Law & Society Review 

About: Law & Society Review is an academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Supreme court. It has an ISSN identifier of 0023-9216. Over the lifetime, 1933 publications have been published receiving 85580 citations. The journal is also known as: body of law & legal system.

The Role of Procedural Justice and Legitimacy in Shaping Public Support for Policing

Abstract: 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.

Legal Cynicism and (Subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences

Abstract: We advance here a neighborhood-level perspective on racial differences in legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and the tolerance of various forms of deviance. Our basic premise is that structural characteristics of neighborhoods explain variations in normative orientations about law, criminal justice, and deviance that are often confounded with the demographic characteristics of individuals. Using a multilevel approach that permits the decomposition of variance within and between neighborhoods, we tested hypotheses on a recently completed study of 8,782 residents of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago. Contrary to received wisdom, we find that African Americans and Latinos are less tolerant of deviance -including violence- than whites. At the same time, neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage display elevated levels of legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and tolerance of deviance unaccounted for by sociodemographic composition and crime-rate differences. Concentrated disadvantage also helps explain why African Americans are more cynical about law and dissatisfied with the police. Neighborhood context is thus important for resolving the seeming paradox that estrangement from legal norms and agencies of criminal justice, especially by blacks, is compatible with the personal condemnation of deviance.

The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming …

Abstract: The sociology of law has been dominated by studies of officials and formal institutions and their work products. Studying the emergence and transformation of disputes means studying a social process as it occurs. It means studying the conditions under which injuries are peceived or go unnoticed and how people respond to the experience of injustice and conflict. This chapter provides a framework within which the emergence and transformation of disputes can be described. It describes the study of transformations with the belief that the antecedents of disputing are as problematic and as interesting as the disputes that may ultimately emerge. The chapter begins by setting the stages in the development of disputes and the activities connecting one stage to the next. Trouble, problems, personal and social dislocation are everyday occurrences. Learning more about the existence, absence, or reversal of these basic transformations increase our understanding of the disputing process and our ability to evaluate dispute processing institutions.