.

ar-Tv*: 4&3<<Wov u,<

+urk, Austin. 1976. Uw as a Weapon in

Social Conflict." eSW/ Problems 23-
276-291.

LAW AS A WEAPON IN SOCIAL CONFLICT

AUSTIN T.TURK
University of Toronto

Explicit or implicit in most research on law and society is the

"moral functionalist" conception of law as essentially a means for
settling or precluding disputes. The major limitations of this concep
tion are that it (1) introduces cultural bias into research by defining
away the disruptive and exploitive aspects of law, (2) tends to
equate legal with consensual methods or processes of conflict
management, which are presumed to be more effective than coercive
ones, and (3) encourages research in which natural law and/or
functional-systems assumptions are taken for granted. A superior
alternative is the conception of law as power, i.e. a set of resources
whose control and mobilization can in many ways as indicated in
a series of propositional statements generate and exacerbate con
flicts rather than resolving or softening them.

Despite persistent challenges by proponents of a wide range of alternati.-e

theoretical and ideological perspectives,1 the most prevalent conception of law
explicit or implicit in recent research on law and society is that articulated most
notably in the works of Fuller (1964, 1971) and Selznick (1961, 1968, 1969)
and prominent in such influential sourcebooks as Aubert (1969), Nader (1969),
and Schwartz and Skolnick (1970). Law is characterized as essentially a means
for settling or precluding disputes by (a) articulating the requirements of an idea
of justice (expressed as prerequisites for sustained interaction and the viable
organization of social life), and (b) restraining those whose actions are incom
patible with such requirements. Accordingly, the presumptive aims of socio-legal
research are to determine how legal concepts, institutions, and processes func
tion in preventing, minimizing, or resolving conflicts; how such legal mechanisms
emerge or are created; how they relate to complementary non-legal mechanisms;
and how they can be made more effective.
Not to deny either that law often does contribute to conflict management or
that the quest for a just and secure social order is honorable and necessary, the
objectives in this paper are (1) to note certain fundamental limitations of what
may be termed the moral functionalist conception of law; (2) to marshal argu
ments for a conception of law free of those limitations - i.e., the conception of
law as a form or dimension of social power (as empirically more a partisan weap
on in than a transcendent resolver of social conflicts); and (3) to formulate a

* Substantially revised and expanded version of a working paper discussed at the annual
meetings of Ihe American Sociological Association, New York, 1973, and published in
German translation by R. Harm and W. Kaupen as "Recht als Waffe in sozialen Konflikt"
in the newsletter of the section on sociology of law of the German Sociological Association
(Informationsbrief.Nt. 3, February 1974).
For their comments and advice, seriously considered though not always followed, I am
especially grateful to llene Bernstein, William Chambliss, Donald Cressey, Allen Grimshaw,
Sheldon Stryker, and the participants in the discussion at the 1^73 ASA meetings.
1 Some recent formulations of historically familiar positions may be found in Black 1972,
1973; Chambliss and Seidman, 1971; Diamond, 1971; Gibbs, 1968; Pospisil, 1971;Quinney,
1974;Turk, 1969, 1972;and Wolff, 1971.
Reprinted from: Social Problems
Vol. 23, 3 February 1976
 Law and Conflict 211
set of basic empirical propositions about law and social conflict to which the
power conception of law directs socio-legal research.
LAW AS CONFLICT MANAGEMENT

To define law as a means of conflict management is to leave theory and re

search on law and society without an analytical framework independent of
particular ethical and theoretical preferences and aversions. While it may facili
tate critiques of totalitarian or bureaupathic decisions and actions taken "in the
name of law," such a definition appears at the same time to impede the develop
ment of an understanding of law in which evidence of its regulatory functions is
integrated with evidence of its disruptive and exploitive uses and effects. Merely
condemning the seamier side of law as perversions or departures from "the rule
of law," and attributing them to human fallibility or wickedness, encourages
neglect of the possibly systemic linkages between the "good" and "bad" features
of law as it is empirically observed. Moreover, insofar as the mora] functionalist
conception of law has directly or by default encouraged such neglect, it has left
socio-legal research vulnerable to charges of bias favoring certain culture-specific
ideas and institutions, and helped to provoke the radical counter-assertion that
exploitation and disruption constitute the defining reality of law while regula
tion is only illusion and suppression (see Lefcourt, 1971; Zinn, 1971 ;Quinney,
1974).
A related difficulty with the moral functionalist conception of law is that
legal.means of conflict management tend to be equated with peaceful ones; and
there is a strong inclination to assume that consensual, non-coercive methods are
the only really effective ways of preventing or managing conflicts. The difficulties
with such assumptions are exemplified in Barkun's (1968) volume appropriately
entitled LAW WITHOUT SANCTIONS. From his useful analysis of conflict
management in segmentary lineage primitive societies and in international rela
tions Barkun adduces evidence of the development of legal controls in the ab
sence of any Weberian (or Austinian) enforcement staff. Instead of coercion, he
finds the bases of legal control in these instances to be "consensus on procedures
and on perceived mutual self-interest" (Barkun, 1968; 123) a consensus pro
duced by "the human craving for order" (160, and see 78-92) in conjunction
with the human propensity to fix upon the features of initial dispute-settlements
. as conceptual and procedural models for handling subsequent conflicts (132).
Interaction experiences are by a process of social learning transformed into
shared normative perceptual frames that constrain behavior by defining the avail
ability and meaning of various behavioral alternatives. Rather than upon the
social structuring of enforcement power, the binding impact of law is found to
depend upon acceptance of the value of continued interaction and of the reality
and usefulness of the normative framework, including procedural rules for
determining the meaning and applicability of particular rules. Though the
achievement of order by such means, as by any others, is assumed to be necessarily
a nutter of degree, Barkun concludes that the evidence does confirm the em
pirical possibility of non-coerced legal order.
Barkun is able to reach such a conclusion because he combines a severely
restricted definition of coercion with a virtually unrestricted definition of law
(cf. Pospisil, 1971: 41). Coercion is taken to mean only the most obvious
exercise or threat of physical force by a central enforcement agency - thus
excluding the many other direct and indirect ways social control for political
278 TURK

