The Oven Bird's Song: Insiders, Outsiders, and Personal Injuries in an American Community

Abstract

It is not an exaggeration to say that we live in an era preoccupied with the problems and challenges of obtaining justice in civil cases. Concerns expressed about the civil justice system range from warnings that civil court dockets are clogged by disputants too litigious for their own good to complaints that the legal system is used too rarely in civil cases. The authors approach their analysis with a sense that this subject area is in need of more and better theory. It is an unfortunate fact that discussions of civil justice-and suggestions for reform-have been marked by contradiction and confusion and have been engrossed with small matters that tend to obscure from view the system as a whole. The first part of this essay focuses on what the civil justice system is and does. It presents a five-stage model of civil case processing and examines relationships between this model and the criminal justice system. The second part of the essay considers this model in a broader context. Here the authors examine two paradigms of civil case processing and their implications for the implementation of legal norms and the pursuit of justice in society.

Measuring rural homeowners' willingness to pay for land conservation easements

“…1982; Salamon and Tornatore, 1994), and values and norms (Engel, 1984;Spain, 1993). Previous studies also suggest that willingness to pay for improved environmental amenities is a function of household characteristics and location (e.g., Breffle et al, 1998).…”

“…Perceptions have been investigated with respect to resident's and homeowner's characteristics, including length of time of residence (Baldassare, 1986;Myers, 1989;Doherty, 1987), social class or income (Lovejoy et al, 1982;Salamon and Tornatore, 1994), and values and norms (Engel, 1984;Spain, 1993). However, these studies examine the impact of the respective characteristics on perceptions independently, even though all of these characteristics are found to have significant influences on perceptions about land-use policy.…”

Reporting behavior of fraud victims and black's theory of law: An empirical assessment

“…Black contends that law is used less frequently among intimates than among strangers, and more frequently as the social distance between people increases. For example, Engel (1999) found that residents of a small community are reluctant to sue one another, even in the case of serious injuries. When residents do sue, he found that the parties are separated by a significant degree of relational distance.…”

Tort Reform and Access to Justice: How Legal Environments Shape Lawyers’ Case Selection

“…Studying both aspects of legal environments is important because, as LoPucki demonstrated, even in communities with the same written laws there can be "persistent, systematic differences in legal outcomes" (1996,1502) due to differences in interpretation, expectations, social norms, and attitudes. In fact, this is one of the central findings in the sociology of law: The interpretation of law by legal and non-legal actors can have profound implications for both the making of law and legal outcomes (see, for example, Edelman 1990Edelman , 1992Suchman 1997, 1999;Engel 1984;Sutton et al 1994). In other words, while written laws shape what is legally viable, it is the law "in people's heads" that shapes how law is applied and carried out.…”