Black's Theory on the Behavior of Law Revisited IV: the Behavior of Qing Law

Black's theory on The Behavior of Law (1976) predicts and explains the behavior of law with five social variables: stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and social control. This research project tested one aspect of Black's theory—the relationship between law and culture—with historical data from the Qianlong reign (1736–1796) in the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) of China. The research question posed was whether and to what extent the cultured people in Qing-China were subjected to a different and more favorable judicial process in speech crime prosecution cases? Two hypotheses were tested: (1) The judicial process was compromised in favor of the cultured. (2) The emperor and the officials were more involved and invested more judicial resources in the processing of cultured cases.The testing of Black's theory was achieved by the analysis of 68 speech crime case files from emperor Qianlong's reign for evidence of favorable treatment of the cultured. The testing was conducted with the cultural status of the speech crime defendants as an independent variable, seriousness of crime as a control variable, and the Qing judicial process as a dependent variable. The concept of law was operationalized as Confucian ethics, emperor's justice policy, Qing law, and judicial practices. The concept of culture was operationalized as education-official standing, i.e., the cultured being officials, gentry, and scholars and the less/non-cultured being students, commoners and eccentrics.The findings of this research show that the cultured were afforded a more protective judicial process. Specifically, the judicial process was compromised in favor of the cultured and the emperor and officials devoted more judicial resources (time and effort) in the processing and disposition of the cultured cases. The findings provided for a first confirmation of Black's theory of law in China, i.e., that the cultured people were treated to more law in the Qing courts.     

Where There's Smoke There's Fire

The heavy, acrid smoke wafted all around. The stench was steady and overpowering. There was no escape.     

A Norms Approach to Jury "Nullification:" Interests, Values, and Scripts

Juries and other lay tribunals are often justified because they leaven the law with community norms. Unfortunately, we do not have a particularly good theory of when and how juries substitute their normative judgments for the law. A first step in developing such a theory is to examine the nature of norms and the way jurors bring normative judgments to their task. In this article I compare and contrast different understandings of norms that currently are in vogue in the social sciences and then use these approaches to develop a more systematic understanding of when juries do and when they do not substitute their normative judgment for that of the law.     

Conspicuous by Its Absence

This year, I’m told, was a bit different:in the interest of not insulting millions of struggling Americans, Santa andhis reindeer touched down very lightly in the United States last month. New Year’sEve,