purposes is effected. In contrast, apparently any behavioral or interactional

pattern may be construed as a legal norm (especially where such patterns are
reflected in linguistic conventions as "rules"); and any order or system of social
interaction may be viewed as a legal order (especially where such an order is
explicitly recognized and accepted as a constraining - though not necessarily
determining - social reality). Thus, any continuing relation in the absence of a
physically threatening formally instituted "umpire" becomes evidence for his
thesis, as does any case in which sanctioning is accomplished by other means and
agencies.
What Barkun does accomplish, admirably, is to demonstrate that law as a cul
tural, or ideological, structure can contribute greatly to the maintenance of
social orders by providing perceptual guides for channeling and limiting disputes.
He fails, however, to demonstrate that "law without sanctions" is possible
except within the narrow bounds of his definitional assumptions. To the con
trary, he himself observes repeatedly that such normative frameworks are very
much subject to rejection and deterioration when the costs of acceptance be
come too high for a conflicting party. In addition, he makes it clear that such
frameworks can in their creation and application be manipulated on behalf of
partisan interests, noting especially manipulation by parties external to particular
conflicts but interested in preserving the ordered context of the conflicts (i.e.,
the tribal, international, or other system). Given that social relationships are
evidently quite vulnerable when sustained only by self-defined interests, and that
the rules for defining and defending such interests are not immune to partisan
manipulation, the more tenable conclusion to be drawn from Barkun's study is
that "norms" (whether or not legal in some sense or other) are weak and unreli
able conflict-regulators to the extent that they (a) rest only upon conventional
understandings unsupported by any "teeth" in the event of serious minunder-
standing, (b) reflect only the bargaining and maneuvering of current or potential
adversaries, or (c) are not accompanied by the replacement or adequate modifi
cation of those social arrangements that generate conflicts.
At a more general theoretical level, the moral functionalist conception of law
impedes efforts to approach the scientific ideal of unbiased inquiry by encourag
ing investigators to define their research problems in terms of theoretical models
derived from "natural law" and/or "functional-systems" assumptions. First, the
bias introduced by natural law philosophy, even though secularized (cf. Selznick,
1961), leaves researchers unable to deal convincingly (i.e., in strictly naturalistic
and empirically demonstrable propositions) with the observation or view that
any idea of justice is founded ultimately upon faith, not upon empirical criteria
(Stone, 1965). Second, many crucial methodological and theoretical issues are
not resolved but evaded to the extent that research begins with, instead of
testing, the assumptions (a) that legal phenomena constitute a system, (b) that
the system-referent is empirically obvious, or at least readily determined, and
(c) that the system embodies the meritocratic or egalitarian prerequisities for
social welfare. In particular, boundedness. and the other assumptions of systems
modeling are left unexamined, as are the conventional or traditional understand
ings of what are "legal things," while - despite the recognition of structured
inequities in particular instances (e.g., Nonet, 1969)there is no conceptual
resolution of the issues raised by the fact that the prerequisites, however, defined,
for the welfare or survival of some are not necessarily consistent with the pre
requisites for all.
 Law and Conflict 279
To summarize briefly, the major limitations of the moral functionalist concep
tion of law for the purposes of socio-legal research are that it (1) introduces
cultural bias into research by defining away the disruptive and exploitive aspects
of law, (2) tends to equate legal with consensual methods or processes of con
flict management, which are presumed to be more effective than coercive means,
and (3) encourages research in which natural law and/or functional-systems
assumptions are taken for granted. If research on law and society is to be even
relatively unbiased by culturally, ethically, methodologically, and politically
partisan assumptions, a more neutral and empirically-grounded conception of
law is needed. The remainder of this paper is devoted to an attempt to develop
such a conception.
LAW AS POWER

