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Civil rights and institutional law: The role of social psychology in judicial implementation
Author(s) -
Haney Craig,
Pettigrew Thomas F.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.585
H-Index - 86
eISSN - 1520-6629
pISSN - 0090-4392
DOI - 10.1002/1520-6629(198607)14:3<267::aid-jcop2290140305>3.0.co;2-g
Subject(s) - desegregation , heuristics , restructuring , political science , law , civil rights , law and economics , sociology , computer science , operating system
In this paper we examine the development of “institutional law,” a recent corpus of doctrines and decisions by which courts have attempted to limit, restructure, and reform total institutions in the name of protecting individual liberty. We suggest that institutional law has reached a crucial stage in which legal decrees now must translate more effectively into institutional change. We use court‐ordered school desegregation of the southern United States as an instructive counterexample in a discussion of the procedural and structural impediments to the judicial reform of institutions. We conclude that institutional change requires much greater attention to applied social psychology than heretofore given it by the courts, and toward this end we propose a brief list of change‐oriented heuristics.