AMICI: Newsletter of the Sociology of Law Section American Sociological Association Volume 5, Number 1 (Fall, 1997) FROM THE CHAIR Another round of proposed changes in section governance coincided with the beginning of the section's program planning cycle in August. While the ongoing reengineering of the ASA-section relationship merits our close attention and concern, we should also use the occasion to think about and plan even more carefully the section activities we value and which make fighting for continuing exist-ence as a section important. I want to comment on both of these issues and their connection to each other. At the annual section meeting, Lauren Edelman and I reported on last year's changes in the relationship between the ASA and its sections. New policies include limitations which affect the substantive mission of the sections as well as fiscal accountability and co-ordination within the ASA. Some of these changes have provoked sharp responses from the sections. Arthur Stinchcombe's stinging criticism of the new rules, published in this newsletter, raised questions about the reasoning contained in a Committee on Sections report which explained that the new rules were adopted "to best serve the entire discipline and all of its constituent parts," and "not merely because ...sections 'lack corporate status.'" (Council Minutes, January, 1997.) Professor Stinchcombe argued that some of the changes in the ASA's section policies show little respect for the spirit of independent inquiry and interpretation in social science. The ongoing reconstruction of ASA-section relationship includes adoption of a rule which expressly reserves issuing public policy positions for the representatives of the ASA. Further, "to encourage strong and vital sections," the minimum membership requirement has been raised from 200 to 300 (a threshold which will be of concern to the Sociology of Law section). The minimum may be waived for a section which "demonstrates strong viability and disciplinary contributions," criteria to be interpreted by the Committee on Sections and the Council. Other changes include mandating some section bylaws, requiring approval for section publications and discouragement of new section awards. Simultaneously, the Association has undertaken other actions involving the fiscal relationship between sections and the ASA. One of these change, raising section dues, may reflect reasonable costs incurred on behalf of sections but will make achieving the new section membership minimum more diffi cult. At the annual meeting between section officers and representatives of the Committee on Sections, members of the Committee (who are appointed by the Council, not elected by the sections), expressed the ASA's continuing concerns about sections --dissipation of symbolic capital, mounting section expenses, section members who are not full Association members. As the Stinchcombe critique warns, with respect to these serious and appropriate concerns, ASA does not represent the only view of the profession's interests. Expressing strong continuing reservations shared by section leaders, Lauren Edelman proposed a resolution asking the ASA's Council to reopen the minimum membership policy in order to restore the 200 member threshold and to add specific criteria establishing section viability, including an annual section meeting, contested elections, and publication of a newsletter. Her resolution received unanimous support from section officers (one abstention). Our section will benefit from reflection on some of the issues raised by these changes. What is our section's purpose and its value to its members and the ASA? While the ASA denies that the recent reengineering of its relationship to its sections is corporate in inspiration, a great deal of thought seems to have been given to the trouble that sections cause and very little to the reasons for section existence. We are a very young section, and memories of the reasons for founding the section should still be fresh. According to some founders, the section provides a home base, a means of co-ordinating their presence at the meetings with others with similar interests, and a guarantee, as one founder put it, that there will be at least a few panels of great interest. These reasons are likely to influence the attendance of more senior members of the profession who are interested in new research and continuing relationships with colleagues. The ASA's cost/benefit analysis may have underestimated the value of sections, because it appears that the founding of our section contributes to continuing attendance at the annual meetings. The continuing connections among section members attract attendance, but not only because section members share similar interests. A related attraction of the section is its facilitation of connections between the sociology of law and the sociology of other fields of study. The section has begun a process by which many members have become more connected to other intellectual currents in the field. The presence of section members at the annual meetings provides a network for discussion and reflection, for particularizing, disseminating and challenging the achievements in theory and research in other areas of in-quiry. Conversely, having made such connections, section members are more likely to bring their work to bear on a wider range of problems, including research and theory outside sociology of law. Embedded in the ASA's treatment of its sections may be an implication that section "proliferation" leads to fragmentation of the profession. Yet, in the founding of our section we find the opposite to be true. Connecting members to the central concerns of the field continues to be an important focus of section collegiality as well as the section's annual program. These goals--sharing interests and engagement with other intellectual currents --provide a starting point for section activities. The section's autonomy should be defended in the policy making councils of ASA so that it can pursue the interests of the field as a whole as well as the interests of section members. Both are best served by section activities linking our particular research interests to wider currents in the field of sociology. During the past two years, the program committee