It must be granted that people may use the language of norms and generally,
more or less consciously, accept their constructions as binding in the absence of
a centralized enforcement agency, or indeed of any reliable means of forcing
conformity. However, as has already been observed, it is equally clear that they
may come to believe that their interests are better served by violating the norma
tive expectations of others. In this connection, the increasingly formal articula
tion of such expectations and the recognition or invention of the right to seek
or attempt their enforcement (Hoebel, 1954; 28) implies the increasing inability
of people to get along with one another solely on the basis of tacit or consensual
understandings. Furthermore, the persistence and growth of law as a cultural
(symbolic, perceptual) and social (interactional, relational) reality is at least a
kind of evidence that people have not yet found that ihey can do without such
formalization, whether by a return to primitivism or by attaining some new con
sensual plateau. The effort to develop an adequate conception of law must,
therefore, begin by recognizing the centrality of diversity and conflict in social
life wherever law provisionally understood as the process of formally articu
lating normative expectations is discernable.
Given that law is intimately linked with social diversity and conflict, the most
parsimonious explanation of the linkage seems to be that people find they can
not trust strangers. As the scale and complexity of social relatedness increase, so
does the diversity of human experiences. The more diverse the experiences people
have had, the more diverse their perceptions and evaluations of behavioral and
relational alternatives may be. The greater the diversity of perceptions and
evaluations, the greater may be the variability in what is perceived as justice in
the specific terms of everyday life. (The implied distinction is between "norms
in action" versus whatever similarities might be found in terms either of a gen
eral belief in justice as an abstract value, or of verbal responses to hypothetical
questioning regarding the substantive meanings and relative importance of vari
ous normative statements oj" labels.) Aware that others' ideas of justice may vary
from their own, people try in accord with their own ideas and interests as they
understand them to maintain or gain control of, or to contest or evade, the
processes by which normative expectations come to be formally articulated and
enforced across, rather than only within, the boundaries of culturally homogen
eous groups (whether the salient boundaries be those of families, clans, tribes,
nations, or other groupings).
The empirical reality of law - apparently well understood in practice if not in
theory-seems, then, to be that it is a set of resources for which people con-
280 TURK

