This fascinating symposium is based on an assumption that no longer seems to need justification: that the institution of marriage is today experiencing profound changes. But the nature of those changes—their causes and consequences—is very much in need of explication. The experts contributing to this volume bring a wide range of perspectives—sociological, anthropological, economic, historical, psychological, and legal—to the problem of marriage in modern society. Together these essays help illuminate a form of relationship that is both vulnerable and resilient, biological and social, a reflection of and an influence on other social institutions.

Contemporary Marriage begins with an important assessment of the revolution in marital behavior since World War II, tracing trends in marriage age, cohabitation, divorce, and fertility. The focus here is primarily on the United States and on idustrial societies in general. Later chapters provide intriguing case studies of particular countries. There is a recurrent interest in the impact on marriage of modernization itself, but a number of essays probe influences other than industrial development, such as strong cultural and historical patterns or legislation and state control. Beliefs and expectations about marriage are explored, and human sexuality and gender roles are also considered as factors in the nature of marriage.

Contemporary Marriage offers a rich spectrum of approaches to a problem of central importance. The volume will reward an equally broad spectrum of readers interested in the meaning and future of marriage in our society.

KINGSLEY DAVIS is senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Grace Ganz Blumberg, Elwood Carlson, Kingsley Davis, Thomas J. Espenshade, Amyra Grossbard-Shechtman, Joy Hendry, Adam Kuper, John Modell, Rachel Pasternack, Yochanan Peres, James E. Smith, Graham B. Spanier, Alan A. Stone, Donald Symons, Lenore J. Weitzman, and Margery Wolf.

Now available in paperback, this provocative study examines the street-level decisions made by police, caught between a sometimes hostile community and a maze of departmental regulations. Probing the dynamics of three sample police departments, Brown reveals the factors that shape how officers wield their powers of discretion. Chief among these factors, he contends, is the highly bureaucratic organization of the modern police department.

A new epilogue, prepared for this edition, focuses on the structure and operation of urban police forces in the 1980s.

"Add this book to the short list of important analyses of the police at work....Places the difficult job of policing firmly within its political, organizational, and professional constraints...Worth reading and thinking about." —Crime & Delinquency

"An excellent contribution...Adds significantly to our understanding of contemporary police." —Sociology

"A critical analysis of policing as a social and political phenomenon....A major contribution." —Choice

MICHAEL K. BROWN is emeritus professor of politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

There has hitherto been limited systematic social research on the prolongation and termination of life, and minimal agreement of the resolution of the moral and social dilemmas that dying provokes. Among the topics discussed by the contributors are: the social context of dying—when, where, and why people die; what they think about death; the cultural background of the patients' attitudes; and how medical practitioners cope with terminal illness. The social, ethical, legal, and economic problems arising from the prolongation and termination of life are also set forth.

ORVILLE G. BRIM, JR. is president of the Foundation for Child Development and former president of the Russell Sage Foundation.

HOWARD E. FREEMAN is director of the Institute for Social Science Research and professor of sociology at University of California, Los Angeles.

SOL LEVINE is university professor of sociology and community medicine at Boston University.

NORMAN SCOTCH is professor and chairman of the Department of Socio-Medical Services and Community Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard M. Bailey, Orville G. Brim, Jr., Diana Crane, Howard E. Freeman, Barney G. Glaser, Robert J. Glaser, Richard A. Kalish, Andie L. Knutson, Louis Lasagna, Monroe Lerner, Sol Levine, Bayless Manning, Robert S. Morison, Osler L. Peterson, David L. Rabin, Laurel H. Rabin, John W. Riley, Jr., Elisabeth K. Ross, Norman A. Scotch, Anselm L. Strauss, David Sudnow, Greer Williams
 

The police and the courts depend on the cooperation of communities to keep order. But large numbers of urban poor distrust law enforcement officials. Legitimacy and Criminal Justice explores the reasons that legal authorities are or are not seen as legitimate and trustworthy by many citizens.

