The Regulation of Groups: The Influence of Legal and Nonlegal Sanctions on Collective Action

Most people do not take their disputes to lawyers and judges. Norms, rather than laws, provide the rules of conduct; friends, relatives, and coworkers, rather than juries, make findings of fact; shame and ostracism, rather than imprisonment or legal damages, punish the wrongdoer. Court is held not in a courthouse, but in homes, work places, and neighborhoods, among networks of kin, friends, and associates. In a sufficiently closeknit group, where norms are well defined and nonlegal sanctions are effective, the law has little impact on behavior. These claims are not original. The legal realists advanced them in the 1920s and 1930s as a critique of the formalism that then dominated legal scholarship.' Members of the law and society movement reiterated them in the 1960s and 1970s.2 Such claims provided the occasion, and even the philosophical basis, for much of the empirical research conducted by legal academics over the years.3 And it seems fair to say that most legal academics endorse them today.4 Yet these claims about the predominance of nonlegal sanctions and the relative unimportance of the