of the section has begun to form relationships with other sections which share overlapping substantive interests--Crime, Law and Deviance; Organizations, Occupations, and Work; Culture; Gender; Comparative and Historical; among others. Each year the committee has succeeded in collaborating with at least one other section. While we have not had an opportunity for widespread discussion of this strategy, much less for revisiting the section's founding goals, this would be an opportune moment to examine both in view of the ASA's challenge to its sections. I invite a continuing conversation among members of the section about these issues and others that members may consider important for the continuing development of the section. Of course, the pages of Amici, as well as the section's listserv, are available for conducting a discussion among those who wish to participate. Frank Munger, Chair ************************************************************************* In Memoriam: H. Laurence Ross I knew Larry Ross before I knew Larry Ross; which is to say I met him through his fine book, Settled Out of Court, long before I met him in person. Settled Out of Court was an exemplary socio-legal study at a time when good empirical socio-legal research was scarce; today when there is an abundance of such research, Larry Ross's book still repays the reading. Like Larry, the book is straightforward and open; it says what it has to say so clearly and without pretense that it is easy to overlook the important contributions it makes. It shows us how what one might think of as "day to day" tort law really works, and so is an important study of the law in action. It takes us back-stage, into an insurance company claims adjustment department, where but for Larry's special ability to secure access, few of us could have ventured. Most importantly and interestingly it reveals how bureaucracies that deal with the law transform and simplify it to meet organizational ends. The pressure insurance adjusters face to close files, we learn, can be more important than the threat of litigation in securing generous settlements for small claims. Formulas, like 3 times the special damages replace the careful case-specific --evaluations tort law contemplates in determining the damages potential plaintiffs collect. But law, we also learned, was not completely swallowed by bu-reaucracy; nuisance value claims did not always succeed and strong cases almost always resulted in payments. And perhaps as importantly we learned from this book that studying the civil law in action can be just as interesting as studying the criminal side. Larry's other major work, the series of studies of drunk driving and deterrence that took up much of his time during the middle years of his professional life are quite different from the almost ethnographic study he did of insurance adjusters. Here he used data he collected first in the U.S. and later abroad to examine the effects of various types of crackdowns against drunk driving. He analyzed these data using time series techniques and again provided us with simple, direct and persuasive statements of what he found. I finally met Larry Ross when he served as Director of the NSF's then fledgling program in Law & Social Science. The early chairs of the program were, as I remember them, mainly law professors who allocated funds without an advisory panel and too of ten to projects by law professors with little social science content. Larry established the first Law and Social Science Panel and with this took a giant step both in developing the program and in making it a respectable counterpart of the established disciplinary programs at the NSF. He asked me to serve on the first panel he established. This was truly enjoyable service. Other members, as I recall them, were Shari Diamond, Mark Galanter, Al Klevoric, Barbara Yngvesson and Frank Zimring. Proposal loads were low then, everyone could read every proposal, and we discussed them, as if in a seminar, usually feeling good about how well we collectively would have done had we written the proposal. But we did find good proposals to fund, and perhaps more importantly at our first meeting established the policy that doctrinal scholarship, the mainspring of legal scholarship, would not, however good it might promise to be, qualify for science funding. Larry was, of course, our leader in this. He was also our social leader, unfailingly pleasant and always good company. He usually chose the restaurants we ate at, and on one occasion arranged for us to hear the barbershop group he sang with. Barbershop singing was the one private passion that he loved to talk about. Perhaps because I have not seen Larry for a few years, it was a real shock to learn of his death. Whenever I ran into him he always had some new project or the revisiting of an old one to talk about. Though he was older than me, he always somehow seemed young. Thinking back I realize that I did not know Larry well, but I always liked the person I knew, and I and several generations of my students benefited from his scholarship. Richard Lempert *********************************************************************** The Lawyerization of Legal Sociology by Donald Black At the 1997 meeting of the American Sociological Association in Toronto, I observed that the Section on the Sociology of Law has no distinctive mission. It is not sufficiently scientific. Nor is it sufficiently sociological. Instead, its members often address questions closer to the concerns of lawyers, especially law professors. Many seem to be amateur lawyers. The Section is thus only a smaller version of the Law and Society Association, an organization similarly unscientific in orientation. Why, then, should it exist? Subsequently I was invited to elaborate my remarks for this publication. I do so with a few personal reflections on the recent evolution of legal sociology. Science as Deviant Behavior When I first explored legal sociology at Yale Law School in the late 60's and early 70's, I was amazed and challenged by the simple fact that law had largely escaped the jurisdiction of science. Legal sociology was primarily practical. Legal sociologists subordinated themselves to lawyers. They embraced the conception of law found in the law schools: a body