Herbert M. Kritzer

Jurisprudential Regimes in Supreme Court Decision Making

We theorize that if law matters in Supreme Court decision making, it matters not as a mechanistic force that dictates decisions, but as an institutional construct created by justices who possess political attitudes. Jurisprudential regimes identify relevant case factors and/or set the level of scrutiny or balancing the justices will use. These jurisprudential regimes have the potential to make a significant difference in the decisions of the justices. We identify a candidate jurisprudential regime, content-neutrality, which appears to govern the general area of free expression law. The Court applies the strictest standard of review to regulations of expression that target the content or viewpoint of expression. Relying on a series of statistical tests using logistic regression, we find that the justices take seriously this jurisprudential regime.

Legal advocacy : lawyers and nonlawyers at work

Legal Advocacy describes lawyers and nonlawyer advocates at work in four different legal settings: unemployment compensation claims appeals, Social Security disability appeals, state tax appeals, and labor grievance arbitrations. The analysis shows clearly that nonlawyers can be effective advocates and, in some situations, more effective than many lawyers. Combining an examination of case outcomes with a systematic observation of advocates in the hearing room, Kritzer provides a compelling portrait of their work and a solid basis for understanding the differences in the effectiveness of advocates with different training.

THE INFLUENCE OF LAW IN THE SUPREME COURT'S SEARCH-AND-SEIZURE JURISPRUDENCE

In this research note/replication, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article to the jurisprudential area of search and seizure. Given the centrality of this area of Supreme Court decision making in the core studies supporting the attitudinal model, replicating our analysis of the jurisprudential regime construct in this area provides an important test of the concept. Our results produce strong support for the proposition that post-Mapp decision making can be separated into distinct regimes, with a set of important cases decided in 1983-1984 demarcating the regimes. The predictors of decisions in the two periods are consistent with the types of changes one would expect the regime shift to produce. Our findings challenge the attitudinalists’proposition that there is at best negligible statistical evidence that law influences Supreme Court decision making.

The Aftermath of Injury: Cultural Factors in Compensation Seeking in Canada and the United States

Injury is common in all societies. Americans are perceived as quick to respond to injury by turning to the legal system. This article compares compensation seeking by Americans and Canadians, examining the degree to which cultural factors shape the response of injured parties in the two countries and the extent to which resources and experience influence individual action. Drawing on two largescale telephone surveys, one conducted in five federal judicial districts around the United States and one conducted in the Canadian province of Ontario, the article looks at the factors that influence claiming and seeking legal assistance. The overall patterns indicate that residents of Ontario are somewhat less likely to claim but more likely to seek legal assistance than are residents of the United States. Moreover, while cultural variations (e.g., religion, type of residence) are good predictors of claiming in Ontario, these factors have little influence on claiming in the United States. As for seeking legal assistance, few predictors are found to influence behavior in the United States while a variety of factors (community size, type of problem, stakes, gender, and education) influence behavior in Ontario.

Methods for Studying Disputes: Learning from the CLRP Experience

The Civil Litigation Research Project (CLRP) evolved as a study of dispute processing in the United States, with a major focus on the role of courts. CLRP is not a study of everything that courts do or of the whole range of dispute processing. Rather it is concerned largely with the intersection of courts and dispute processing. It seeks to answer these questions: how do courts fit within the larger dispute processing system? How do courts compare to alternatives that deal with comparable disputes? What do courts do well in this regard? What do they do poorly? What does it cost to process disputes in court? How do you explain these costs? How do such costs compare to the costs incurred in other dispute processing institutions?

To Lawyer, or Not to Lawyer, is That the Question?

A central aspect of much of the debate over access to justice is the cost of legal services. The presumption of most participants in the debate is that individuals of limited or modest means do not obtain legal assistance because they cannot afford the cost of that assistance. The question I consider in this paper is whether income is a major factor in the decision to obtain the assistance of a qualified legal professional. Drawing upon data from five different countries (the United States, England and Wales, Canada, Australia, and Japan) I examine the relationship between income and using a legal professional. The results are remarkably consistent across the five countries: income has relatively little relationship with the decision to forego that assistance. The analysis suggests that those considering access to justice issues need to grapple with the more general issues of how those with legal needs, regardless of the resources they have available, evaluate the costs and benefits of hiring a lawyer.

An Introduction to Multivariate Contingency Table Analysis

Much of the data that political scientists deal with is essentially qualitative in nature, or at best ordinal. Nonetheless, we usually analyze our data as though it met the criteria of an interval scale. We proceed in this way not because we mistakenly believe our data to be interval but because the tools available for the analysis of interval data have been, at least in the past, much more powerful than the tools we have had for use with nonmetric data. With the development of new methods for analyzing nominal level data this gap has been substantially narrowed; the analyst now has a number of techniques for multivariate contingency table analysis from which to choose. This paper is intended to provide an introduction to those techniques, focusing on the linear model approach described by Grizzle, Starmer, and Koch (GSK). The paper includes the following sections: a review of simple contingency table analysis, a discussion of how the analysis of simple tables may be extended to complex tables using the GSK approach, and a brief comparison of the GSK approach to loglinear techniques such as that described by Goodman.

Toward a Theorization of Craft

This article presents a theorization of craft as an analytic concept that can be applied in studies of the work of professionals, including both judges and lawyers. Building on sociological work that distinguishes craft from art, I describe a set of elements that can be used to analyze the work and working situation of lawyers, judges, and other professionals: utility, consistency, clientele, skills and techniques, problem solving, and aesthetic. I posit that these elements can be organized along two dimensions, one that distinguishes between elements that are internal to the craft community and those that are external, and a second dimension that distinguishes elements that deal with production, functionality, and evaluation. The article concludes with suggestions as to how this framework might be applied to the analysis of the work of judges.

Analyzing Measures of Association Derived From Contingency Tables

This paper describes a technique for the rigorous analysis of probabilistic measures of association derived from contingency tables. The technique uses the approach to contingency table analysis first described by Grizzle, Starmer, and Koch and extended by Forthofer and Koch. This approach permits the user to obtain estimates of gamma, Yules Q, Kendalls taub and tauc, Somers D, and Goodman and Kruskals taus, plus estimates of the variances and covariances of those measures of association. With the variance-covariance estimates, the user can examine a wide range of hypotheses for statistical significance.

Unconventional Approaches to Conflict Resolution

We discuss various approaches to nonviolent conflict resolution and specifically the views of Gene Sharp and Erik Erikson as developed in their recent books on the subject. Both authors have in common a concern with the sources of obedience and the processes by which people come to question authority and the use of force. We explore the insights and limits of each approach and suggest aspects that need further clarification in the discussion of nonviolence. Sharps encyclopedic effort draws together much material and is a valuable source. Erikson develops a set of poetic and telling conclusions from Gandhis career that provide a deeper sense of how nonviolent campaigns can be waged and what they are all about.