On Legal Sanctions

Sanctions are officially imposed punishments aimed at enforcement of legal obligations. They are said to constitute the core, if not the defining characteristic, of the legal order. Inadequate sanctions are blamed for the failures of legal control in such divergent areas as international law, domestic crime, and civil rights. Despite the presumed importance of sanctions in the legal process, however, serious attention has rarely been paid to the topic.' This paper examines sanctions from the perspective of the social sciences. It consists of two parts: a brief review of existing knowledge relevant to legal sanctions, and a preliminary report of a field experiment aimed at generating more information on the subject. The first part begins with an oversimplified account of conventional wisdom in the area of sanctions, uses some research findings to show the inaccuracy of many of these conventional beliefs, and suggests the complexity of the problem. The second part narrows the questions to be examined, describes the research technique employed in trying to answer some of these questions, and gives initial results from that research. Both parts are presented here in a frank effort to elicit suggestions which will make the final report more useful as a social scientific contribution to iurisDrudence.2