Applying Socio-Legal Methods

Le résumé fourni par la source

Studying the law as a ‘social fact’ is crucial to understanding how societies define crime and respond to it. Legislation enacted by Parliament identifies what behaviours amount to an offence, and under which circumstances. It establishes when a person can be held responsible for engaging in criminal activity. The courts translate the ‘law in books’ into ‘law in action’ and determine how otherwise abstract and general principles shape individual and collective conduct. However, students on criminology programmes generally receive little training on how to apply socio-legal methods to issues concerning crime and criminal justice. This chapter aims to fill this gap and to guide students on how to use desk-based socio-legal methods. It demonstrates that secondary data such as statutes, parliamentary debates and court proceedings provide excellent resources to answer complex questions and to investigate topics that are hardly researchable via ‘mainstream’ social science methods. A discussion of the strengths and limitations of desk-based socio-legal methods is also provided, with suggestions on the research questions these methods are well suited to answer. Students are further guided step-by-step on how to navigate legal databases and ensure criticality in their analysis.

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