Legitimacy and Criminal Justice is the first study of the perceived legitimacy of legal institutions outside the U.S. The authors investigate relations between courts, the police, and communities in the U.K., Western Europe, South Africa, Slovenia, South America, and Mexico, demonstrating the importance of social context in shaping those relations. Gorazd Meško and Goran Klemenčič examine Slovenia’s adoption of Western-style “community policing” during its transition to democracy. In the context of Slovenia’s recent Communist past—when “community policing” entailed omnipresent social and political control—citizens regarded these efforts with great suspicion, and offered little cooperation to the police. When states fail to control crime, informal methods of law can gain legitimacy. Jennifer Johnson discusses an extra-legal policing system carried out by farmers in Guerrero, Mexico—complete with sentencing guidelines and initiatives to reintegrate offenders into the community. Feeling that federal authorities were not prosecuting the crimes that plagued their province, the citizens of Guerrero strongly supported this extra-legal arrangement, and engaged in massive protests when the central government tried to suppress it. Several of the authors examine how the perceived legitimacy of the police and courts varies across social groups. Graziella Da Silva, Ignacio Cano, and Hugo Frühling show that attitudes toward the police vary greatly across social classes in harshly unequal societies like Brazil and Chile. And many of the authors find that ethnic minorities often display greater distrust toward the police, and perceive themselves to be targets of police discrimination. Indeed, Hans-Jöerg Albrecht finds evidence of bias in arrests of the foreign born in Germany, which has fueled discontent among Berlin’s Turkish youth. Sophie Body-Gendrot points out that mutual hostility between police and minority communities can lead to large-scale violence, as the Parisian banlieu riots underscored.

The case studies presented in this important new book show that fostering cooperation between law enforcement and communities requires the former to pay careful attention to the needs and attitudes of the latter. Forging a new field of comparative research, Legitimacy and Criminal Justice brings to light many of the reasons the law’s representatives succeed—or fail—in winning citizens’ hearts and minds.

ANTHONY BRAGA is a senior research associate at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice at the University of California, Berkeley.

JEFFREY FAGAN is professor of law and public health at Columbia University, and director of the Center for Crime, Community and Law at Columbia Law School.

TRACEY MEARES is professor of law at Yale Law School.

ROBERT SAMPSON is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

TOM R. TYLER is University Professor of Psychology at New York University.

CHRIS WINSHIP is Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and also a member of the faculty of the Kennedy School of Government.

CONTRIBUTORS: Hans-Jorg Albrecht, Catrien Bijleveld, Sophie Body-Gendrot, Anthony Braga, John Braithwaite, Ignacio Cano, Jean Camaroff, John Camaroff, Jeffrey Fagan, Hugo Fruhling, Heike Goudriaan, Mike Hough, Jennifer L. Johnson, Goran Klemencic, Marijke Malsch, Tracey Meares, Gorazd Mesko, Graziella Moraes, Sebastian Roche, Robert Sampson, David J. Smith, Michael Tonry, Chris Winship.

A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

During the 1970s, a nationwide school finance reform movement—fueled by litigation challenging the constitutionality of state education funding laws—brought significant changes to the way many states finance their public elementary and secondary school systems. School finance reform poses difficult philosophical questions: what is the meaning of equality in educational opportunity and of equity in the distribution of tax burdens? But it also involves enormous financial complexity (for example, dividing resources among competing special programs) and political risk (such as balancing local control with the need for statewide parity).

For those states (like New York) that were slow to make changes a new decade has brought new constraints and complications. Sluggish economic growth, taxpayer revolts, reductions in federal aid, all affect education revenues. And the current concern with educational excellence may obscure the needs of the poor and educationally disadvantaged.

This book will provide New York’s policy makers and other concerned specialists with a better understanding of the political, economic, and equity issues underlying the school finance reform debate. It details existing inequities, evaluates current financing formulas, and presents options for change. Most important, for all those concerned with education and public policy in New York and elsewhere, it offers a masterful assessment of the trade-offs involved in developing reform programs that balance the conflicting demands of resource equalization, political feasibility, and fiscal responsibility.

