Research Summary: This study examines police conformity to the law by evaluating direct observations of police searches in a medium‐sized American city against the applicable constitutional standards. Other researchers have investigated police misconduct, but the present study uses direct observations of police behavior. The research asks three questions: How frequently do patrol officers engage in searches? How often do their searches meet constitutional standards? What explains the proclivity to search unconstitutionally? The results paint a disquieting picture, with nearly one‐third of searches performed unconstitutionally and almost none visible to the courts. The research links police misconduct to the municipality's “war on drugs,” but surprisingly, the majority of constitutional violations was concentrated in a small number of otherwise model officers engaged in community policing. Policy Implications: Based on researchers’ direct field observations, this analysis suggests that studies of constitutional violations based on secondary or official records touch only the exposed tip of the population of police searches, and far more importantly, they may vastly understate the extent of constitutional violations. This is not the picture offered by Wilson and Kelling (1982), who claimed that the police previously had been constrained by legal restrictions. If anything, the data support Kelling's (1999) more recent contention that police officers are “pushing the Fourth Amendment” to the verge of or beyond what is legally permissible. There are substantial costs when the police search unconstitutionally, not only to the rights of individuals but also to the legitimacy of law enforcement. The present observations were conducted in the midst of a war on drugs, which raises the question of what a replication would show now that the nation's local law enforcement agencies have been enlisted in a war against terrorism.

Arising in the late 1960s and early 1970s—in conjunction with the development of sociology of law and the Law and Society Association—gap studies dominated much of sociolegal scholarship for a time, providing multiple examples of the ways in which law on the books is inconsistent with law in action. These gaps, in turn, spurred calls for legal reform. By the 1980s, however, gap studies came in for criticism, not only for the presumption that law was purposively rational but also for scholars' beliefs that they could identify law's aims. To some, the findings were naïve or undertheorized. Nonetheless, gap studies have illuminated many legal practices and have helped to identify pathways by which law may have an impact. Even as sociolegal scholarship has become increasingly decentered from law, one still sees the tendrils of gap studies in research exploring discrepancies between expectations and actuality in law and legality.

All criminal justice systems grapple with the problem of convicting the innocent. In the case of death penalty cases the error can be irreversible. Over the last century, considerable research has been conducted on wrongful convictions, not only uncovering the most common factors but also recommending remedies for the sources of erroneous convictions. This chapter summarizes the voluminous literature on the sources of wrongful convictions in the United States, exploring the relative importance of a range of factors on which research has been conducted. Arguing that existing research has sometimes confused correlates with causes, the chapter presents findings from a recent large-scale empirical study of wrongful convictions using a control group and employing both quantitative and qualitative methods. The chapter concludes by summarizing plausible steps to address the known factors behind wrongful convictions.

This article paints a troubling picture of disparate treatment in the Federal Court of Canada. Examining more than 600 immigration and refugee claims, the results link judicial action to litigants' representation, their demographics and national region, and the background and ideology of the judges involved. When compared with prior research in Canada and similar studies from the United States, the findings suggest that an applicant in search of a just result would do as well to hire an experienced lawyer and hope for a sympathetic judge as to prepare an excellent appeal. Canada's immigration process requires greater attention so that the reality of its operation matches the promise of the nation's intentions.