of rules and principles that logically imply how cases should be handled. Their work was moral in meaning: the handling of cases was evaluated--not explained. Legal sociology lacked its own agenda. It was not autonomous. Understandably, therefore, law professors regarded sociologists as mere methodologists without a field of their own, hired hands who could draw samples, write questionnaires, calculate statistics, and the like. I wondered what might happen if we were to examine law from an uncompromisingly scientific point of view. What if we were totally concerned with ordering facts? Could we study legal variation like any other kind of variation in the natural world? Could we develop a body of general theory that would predict and explain legal behavior throughout the social universe? Could we predict and explain, for example, the variable application of legal authority, such as when courts are used, who wins in court, or what happens to the loser? What might be discovered? What if the behavior of law were to prove as predictable as anything else? How might this alter the prevailing conception of law itself? The possibility of subjecting law to science was exciting to a degree difficult to exaggerate. The law professors at Yale were skeptical, if not condescending or openly scornful. They could not imagine a sociology of law completely independent of lawyers. They were mystified by the notion that a sociologist might ask new and distinctive questions about law. They scoffed at the possibility of a sociological theory of law. Some literally laughed in my face or refused to speak to me. But what did they know? They were deeply ignorant of science. Obviously they would cling to their centuries-old conception of law. They would fight to protect their intellectual territory and oppose a genuine sociology of their subject every step of the way. But I believed in sociology, and I did not doubt that sociology could conquer law. Make no mistake: To be scientific in an unscientific field is highly disruptive. It is deviant, a form of rebellion--epistemological rebellion. If successful, it overturns reality. Ironically, however, those who wage war against modern science--especially social science--commonly claim it is a discredited philosophy of knowledge called positivism. They also claim it is conservative. They presume to be enlightened, even avant-garde, while they portray scientists as unsophisticated and old-fashioned. Yet exactly the opposite is true: Virtually all the opponents of science I have encountered, in law schools or elsewhere, are embarrassingly unenlightened about the history, philosophy, and practice of science. They do not understand, for instance, that the best scientists are dreamers obsessed by projects regarded as impossible by everyone else. They do not appreciate the radically creative spirit of science, the clear and present danger it perpetually poses to established ideas, its continual reinvention of reality itself. For half a millennium opponents of science have been conservatives--epistemological conservatives who usually hold political, religious, and academic power as well. They always join forces against the scientists. Law professors--across all political and moral persuasions--likewise join forces against the idea that law is part of the natural world and subject to science like anything else. My theory of the behavior of law is therefore despised and rejected in law schools more than any-where. It is an outrage, as outrageous as my new theory of the behavior of God among believers (Black 1995:856-857). Heresy. I began teaching the soci-ology of law at Yale Law School, and soon wrote "The boundaries of legal sociology," a manifesto calling for a self-consciously scientific sociology of law (Black 1972). The editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal grudgingly published it, but nonetheless found my value-neutral stance incompre-hensible and repugnant. He speculated that I was "either completely crazy or a Nazi." One prominent professor of jurisprudence pompously declared that it was the worst paper he had ever read. Many others were similarly negative. Yet even before the article appeared, my ideas attracted a small following at the Law School. Law professors asked me for reading lists and studied Durkheim and Weber. I tutored them in sociology. Several converted to my vision of the field and began calling themselves legal sociologists. They joined the Law and Society Association. The atmosphere was heady. It appeared that a truly sociological sociology of law--a new branch of the science of social life--was emerging. I believed this would prove to be the most important development in legal scholarship during the past century--if not ever. I still do. Sociology as Conformity But what happened? What became of legal sociology after its early progress at Yale? I must conclude that, scientifically speaking, it has been a failure. Why? Not merely be-cause so few legal sociologists have made significant contributions of a scientific nature, such as theoretical formulations that are testable, general, simple, true, and original (see Black 1995). No. This might be forgiven in a science so young. The failure is far worse: Legal sociology lost its dream. It lost the faith to achieve the impossible, and it lost the courage to take risks. It retreated to the preoccupations of law professors: practical matters, matters of public policy, and other matters beyond the jurisdiction of science. Nearly all the Yale converts to legal sociology reverted to being lawyers. And several of the social scientists elected intellectual surgery: They went to law school and got a law degree. Nothing could be more scientifically incapacitating. Originally the primary proponent of the field, the Law and Society Association increasingly neglected legal sociology as well. A new policy brought unprecedented growth: Lawyerization. Increasingly the Association included law professors at its meetings. Increasingly it encouraged lawyerly discourse. Increasingly its culture became non-scientific, even antis cientific. But this is normal in a lawyerized world: Law professors have no more training or involvement in science than, say, art or language professors. They do not seek to understand variation in