church ("Plea Bargains, Concessions and the Courts: Analysis of a Quasi-Exp,eriment") neatly displays the mechanisms by which a pattern of bargained dispositions survived an attempt to proscribe it.Church's account complements the conclusion of Heumann (1975) that plea bargaining is not explainable by caseload pressure, but represents an expression of the fundamental strategic concerns of the actors.Church's
Source: Law & Society Review
Author: Marc Galanter
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4400254103