The AIDS epidemic is among the most critical health crises of national and global importance. While medical science is still in the early stages of dealing with the prevention and treatment of AIDS, social processes carry the responsibility of coping constructively with this illness for the foreseeable future. The legal system has a paramount role because, as the most pervasive social institution shaping formal and informal norms, it affects the meaning of social problems and structures responses to them. This study focuses on how aids disputes emerge, are transformed, and managed. The emphasis of the project is on how courts and state task forces act on contestations in society over AIDS, how nascent disputes that never reach public notice are handled, and how the actions of public institutions transmit messages to society about how the disease is to be handled. To examine these issues, multiple data sets are used, including all published AIDS court cases; deliberations and reports from 40 state task forces; yearly samples of newspapers, mass periodicals, special interest newsletters, and popular magazines; and in-depth field study of full-blown disputes in four cities. Given the AIDS epidemic, the research is of great significance because it has the goal of discovering just what happens when state and legal institutions are presented with claims from actors involved in the AIDS health care arena as victims or as organizations handling the needs of victims. Theoretically, the study draws on work on legal pluralism to discover the role of entrenched interests in disputing, on critical legal studies to examine linguistic messages and their infusion into public discourse, and social movements to identify how stigmatized parties resist dominant structures. Thus, the research should advance understanding not only of a current health problem but also the legitimation, social control, and change of disputes as a generic phenomenon.
