In almost all legal disputing, formalities are employed as a last resort. This book presents a new theory of decision-making, exploring the conditions under which prosecution is employed to handle troublesome occupational health and safety problems. This book is for those interested in law, regulation, socio-legal studies, criminal justice, sociology, and political science.

A collection of original essays by leading scholars in the socio-legal studies field to mark the retirement of Donald Harris as Director of the Socio-Legal Studies Centre, Oxford University. The essays provide rich insights into current thinking in socio-legal studies and a considered evaluation of future directions.

Most studies of law enforcement deal with police work, and many are concerned with underenforcement of selective enforcement as problems. This book shifts the focus to social and economic regulation and the issue of compliance.

In almost all legal disputing, formalities are employed as a last resort. This book presents a new theory of decision-making, exploring the conditions under which prosecution is employed to handle troublesome occupational health and safety problems. This book is for those interested in law, regulation, socio-legal studies, criminal justice, sociology, and political science.

Discretion is a pervasive phenomenon in legal systems. It is of concern to lawyers because it can be a force for justice or injustice: at once a means of advancing the broad purposes of law and of subventing them. For social scientists the discretion exercised by legal actors is an important form of decision-making behaviour, in which legal rules are merely one force in a field of pressures and constraints that push towards certain courses of action or inaction. This book presents a variety of analyses of legal discretion by lawyers and social scientists (drawn from both sides of the Atlantic), who have made discretion and its uses a central part of their scholarly concerns.