Afterword: Change and Structure in Dispute Processing

Abstract

One need only thumb through the back issues of this journal to sense that the material presented in these two special issues on litigation represents a change of some sort. The post-World War II revival of social scientific interest in law has been characterized by a strong programmatic or policy orientation which has tended to assign a peripheral position to the issues raised in these pages (cf. Black and Mileski, 1973, 3-5). The revival of this interest, which gave birth to this journal, received much of its impetus from concern with questions of social control. Broadly speaking, the question was: “To what extent can legal institutions be used to achieve legally mandated objectives?” The legal impact study's search for the effects of legal acts has expanded to include the conditions which shape those effects. This search has sometimes been informed by theoretical consideration of the organizational processes affecting legal functionaries as they deal with the problems of putting legal doctrine into practice. In many ways, we have learned how legal actions become transformed by their encounter with the “real world.” The law, we repeatedly discover, does not always have its “intended effects.”

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