reality, the fundamental problem of science. If concerned with reality at all, they are practical and moralistic, not scientific. In my years of teaching legal sociology at three law schools (Yale, Harvard, and Virginia), I have found hardly any serious interest in the scientific study of law by anyone, faculty or students. They do not wish to predict and explain the behavior of law as a naturally phenomenon. They do not wish to hear about it. On the contrary, they find the very idea of a scientific theory of how law actually behaves to be extremely disturbing--far more so than any critical or political claim about law. But, as noted earlier, this too is normal, as normal as the hostility of religious authorities to the science of Copernicus or Darwin. In fact, I have long regarded the hostility of law professors to my work as an encouraging sign: It suggests I am succeeding. The best science infuriates. It inflicts a new conception of reality on everyone, including the experts. It disturbs their universe. Many nonlawyers who study law, including many self-styled legal sociologists, are indifferent or hostile to science as well. Like those who went to law school, they lawyerized themselves. They conform to the expectations of law professors. They pursue justice instead of knowledge, value judgments instead of discoveries, interpretations instead of explanations. They are epistemologically conservative. Their results are scientifically trivial and irrelevant. To this degree, legal sociology is a delusion. It is merely that which is so labeled. It is hardly sociology at all. As legal sociology withered away in the Law and Society Association, serious sociologists and their students felt increasingly out of place at its meetings. They discontinued their memberships and otherwise expressed disapproval and disappointment. I therefore agreed to help found a Section on the Sociology of Law in the American Sociological Association. I thought it might provide a new organizational home for legal sociology. But I was wrong. The lawyerization of the field had spread further than I realized. Largely without lawyers of its own, the Section has to a large extent lawyerized itself. It welcomes practical and critical perspectives, muckraking and moralism. Its discourse is not distinctively scientific and sociological. Thus here the law professors have nothing to fear: Here they still own the law. Nothing new is likely to happen. References Black, Donald 1972 "The boundaries of legal sociology." Yale Law Journal 81:1086-1100. 1995 "The epistemology of pure sociology." Law & Social Inquiry 20:829-870. Acknowledgments: I thank Matthew Silberman for inviting me to write this statement and Roberta Senechal de la Roche for commenting on earlier drafts. ********************************************************************** Student Paper Competition The Sociology of Law Section announces its annual student paper competition. The Section will award prizes for the best graduate and undergraduate submissions. Papers may address any topic in the Sociology of Law. Papers may be reports of original empirical or theoretical scholarship, or analytic evaluations of existing research or theory. Entries should be double-spaced and not exceed 50 pages in length (including all tables, appen-dices, and references). All entries should follow ASA style. Papers must have been written while the student was a graduate or undergraduate student. Papers that have been accepted for publication or published at the time of the competition submission are not eligible. The submission deadline is April 30, 1998. Please encourage students whose work you find prizeworthy to send 6 copies of their paper to: Jerry Van Hoy Department of Sociology and Anthropology Purdue University 1365 Stone Hall West Lafayette, IN 47907-1365 e-mail: vanhoy@sri.soc.purdue.edu phone: 765-496-2225 **************************************************************** Distinguished Book Award The Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association seeks nominations of books that make a significant contribution to the Sociology of Law for the Section's Distinguished Book Award. Nominated books must have a publication date of 1996 or 1997. Nominators should send a brief letter describing the book's contribution and have a copy of the book sent to: 1. Joachim Savelsberg (Award Committee Chair), Department of Sociology, 909 Social Sciences Tower, University of 2. Jo Dixon, Department of Sociology, New York University, 269 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10003 3. Wendy Espeland, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60208-1330 4. Robert Kidder, Department of Sociology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122. Complete nomination materials must be received by March 1, 1998 to be considered for this year's award. ****************************************************************** Call for Papers WORK AND OCCUPATIONS invites you to submit your manuscripts for peer review and possible publication. Now in its 24th volume, WO is a scholar ly sociological quarterly that publishes original research articles in the sociology of work, employment, labor force and labor markets, and occupations and professions. Consult the lastest issue of WO for manuscript formatting and submission instructions. Manuscripts will not be returned. Send three copies of your paper to: Daniel B. Cornfield, Editor WORK AND OCCUPATIONS Box 1811, Station B Department of Sociology Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37235. Inquiries may be directed to the Editor at this intenet address: CORNFIDB@CTRVAX.VANDERBILT.EDU ************************************************************* Call for Participation The Law and Society Association has issued a Call for Participation for its 1998 Annual Meeting to be held June 4-7 in Snowmass Village at Aspen, Colorado. The theme is "Making Connections Across Disciplines, Theories, and Methods". For a copy of the Call and information on submission of proposals contact the LSA Executive Office by e-mail, lsa@legal.umass.edu; fax 413-545-1640; phone 413-545-4617; website www.umass.edu/legal/lsa; or by mail to: Executive Office, Law and Society Association, Hampshire House, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA 01003.