tend and with which they are better able to promote their own ideas and inter
ests against others, given the necessity of working out and preserving accommo
dative relationships with strangers. To say that people seek to gain and use
resources to secure their own ideas and interests is, of course, to say that they
seek to have and exercise power. While the meaning of power is far from settled,
a convenient starting point" is to view power as the control of resources, and the
exercise of power as their mobilization in an effort to increase the probability of
acceptable resolutions of actual or potential conflicts.2 Although it helps to re
cognize that "law is power," a more specific conceptualization of what kinds of
resource control are possible is necessary if we are to arrive at a useful under
standing of what the general proposition means. I see five kinds of resource
control, all represented in the cultural and social structural reality of law.
These are (1) control of the means of direct physical violence, i.e., war or police
power;(2) control of the production, allocation, and/or use of material resources,
i.e., economic power; (3) control of decision-making processes, i.e., political
power; (4) control of definitions of and access to knowledge, beliefs, values, i.e.,
ideological power; and (5) control of human attention and living-time, i.e.,
diversionary power.3
1. Having the law on one's side in a conflict implies that one can rightfully use
or call upon others (allies, champions, or the authorities claiming jurisdiction over
the area, people, or matters involved) to use violence to support one's claims
against others. Modern polities are characterized by the presence and availability
of control agencies specializing in the accretion, organization, and use of the
means of violence, and asserting the principle that violence is - excepting more
and more narrowly defined emergency situations - a resource reserved for
official use only. Decisions by authorities, including decisions regarding the
respective claims of disputing parties, are accompanied by the implied threat of
physical coercion should any of the affected parties refuse to act in accord with
such decisions.
2. People's life chances are affected just as decisively by how much their
economic power is enhanced or eroded by law. The invention and elaboration of
property and tax laws, in particular, reflect and help implement decisions on (1)
what kinds of activities, products, and people should be rewarded more and what
kinds less, and (2) how great should be the range between maximum and mini
mum rewards. "Radicals" seek modifications of law so as to change the criteria
for reward, and very often also to reduce the range of rewards; "liberals" seek
modifications so as to insure at least a "decent" minimum in the range of
' "Control" means the availability or accessibility of resources, varying from the extremely
Limited access of the helpless, through the shared access of competitors or allies, to the exclu
sive access of the almighty. "Resource" means anything of biological or cultural significance
for human welfare. The distinction here between controlling and mobilizing resources is ana-"
logous to that which Etzioni (1968: 314-317) makes between "assets" and "power." How
ever, his concept of "power" is much more restricted, or truncated, in that it refers only to
mobilization against resistance and excludes much of what is involved in the control and
mobilization of symbolic resources. With rather unnecessary inconsistency, he defines "per
suasive power" as "exercised through the manipulation of symbols" (358) after suggesting
that "the assets from which power is generated are much more scarce than the symbols which
are the main base of communication" (335) and arguing that "communication" can be sub
stituted for "power" (336).
J My conscious indebtedness for terms and ideas used in this effort to sort out the forms
and dimensions of power is mainly to Russell (1938), Schermerhorn (1961), and Gamson
(1968).
 Law and Conflict 281
rewards, and may accept if they do not seek - some reduction in the range;
"conservatives" resist modification, but may accept some "decent minimum."
Though orderly (usually meaning limited and gradual) economic changes can be
facilitated by law, economic decisions once articulated in and supported by law
become postulates which further elaborations and even modifications of the
law must satisfy. Radical economic changes, therefore, become increasingly
difficult to effect by legal means because they require not legal reasoning to satisfy
the postulates of a body of law, but rather a new set of postulates and thus a
new body of law.
3. The formulae and procedures of legal decision-making are integral to the
workings of politically organized societies. Organizational decisions are in signif
icant ways influenced by and expressed through legal decisions. Most important,
the law as culture and as social structure provides the rubric for articulating,
interpreting, and implementing organizational norms and decisions. As a sub
stantive and procedural model and as an ultimate support for institutional
normative structures, the law contributes - as Selznick (1969) and many others
have demonstrated to private as well as public social ordering, and provides
some of the weightiest criteria for assessing proposed changes and resolving
internal as well as inter-organizational conflicts. While non-legal factors clearly
affect political struggle in general and organizational decision-making in partic
ular, the law - as the most authoritative record of events and as the definitive
model, criterion, and arbiter of Tightness - is itself a political resource of major
I importance.
4. Legal concepts and thought-ways develop in the course of pragmatic efforts
by men to comprehend problems of social interaction so as to manage them
including the problematics of dominating the lives of other people. Though not
in this regard different from other products of such efforts, law as culture has
an especially strong impact upon the frames of reference people use to give
meaning to their situations. Those definitions of the real, the true, and the
worthy given legal expression or approval are thereby given the support of what
is not only one of the most prestigious of cultural structures, but also that struc
ture most directly supported by the apparatus of political control. The reality or
value of alternative conceptions can be denied either by simply denying recogni
tion in law, or else more forcefully by explicitly rejecting them in ways ranging
from the most extreme forms of suppression to the most subtle forms of rejection
in practice conjoined with verbal acceptance or toleration. Censorship by omis
sion or commission is nonetheless censorship. Yet, the greatest importance of law
as an ideological resource probably lies not in the facts of deliberate or inadvert
ent intervention on behalf of some perceptual alternatives versus others, but in
the fact that legalism is the cultural bedrock of political order. The very concept
of legality is designed to promote adherence to the ground rules of conventional
politics (Turk, 1972:15-16) which amount to agreement among contending
parties on the supreme value of their common membership in a polity which
must be preserved.
5. Human attention and living-time are finite resources - a trite but profoundly
consequential observation. Insofar as the rhetoric and the real workings of law
occupy men's attention and time to the exclusion of other phenomena perhaps
of greater import for the probability and quality of life the law exerts diver
sionary power. As entrepreneurs of the news, publishing, advertising, and enter
tainment industries have long known, at least the more reassuring, titillating, or
 sstsacse*