"Synthesizes the political and fiscal research [on school finance reform] and applies it to the New York Context....A blueprint for how to redesign state school finance....A fine book." —Public Administration Review

"This is a book that lucidly discusses the issues in school finance and provides valuable reference material." —American Political Science Review

The late JOEL S. BERKE was director of the Education Policy Research Institute of Educational Testing
Service.

MARGARET E. GOERTZ is policy research scientist at Educational Testing Service.

RICHARD COLEY is research associate at Educational Testing Service.

A recent Supreme Court decision confirmed the churches' right to tax exemption for religious property. In this highly relevant book, Alfred Balk places this question in social perspective and demonstrates how tax exemption and immunity affect the fiscal load of local communities and the well-being of our whole society. Among the "free list" or tax-free properties which the author examines are churches, hospitals, schools, and government buildings. Seven specific proposals for reform are set forth.

ALFRED BALK is visiting editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and an Editor-at-Large of Saturday Review. He has written more than a hundred articles for national magazines, including Harper’s, Saturday Review, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times Magazine, Reader’s Digest, This Week, The Nation, McCall’s, and The Reporter. He also is the author of The Religion Business (John Knox, 1968), and a contributor to a number of anthologies.

Winner of the 1973 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Less than 2 percent of some 4000 adults prosecuted for participating in the bloodiest ghetto revolt of this generation served any time in jail as a result of their conviction and sentencing. Why? Why, in contrast, did the majority of those arrested following a brief and minor confrontation with police in a different city receive far harsher treatment than ordinarily meted out for comparable offenses in "normal" times? What do these incidents tell us about the nature of legal repression in the American state?

No coherent theory of political repression in the liberal state exists today. Neither the liberal view of repression as "anomaly" nor the radical view of repression as "fascist core" appears to come to grips with the distinctive characteristics of legal repression in the liberal state.

This book attempts to arrive at a more adequate understanding of these "distinctive characteristics" by means of a detailed analysis of the legal response to the most serious violent challenge to the existing political order since the Great Depression—the black ghetto revolts between 1964 and 1968.

Using police and court records, and extensive interviews with judges, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and detention officials, Professor Balbus provides a complete reconstruction of the response of the criminal courts of Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago to the "civil disorders" that occurred in these cities. What emerges is a disturbing picture of the relationship between court systems and participants and the local political environments in which they operate.

ISAAC D. BALBUS has been assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, and will join the faculty of York College of the City University of New York as associate professor of political science in the fall of 1973. He received his B.A. in Government from Colby College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. He is the author of a number of articles on Marxism, Elitist Theory, and Pluralism.

This study contains fifty-eight documents from forty-nine different foundations, selected to represent a wide variety of these organizations. Included are documents from at least one perpetuity, dissolving fund, discretionary perpetuity; at least one company-sponsored foundation, family foundation, foundation engaged in unrelated business activities, association of foundations, "captive" foundation; at least one research foundation, special-purpose foundation, community trust scholarship fund. Several documents have been included for historical interest; documents of two foreign foundations for their comparison values. A final chapter introduces certain operational documents: grant notification form, agreement with consultants, outline for grant applicants, publication agreement.

F. Emerson Andrews was director of publications at the Russell Sage Foundation.

CONTRIBUTORS: James Coleman, James Davis, Beverly Duncan, Otis Dudley Duncan, Mark Evans, David L. Featherman, Robert M. Hauser, Kenneth C. Land, Judah Matras, David D. McFarland, Aage B. Sorenson, Seymour Spilerman, Arthur Stinchcombe, Richard Stone, Kermit Terrell, Donald J. Treiman, James Wendt, H.H. Winsborough.

This book presents an informing picture of giving in the United States. It glances briefly at the history of philanthropy, including its growth in government services, but its emphasis is on recent changes and special opportunities for today. It offers estimates of giving, as to amounts, sources, and benefiting agencies. It includes a discussion of legal and tax aspects of philanthropy.

F. EMERSON ANDREWS was a staff member of Russell Sage Foundation since 1928, a consultant on publications to the Twentieth Century Fund since 1940, and served as a consultant to a number of other organizations in the welfare field. This book grew out of the requests of many donors for advice and help, which came to him as co-author of American Foundations for Social Welfare.