Native people, whether influenced by traditional approaches to dispute resolution or by their pragmatic experience with local courts and dispute resolution or by their pragmatic experience with local courts and law enforcement, do not see justice as being done within the forum offered by the state. In search of an authoritative locale for rational dispute resolution, they find arbitrary and apparently irrational treatment in magistrate courts. Conversely, they have found in conciliation before the village council a forum where misconduct is measured against the world that the defendant immediately affects. They find a comprehensible forum in the village to solve their problems or no forum at all. Can participation in a functioning advocacy and adversary system be taught and utilized along with continued functioning of a sub-legal conciliatory system that handles de minimus matters effectively? This paper offers guidance to public defenders and legal services attorneys in representing Alaska Native clients.

Police administrators are responsible for providing a police operation that serves the public needs. On the surface, this responsibility appears to be simple enough; however, the realities encountered in operationalizing it are enormously complex. It is the purpose of this paper to review and analyze urban policing and suggest methods that police administrators can use to improve the effectiveness of their police organizations.

Diverse groups — e.g., Brazilian squatters, Navajos, village Eskimos and Indians — look to special forums to resolve disputes outside the formal legal system. These forums are employed because they accept disputes as defined by their clients and offer remedies based upon these conceptualizations. Formal agents of the law in their environments cannot do this. When these forums are extralegal (without formal legal authority to act) and are located in an environment where the formal legal process has the theoretical capacity to intervene in the disputes, they must tap into authentic lines of power to maintain their credibility with their constituents. Legal power is not usually formally delegated without defined limits upon its use. Because extralegal forums often must be free from the constraints of particular norms and processes, in order to correctly define and remedy disputes, extralegal forums seek borrowed power through special relationships with formal agents of legal power. Then they reapply it to meet the needs of their constituents. This paper describes the ways to study these relationships and their likely impact upon an informal forum. The author suggests a way of viewing extralegal dispute resolution in a given community against the larger matrix of relationships between the formal and informal legal process. He draws upon his field work in Brazilian squatter colonies, Navajo Indian communities, and rural Athabascan and Eskimo villages in Alaska.

Alaska is the only state of the United States that does not have a law school. This 1975 study, commissioned by the Alaska Legislative Council and the University of Alaska, is the first comprehensive investigation of the demand for legal and law-related services in Alaska and how that demand can best be met, including an examination of the feasibility of establishing a law school in the state. The study describes contemporary methods of delivering legal services in the state, with particular focus on the needs of rural and middle income Alaskans, and evaluates their cost and efficiency. It evaluates the present supply of lawyers and law-trained people in Alaska with reference to national trends in legal education, the migration to and admission of attorneys in Alaska, and the unique circumstances of Alaska law practice. It analyzes the need and demand for legal education in the state, and incorporates principal results of surveys of the general public and of Anchorage-area attorneys. The study concludes that there is no need to increase the supply of lawyers in Alaska by establishment of a law school and that many objectives which might be reached by a law school can also be reached by building on existing arrangements and models and development of other options for legal practice in Alaska such as paralegal training, particularly in rural areas of the state.

There is an undercurrent of opinion in Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) administration that the village corporation structure established under the Act is an anachronism, unsuitable to the needs of modern corporate enterprise and accordingly Alaska Native purposes. This line of criticism suggests that the regional corporate structure, also established under the Settlement Act, is sufficient to the needs of the Alaska Native people. Organizational issues in the Settlement Act are both politically and emotionally sensitive. As a result, discussion of this point of view has been muted. It is nonetheless important. The purpose of this paper is to search out the purposes of village corporation existence as a foundation to change or for a better understanding of the roles that are played by them. The Act serves as a written constitution for the Alaska Native people. It must be interpreted broadly to accomplish these fundamental purposes of the people and not as an instrument of a particular economic theory – which is, at least in part, alien to its heritage.

Three situations serve to hamper police effectiveness under traditional police organizational arrangements First, police operations are based on an assumption that police are primarily in the "criminal apprehension" business. This concept of the police role serves to constrain many police activities that offer potential for satisfying client needs and contributing to crime prevention. Second, police managers rely almost exclusively on the tenets of Bureaucratic Theory, as promulgated by Max Weber (1947), for arranging and managing police organizations. This reliance contributes to problems in the police and community relationship, coordination and direction of police operations, and (3) motivation of police employees. Third, police agencies are basically organized as self-contained operations which are automous from other units of government. This independence reduces the potential for optimum utilization of police services. This paper elaborates on these three situations and their implications, and makes proposals about the directions that the author believes police organizational changes should take.

In 1976, Anchorage School District (ASD) and the Criminal Justice Center at University of Alaska, Anchorage, collaborated to develop a law-related curriculum for 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade classrooms, with teacher's manuals written to supplement the basic texts chosen for the program, the "Law in Action" series by Linda Riekes and Sally Mahe Ackerly (West Publishing Company, 1975). This teacher's manual for the unit taught to seventh-graders, ""Courts and Trials," focuses on the judicial system in America and in Alaska. The teacher's manual reflects improvements to the original lessons, supplementary classroom activities, supplementary media, and inclusion of Alaska-specific content such as local news articles about Alaska courts and Alaska community resources. Supplementary material in this teacher's manual does not cover every lesson in the original "Law in Action" unit.

In 1976, Anchorage School District (ASD) and the Criminal Justice Center at University of Alaska, Anchorage, collaborated to develop a law-related curriculum for 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th-grade classrooms, with teacher's manuals written to supplement the basic texts chosen for the program, the "Law in Action" series by Linda Riekes and Sally Mahe Ackerly (West Publishing Company, 1975). This teacher's manual for the unit taught to eighth-graders, "Juvenile Problems and the Law," focuses on the legal aspects of juvenile delinquency and contains information regarding "helping" agencies. The teacher's manual reflects improvements to the original lessons, supplementary classroom activities, supplementary media, and inclusion of Alaska-specific content such as Alaska laws and Alaska community resources. Supplementary material in this teacher's manual does not cover every lesson in the original "Law in Action" unit.

Prior to the establishment of the Criminal Justice Center at the University of Alaska, no program has attempted to train and educate Alaska justice practitioners on a continuing basis and at all agency levels. The Alaska Criminal Justice Planning Agency, through the Governor's Commission on the Administration of Justice, has attempted to deal with this training problem on an interim basement through the Specialized Training Grant program, which enables "state and local police officers, correctional officers, prosecutors, public defenders, and court personnel [to obtain] specialized training sponsored by other agencies and institutions," often involving travel out-of-state for programs largely unavailable in Alaska. This study examines individualized grants funded for the years 1973–1975 as a means of measuring the effectiveness of the Specialized Training Grant program as on approach to the continuing professionalization of Alaska's criminal justice personnel.

This report presents results of a survey of Alaska criminal justice agencies. The survey was designed to provide baseline data on the educational levels of criminal justice personnel and existing training programs in Alaska; and to elicit from criminal justice agencies their views on subject areas — both in higher education programs and in continuing professional development programs — which those agencies believed deserved attention. A total of 47 agencies, offices, institutions within agencies, and individuals responded to the survey, out of a total of 78 to whom surveys were sent. Respondents represented the law enforcement agencies, the Alaska Court System, the Alaska Department of Law, the Alaska Public Defender, and correctional agencies including probation/parole.