282 TURK

lurid aspects of law can in the name of "human interest" and "information" be
presented to capture and hold the public's attention. Nor have the obviously close
links between diversionary and ideological power been neglected. Preoccupation
with the law, especially in its more attractive and innocuous aspects, not only
diverts attention from potentially more dangerous concerns (from the perspective
of authorities, de facto including loyal oppositions) but also reinforces the sense
of law as an overwhelming, scarcely challengeable reality and criterion of reality.
The conception of law as a set of resources, as power, is methodologically
superior to the conception of law as conflict regulator in that the relationship
between law and conflict is not assumed, but left open for investigation, and
the distinction between legal and non-legal phenomena is grounded in empirical
observations rather than normative assumptions. Instead of asking how law
regulates conflict, the investigator is encouraged to ask v/ier/ier law regulates or
generates conflict, or in what ways and in what degree the use of legal power does
both. Instead of assuming that legal and non-legal actions and relations are some
how differentiated by criteria of moral legitimacy or functional necessity, the
investigator asks whether and how the invocation of such criteria and the intro
duction of the distinction itself exemplify the control and mobilization of
ideological and diversionary resources. Freed from arbitrary ideological and
theoretical constraints, the investigator directly confronts the empirical realities
that legal power can be used in ways inconsistent as well as consistent with
normative criteria of legality, that the empirical relevance of such criteria is
decided by the actions rather than the claims of those who wield legal power,
and that the law - since it is necessarily promulgated, interpreted, implemented,
or enforced by people with specific social and cultural involvements - can never
really be neutral vis-a-vis social conflicts.
A particular advantage of the power conception of law is that it facilitates
analysis of the processes (as distinct from particular structures) by which norm
ative expectations are given "cross-group" as well as "intra-group" significance
- i.e., how they become formally binding upon people who themselves have
neither generated such norms nor been socialized as children to accept them.
At the most general analytical level, the processes are those - stigmatization and
other forms of manipulation - any group uses to achieve some behavioral and
relational coherence despite the varying idiosyncracies of its members. Nonethe
less, as one's attention shifts from the most ephemeral and least differentiated
forms of group life to more durable and complex social entities, the processes
come more sharply into focus as the distinction between legal and nonlegal
emerges and acquires increasing social and cultural reality. The power conception
of law suggests analysis of these processes in the specific empirical terms of how
people actually deal with one another, regardless of any conventional under
standings or rationales about the existence and significance of particular legal
phenomena. Thus, socio-legal research is cast not in terms of the assumed
concreteness or meaningfulness of the legal-nonlegal distinction, but in terms of
the human actions creating the distinction, giving it empirical substance, and
altering or erasing it.
Finally, the power conception of law gives socio-legal research a distinctive
focus, related to but not confused with the general concerns of the social sciences
with social order, conflict, and change. Instead of losing the legal-nonlegal
distinction in the quest for knowledge useful in conflict management (as in
Barkun's case), the distinction itself becomes in two ways the basis for defining
 Law and C o n fl i c t 283

research problems. First,-the problematic status of the distinction implies the

need for historical and anthropological studies to determine the specific conditions
where it is introduced (and perhaps to suggest the conditions where it may be
transcended) in social life.4 Second, as the core task of sociclegal research is
taken to be that of developing a predictively useful understanding of the control
and mobilization of legal resources, the availability of such resources is necessarily
presupposed. That is, scientifically meaningful research questions about law and
society become possible only when the concept of law is empirically grounded
by the differentiation of legal from other cultural and social phenomena in one
or more of '.lie following ways: (1) verbal articulation of a set, in some degree
a system, of explicit norms; (2) establishment of procedures for making, inter
preting, implementing, and changing normative decisions; (3) occupational
specialization in knowing the substantive law and in using the established proce
dures; (4) institution of explicit provisions for the enforcement of substantive
and procedural norms, by actual or threatened deprivations; and (5) associated
with any or all of the other ways, the display of symbolic trappings designed to
emphasize the reality, rightness, and might of law.s Rather than some kind of
essence, property, or function to be sought in an apparently unlimited variety
of cultural and social configuration, "law" thus becomes an empirically specifiable
set of objects of scientific attention.
In sum, in the power conception of law students of law and society are offered
a methodologically tenable definition of the scope of their inquiry that includes
it within the social scientific enterprise without reifying, mystifying, or obscuring
the legal-nonlegal distinction. Given then the availability and amorality of legal
power, the formulation and testing of propositions about the exercise of such
power become central concerns for the scientific study of law as it is, as distin-
quished from doctrinal or applied research on behalf of law as someone believes
it should or must be.6 Because of the availability of so much work on law as a
regulator and the relative paucity of work on law as a source and means of con
flict, there is a particular need for propositions about ways in which law may
generate or sharpen social conflicts. Accordingly, an effort has been made to
develop several propositions indicating what seem to be the major ways law
promotes or facilitates conflict. To the extent that these and related propositions

* This formulation is intended to emphasize that the legal-nonlegal distinction is a prob

lematic human invention rather than an inevitable product of some supra-human evolutionary
process. Against any emergentist conception of "legal evolution" as an unavoidable and/or
irreversible linear progression, the differentiation of legal from nonlegal phenomena is simply
recognized as an historically specific accomplishment that has occurred, may occur, and
may continue.
! The extent to which sequential or functional relationships may be found among these
indicants of the five kinds or dimensions of legal power is an empirical question. Though not
directly pertinent, the mediation-courts-punishment-police-counsel cumulative scale order
that seems to be emerging from the work of Schwartz and others (Schwartz and Miller,
1964; Wimberley, 1973; Baxi, 1974; Schwartz, 1974) suggests that some such relationships
may well exist.
* While the distinction is essentially that proposed by Jerome Hall (1963:42) between
"normative" or "humanistic legal sociology" (which he approves) and "scientific legal socio
logy" or "legal science" (which he disapproves), there is no compelling reason to oppose
these two kinds of inquiry to each other. The point is merely that for those whose primary
aim is to develop scientific knowledge of law as a social and cultural phenomenon an ap
propriately objective conception of law is essential. For those with other primary objectives,
the moral functionalist or jome other "committed" conception may well be more useful.
284 TURK

are sustained and elaborated with greater precision in further research, they are
expected to constitute the basis for a theory of law able to explain the conditions
when and how conflict management may be accomplished by the control and
mobilization of legal resources - i.e., a theory able to deal with conflict manage
ment as a problematic outcome instead of a defining characteristic of law as a
social and cultural phenomenon.
PROPOSITIONS: LAW AND SOCIAL CONFLICT

