THE HELPING HAND OF THE LAW: POLICE CONTROL OF CITIZENS ON REQUEST*

This study examines how patrol officers respond to citizens' requests that officers control another citizen—by advising or persuading them, warning or threatening them, making them leave someone alone or leave the scene, or arresting them. Data are drawn from field observations conducted in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1996 and St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1997. Officers granted the request for the most restrictive form of control requested by the citizen in 70% of the 396 observed cases. Several factors were modeled to determine their influence on officers' decisions to grant or deny the most restrictive request. These factors include legal considerations, need, factors that attenuate the impact of law or need, the social relationship between the requester and target of control, and personal characteristics of the officer. Multivariate analysis shows that the most influential factors were legal considerations. When citizens requested an arrest, the likelihood that the police would be responsive dropped considerably. However, as the evidence of a legal violation against the targeted citizen increased, so did the odds of an arrest. Officers were less likely to grant the requests of citizens having a close relationship with the person targeted for control, disrespectful of the police, or intoxicated or mentally ill. The race, wealth, and organization affiliation of citizen adversaries had little impact on the police decision. Male officers, officers with fewer years of police experience, and officers with a stronger proclivity to community policing, had significantly greater odds of giving citizens what they requested. The implications of the findings for research and policy are discussed.     

PARENTAL ATTACHMENTS AND DELINQUENCY*

Using the 1972 National Survey of Youth, we analyze attachment to mother and father along several dimensions (i.e., intimacy of communication, affectional identification, supervision, and family activities). We test two hypotheses: (1) as long as a child is strongly attached to one parent, strong ties to the other parent play an insignificant role in reducing delinquency further and (2) single-parent homes are not associated with delinquency as long as the child is strongly attached to the custodial parent. Generally, we find that children who are strongly attached to both parents have a lower probability of self-reported delinquency than children who are strongly attached to only one parent. Further, children living in single-parent homes who are strongly attached to the custodial parent generally have a greater probability of committing delinquent acts than children living in intact homes who are strongly attached to both parents.     

Rules of Power and the Power of Rules

Abstract
The paper describes at length and then discusses critically Frederick Schauer's analysis of rules in his recent book Playing By the RuZes . For most of the book Schauer discusses rules in general, and only at the end talks about legal rules in particular. The chief message of Schauer's analysis is that rules permit, and even constitute, a particular kind of decision-making, one that quite deliberately insulates the decision-taker from considerations of what would be in the circumstances the best justified decision to take. Rules are thus for Schauer devices for the allocation of decision-making power: The effect of A delegating to B the power to decide by a set of rules devised by A is that A retains much control over B 's decision-making. Schauer canvasses the claims of what he calls "presumptive positivism" to be a theory of law which embodies such a view of legal rules. In his criticism, the author compares Schauer's view with Joseph Raz's notion of legal rules as exclusionary reasons. The author then compares "presumptive positivism" with some other recent versions of positivism and the idea of rules as devices for the allocation of power with theories of law in the Critical Legal Studies movement.     

THE CENTRALIZATION AND FRAGMENTATION OF SOUTH AFRICA'S DOMINANT PARTY SYSTEM

South Africa's first democratic election of 1994 provided thebasis for the African National Congress (ANC) to replace theformerly ruling National Party (NP) as the country's dominantparty. The new dominance was initially established by the ANC'smajority position within the postelection coalition Governmentof National Unity. Since the election, however, the ANC's dominancehas begun to be extended by a centralization of control exercisedthrough the machinery of state, notably through four processes:the rewriting of the transitional interim constitution and thepromulgation of a new constitution which, inter alia, abolishesthe necessity for coalition government after the next election;the attempted containment of autonomy of the ANC's structureswhich have been established at the level of the new provinces;the exercise of party discipline within parliament and somecurtailment of the government's accountability to parliament;and, fourthly, the imposition of administrative and financialdiscipline upon the provinces. These processes have taken placewithin a context of a fragmentation and fissure of Oppositionparty forces, which in the immediate future will only furtherenhance the ANC's dominance, despite some indication that thatparty is itself faced by a declining level of popular support.     

A socio-legal quest: from jurisprudence to sociology of law and back again

How should socio-legal studies view jurisprudence, the legal theory of jurists? Jurisprudence's task is to promote law as a socially valuable idea taking various forms in different times and places. As a value-oriented and context-focused enterprise, it should draw on the social sciences to make its inquiries relevant in a changing socio-legal world. Correspondingly, socio-legal research needs theory to link its empirical inquiries to an overall sense of what can be hoped for from law as a social phenomenon. In different ways, jurisprudence and socio-legal inquiry should help to theorize the nature of legal practice and legal experience. They are necessarily distinct enterprises with contrasting orientations, but they can aid each other in important ways.