The behavior of civil restraining orders: An empirical test of Black's 'Behavior of Law' (Donald Black)

This dissertation examines the general qualities and characteristics of the restraining order process in the state of New Jersey; provides a theoretical analysis of the relief available to victims through civil injunctions; and explores, using a sample of women and men who petitioned the civil court for a restraining order in Hudson County, NJ (N = 2,410), the pattern of relief afforded these victims. The restraining order delivery process may be explained by The Behavior of Law (Black, 1976), which is a theory that explains variations in law. This dissertation examines many of Black's Behavior of Law propositions and empirically tests their predictions using civil restraining order, police incident, and Census block-group data. This study expands empirical tests of Black's theory that have focused primarily on criminal law applications and the quantity of law to the exclusion of civil law applications and measures of quality. Restraining orders provide a unique opportunity to apply and test Black's theory since each order is made up of any number of reliefs (quantity) and each relief is a different style of law (quality), as defined by Black (1976). This study contributes to the growing body of literature that has found mixed support for Black's Behavior of Law theory and its propositions. The findings support Black's proposition that less “respectable” people are less likely to benefit from the law. This study finds mixed support for Black's social control and morphology concepts, and where the majority of prior studies found support or mixed support for Black's propositions about culture and stratification, this study did not. This study raises questions about whether legislators should rethink the intended purpose of restraining orders and whether guidelines that focus on quantifiable characteristics of the situation and not the victim's social structural characteristics would be useful in restraining order disposition, and discusses the value of Black's theory for future research.