1. The availability of legal resources is in itself an impetus to social conflict,

because conflicting or potentially conflicting parties cannot risk the possible
costs of not having the law - or at least some law on their side. When legal
resources are not available or are negligible, parties are forced or able to rely
upon nonlegal power to deal with the problematics of social interaction; law is
irrelevant except perhaps in the loose sense of a generally recognized right of
self-help for aggrieved parties able to assert it (cf. Hoebel, 1954: 25-28). As law
becomes available, it becomes relevant as a contingency which must be met. It
then becomes necessary to act so as to gain or increase control of legal resources,
if only to neutralize them as weaponry an opponent might employ. The point is
illustrated in the long effort by American southern whites to use the "white
primary" and other ostensibly legal devices (Wirt, 1970: 56-71), supplemented
by extralegal and illegal ones, to prevent blacks from using resources formally
granted them by emancipation and subsequent legal enactments and decisions.
2. Given pressure to contend for control of legal resources, differential non-
legal power can be expected to result at least initially in corresponding differences
in legal power. The party with greater legal as well as non-legal power may then
be able to increase its edge over weaker parties, even to the~extreme of excluding
the weaker altogether from access to the legal arena, cutting him off from even
the opportunity to advance his claims and defend his interests "legally." For
instance, since the formation of the inegalitarian South African nation in 1910,
the weaker nonwhites have had their legal position steadily eroded, losing be
tween 1936 and 1955 even voting rights guaranteed by the "entrenched clauses"
of the South Africa Act (May, 1955: 47-78; see also Sachs, 1973: 143-145 and
passim) - South Africa's constitution until it was superseded by the Republic
of South Africa Constitution Act, 1961.
3. Legal power provides both the opportunity and the means to accomplish
the effective denial of the reality of conflicts by making it impossible or inor
dinately difficult for them to be articulated and managed - as amply demon-
stated in the long and stubborn effort to deny legal recognition and support
for the effective unionization of agricultural laborers (McWilliams, 1942;Tangri,
1967;Galarza, 1970).
However, the persistent recurrence of struggles against economic, racial, and
other forms of domination and exploitation make it clear that issues which can
not be couched in the language of law, or will not be accepted as actionable or
justiciable, eventually have to be fought out in non-legal arenaewhere resolu
tions may be achieved, but often at greater cost and with less durability. It is, of
course, true that the lack of appropriate legal mechanisms for managing some
issues may result from unintended as well as intended actions. Nonetheless, even
though the denial of access to law may be explicable in objective terms, "objec
tive" denial appears to be just as real in its consequences as "subjective."
4. Where power differences are rather less extreme, the availability of legal re-
 Law and Conflict 285
sources may encourage litigiousness-a word indicative of the fact that the pre
sence of law encourages its use' by parties hoping to improve their positions by
methods relatively less dangerous or costly than non-legal power struggles, espec
ially with formidable opponents. Parties confronting more powerful opponents
may be encouraged to hope that by threatened or actual recourse to law they will
be able to reduce, eliminate, or reverse initial power differences, or merely to ex
tract some concession. For example, Nonet (1969: 81-83, 133-137) concluded
that the New Deal turned law into an ally rather than an enemy of American
trade unionism, so that the unions were encouraged to pursue a policy of self-
help through legal advocacy instead of relying upon administrative procedures for
handling workmen's compensation claims. On the other hand, stronger parties
moving against weaker ones may find it advantageous to cloak their moves with
legitimacy, especially to minimize the chance of third-party intervention on be
half of the underdog-as in the use of antitrust, conspiracy, right-to-work, and
other laws to impede the development of effective labor unions (Blumrosen,
1962;Nonet, 1969: 81-83).
5. Apart from encouraging litigiousness, the availability of legal facilities de
creases the pressure upon conflicting parties to resolve disputes in terms of
the non-legal resources they can mobilize. Informal and private settlements, or
at least accommodations to non-legal power differences (e.g., race relations
"etiquette") seems less likely where the parties have the option or hope of legal
recourse. Similarly, where an older legal system is giving way to a newer one, as
in the Northern Rhodesian (Zambian) copperbelt, parties without recourse in the
older system (e. g., young men protesting against the power of their wife's kin to
intervene in marital and familial affairs) may be encouraged to appeal "to norms
irreconcilably opposed to those of the traditional tribal system" (Epstein, 1958:
222).
6. Articulation in law of social categories, boundaries, and roleswith their as
sociated rights and obligations-can sharpen old conflicts and produce new ones.
Heightened awareness of the problematics of social interaction and relatedness
can decrease the chances of resolving or avoiding conflicts, because "bringing
things out into the open" frequently hardens existing boundaries, cleavages, and
inequities (whether objectively or perceptually "real") by making it less easy to
ignore, tacitly live with, or quietly and informally erase or change them. Rather
than a transformation of conflict into a form more amenable to a reasonable re
solution, legalization of a conflict can amount to an escalation that makes gen
uine settlement more difficult. Recognition of such possibilities has often been
used for resisting the use of law as an instrument of social change-e. g., the views
of some southern moderates, as well as conservatives, in the 1950's regarding
the probable impact of the U. S. Supreme Court's desegregation decisions (Tumin
andRotberg, 1957).
7. Legal procedural norms are often used to exclude or distort information es
sential to an adequate comprehension of empirical problems, and thus can impede
or prevent conflict resolution. In particular, legal distinctions between admissible
and inadmissible evidence tend to work against consideration of perceptual, or
subjective factors-those perhaps not objectively important or recognizable by
legal criteria but extremely important in terms of what is significant to some or
all of the involved parties. European, especially Anglo-American, legal systems
have frequently been critically contrasted with non-European systems (e. g.,
Epstein, 1958, 198-223; Gibbs, 1963; several of the selections in Nader, 1969) in
286 TURK

