【正文】 concentrations, and extralegal variables of offender age, gender and employment status. Men were treated more harshly than women, and young offenders more harshly than all other offenders except those over 56 years. Unemployed offenders were fined less, but disqualified for longer than offenders in the workforce. Magistrates39。 justice。 discretion. How do magistrates determine just penalties for a mon offense that causes death, injury, and property damage, but has questionable status as a crime (Gusfield, 1981)? Are sentencers39。 sentencing orientations, or by binations of sentencer and case factors? The aim of this research was to examine the factors influencing magistrates39。 unwarranted, legally irrelevant discriminations between offenders, as opposed to their appropriate attention to legally relevant case de tails. Campaigns to reduce drinking provide a unique opportunity for analyzing how justice is dispensed, since sentencing outes and the sentencer39。 Wood, 1990). Australian state parliaments have responded to the social cost of drinking and driving by tying penalties to graded levels of offenses defined by binations of blood alcohol levels and recidivism, and this action automatically limits magistrates39。 deliberations is constrained by circumscribed ranges of penalties, at the same time that they are informed by public and media attention to the road toll (Homel, 1990). In such a situation, it is possible to investigate how magistrates apply their perspectives to the fundamental case information specified by the legislation, in relation to other information about offenders appearing before them. An effective strategy for understanding sentencing behaviors involves analyzing how sentencer and case factors interact (Hagan, 1975。s background and the judicial decisions he or she produces. Different sentencer factors will be considered relevant in any empirical analysis, depending on the researcher39。 McFatter, 1986). Although some notable studies have related sentencers39。 Hogarth, 1971。s actual sentencing activities (Grossman, 1966。 relevant activities involve their interpretive cognitive work (Maynard, 1982). Everything else to do with the sentencer provides the setting for that work. Expertise in managing information resides chiefly in professionals39。 JohnsonLaird, 1983). As experienced professionals approach a given task from the basis of accrued knowledge, they mentally construct their own working models or images, envisaging the elements and linkages involved in the task environment. Accumulated experience of simi lar tasks suggests reoccurring patterns of associations, so that fresh in stances can be interpreted against these wellknown patterns and the internally constructed interpretations they suggest. Because drinkdriving cases are frequent in magistrates39。s own attitudes and goals (Hogarth, 1971。s mind, so that he or she finds a way of selecting and categorizing the facts about an offender39。 working se equation, and seek few other details. Each sentencer may adopt one or more perspectives on the same piece of information, because one perspective may not exhaust all the possible viewpoints that an experienced person can apply to the same case. The tarifforiented sentencer may be concurrently oriented towards not dis criminating against the poor, so that he or she consults an image of a known class of offender who cannot pay a normal tariff penalty because they are unemployed. That sentencer needs to weigh the immediate relevance of each orientation to the given case particulars, and e up with a penalty that satisfies personal sentencing criteria. In the domain of drinkdriving, we were able to draw on a set of a priori orientations based on Homel39。 tough or lenient styles, goals for deterring specific offenders, or contributing to the general deterrence of the munity。 and perspectives on a drinkdriver39。 expressions of multiple perspectives on interpreting drinkdriving offenses. We were specifically interested in orientations related to magistrates39。 deterrence。 the importance of an offender39。 and a magistrate39。 Lawrence, 1992). The availability of a powerful multivariate linear model that could incorporate nominal categories of several orientations and their interactions with other factors meant we could use qualitative codings of orientations that were realistic for the specific offense, without forcing positions into falsely ordinal classifications. With task specificity, and a welldefined offense that approximates a field experiment in which the expert39。 Pope, 1986), we included as many legal and extralegal variables as possible. Legally relevant information is well defined in this area (BAC in relation to recidivism), but the extralegal or social variables related to the offender also have to be fitted into the interpretive picture if disparities are to be identified, making a plex set of different and conflicting factors to be sorted and used in the decision process. Adopting the mon practice of labeling personal and social offender variables as extralegal in order to consider their legitimacy, we focused on three types of offender characteristics that consistently promote different outes: gender, age, and employment status as an index of social class. These three factors throw light on the justice and equity issue as well as being consistently recorded in most courtroom files of cases (Unnever, 1982). There is a fair degree of consensus that women are likely to receive lighter penalties than men, after researchers have controlled for legally relevant factors , despite Ghali and ChesneyLind