which there are few if any restrictions upon what may be considered in deter
mining the contextual significance of facts. These non-European systems em
phasize the qualitative more than the formal aspects of what is seen as a contin
uing rather than an episodic relationship between the disputing parties. Similarly,
though in a different vein, "bourgeois legalism" has been rejected by Marxists in
favor of "socialist legality," where the emphasis is asserted to be (and in non-po
litical cases normally is) upon the education of disputants and offenders to social
awareness and responsibility (Berman, 1966: 277-384).
8. Legal formulae and processes tend to emphasize the limitation and cessation
of overt conflict behavior, discouraging not only all-out battles of principle but
even the recognition that at least some social conflicts are zero-sum, not variable-
sum (e.g. czars vs. communists: white racists vs. black revolutionaries).7 To a
considerable extent, law is oriented to regulating the symptoms of conflict with
out getting at the more intractible problems of removing the sources of conflict.
However tactical concern with symptoms may sometimes be dictated by a stra
tegic concern to minimize political or other costs of dealing with those sources.
Consider the frequently noted judicial preference, supported by and expressed in
such operating principles as stare decisis and certiorari, for carefully delimited
case-specific issues rather than open confrontations over the political and eco
nomic premises of "the given order." Nonetheless, insofar as the legalization of
conflicts does no more than limit the means of conflict and/or obfuscate the
real issues, as in zero-sum struggles, some or all of the conflicting parties may
come to view legalization as simply another device for out-positioning an oppo
nent or for gaining time to mobilize or regroup one's non-legal forces-an attitude
characteristic of both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionary police agents.
9. The tactics required to accomplish a legal settlement can conflict with those
required to accomplish a genuine settlement, Where communication between dis
putants may be essential for them to become aware of common interests with
priority over those at issue, communication may be precluded by the risk of dis
closing injurious facts, violating rules against collusion, or otherwise weakening
or contaminating the case at hand. The terminology and style of public legal con
flictas in verbal exchanges in legislative and judicial proceedingsmay emphasize
instead of correcting the affective and cognitive biases associated with conflict.
Obtaining formal, open concessions from opponents in the course of legal strug
gle can make it more difficult for them to back down or accept defeat, and can
reduce the chances of building a fund of mutual trust with them as a way of
making further conflicts more amenable to resolution. Such considerations ap
pear to explain the reluctance of businessmen to conduct their transactions in
strictly legalistic terms (Macaulay, 1963), as well as the opposition of many aca
demics to the more explicit legalization of faculty-student relationships.
10. Legal decisions may prematurely signal the end of conflicts without actu
ally resolving them. The processes of legal hearing, trial, and appeal often amount
to rituals of dispute-settlement resulting in only illusory resolutions of conflicts,
i. e., formal decisions that seem to settle disputes but do not do so on terms
acceptable or even tolerable to the losers (and sometimes also the winners). Not

7 Whether or not all human conflicts are in principle transformable into variable-sum
terms, and therefore resolvable by consensual means, it appears that in empirical, historically
specific, rather than philosophical terms there are limits to the ability and willingness of
people collectively to accomplish such transformations.
 Law and Conflict 287
only may dissatisfied parties be forced to seek redress by non-legal means in such
present conflicts but the pretense of conflict resolution which they have experi
enced as the reality of law in action may make them far less willing to enter the
legal arena in future conflicts. To the extent that law produces illusory instead
of real conflict resolutions, it not only aggravates existing conflicts but also
makes future conflicts more likely, and likely to be worse. Racial conflicts, for
instance, have clearly not been resolved in South Africa by the legalization of a
policy of racial separation-to be gradually accomplished during a "transitional"
period of dejure white domination (Sachs, 1973), or in North America by the
legalization of a policy of racial integration-to be gradually accomplished during
a "transitional" period of overcoming de facto white domination "with all delib
erate speed" (compare Blaustein and Ferguson, 1962, with Swett, 1969, Moore
1971 and Balbus, 1973).
11. Insofar as legal culture is incongruent with the social-behavioral realities of
legal power as exercised by authorities, the law itself promotes cynicism, evasion,
and defiance with respect to normative expectations and decisionseven among
its representatives and practitioners.(on lawyers, see Blumberg, 1967; on police,
see Galliher, 1971). The law provides authorities with the cloak of claimed im
partiality, a difficult claim impossible to live up to always and entirely. Apart from
predispositions arising from their social origins, legal officials develop at least a
partiality on behalf of their own organizational and career interests (Aubert,
1963) and routines for categorizing and handling cases with as little effort and
risk as possible (Cicourel, 1968: 170-242).
Moreover, whether or not authorities try to be unbiased, the intent of the law
can never be identical with the effect of the law as experienced. Even the most
"understandable" differences between inlerpretation and interpretation, inter
pretation and action, or action and action, may not be "understandable" to
affected parties who believe themsclvcs-probably correctlyto be disadvantaged
by the outcome. Credit, tenancy, welfare, and other laws affecting economic
opportunities, privileges, and liabilities have often been shown to work system
atically against the poor (Caplovitz, 1963; Carlin, Howard, and Messinger, 1966;
tenBroek, 1966).
The crucial point is that bias is not just a matter of intention or even objective
behavior, much less a matter only of due process under formal rules. Bias is
also-and for the tasks of conflict regulation most important-a matter of per
ception and inference. Law believed to be biased may be just as ineffective, or
worse, as law that is biased.
12. Legal changes that precipitate or facilitate non-legal social and cultural
changes inevitably-barring the improbable case of unanimity on the meaning and
desirability of the changessharpen and produce conflicts. As new law supersedes
old, older ideas and interests may be shunted aside or demoted to lower priority
ratingsas will be those people whose identifications and commitments are de
fined in terms of those ideas and interests. Nowhere is the fact of law as a party
with its own interests to safeguard and enhance, potentially in conflict with
others, more inescapable to people than when legal power serves to override,
subvert, or simply reject their values and ways. Regardless of the possible long-
run impact of legally promoted changes, the shoit-run impact will certainly be
some contribution to increasing and exacerbating conflicts-most especially con
flicts between legal authorities and at least some of those over whom authority is
claimed. The degree of conflict resulting from legal changes will, of course, vary
288 TURK

with the type of innovation, the social characteristics of those affected, and
other factors (Zimring and Hawkins, 1971), from the relatively mild conflicts of
conventional politics to the extreme conflicts resulting from legal intrusions into
matters of sacred belief and practice-as in the Bolshevik attempt of the 1920's
to impose sexual equality upon the largely Moslem peoples of Soviet Central
Asia (Massell, 1968).

CONCLUSION

As many others have said in various ways, those engaged in socio-legal research
must constantly question the assumptions so easily received from jurisprudence
if the social science of law is to be more than a servant of established power, al
beit a servant with critical intelligence. Socio-legal inquiry that assumes the good
ness or badness of any set of cultural and social phenomena cannot be expected
to produce valid and reliable knowledge of the full range of problematic relation
ships within that set and between that set and others.8 It had been argued in this
paper that the most prevalent conception of law orienting contemporary socio-
legal researchthe "moral functionalist" conception of law as in essence a means
of conflict regulationis in this and other respects demonstrably inadequate for
the purposes of scientific research, however useful it may be for other purposes.
A far more adequate alternative, it has been further argued, is the power concep
tion of law, which recognizes in law a set of resources whose control and mobil
ization can in many waysas indicated in a series of propositional statements-
lead toward instead of away from conflicts. While the specifics undoubtedly need
extension, elaboration, and qualification, the formulation offered here will have
served its purpose if it stimulates socio-legal theorists and researchers to be more
alert to the often subtle realities of power and conflict. In any case, there should
be no quarrel over the fact that law may indeed contribute to conflict manage
mentnot least by its role in creating, sustaining, denying, and changing the per
ceptions and understandings by which people live.

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