• Selected
• Entire List

Abstract:
This project sets out to refute the common criminological assumption that women have always constituted a negligible percentage of those subjected to the criminal justice process. Using a variety of primary and secondary datasets drawn from dozens of European courts, we prove that, in the 17th and 18th century, women constituted a significant proportion of criminal defendants all over Europe, particularly in large, urban areas. Female percentage then dramatically declined over the 19th century. This general tendency transcends local explanations, and cannot be fully accounted for by any traditional historical explanation. We suggest that the decline of women in the criminal justice process reflects the shift in patriarchal patterns before and during the industrial revolution; during this period, women were removed from the public sphere, the labor market and the control of their communities and confined in the private sphere of the home, where their opportunities to commit crime decreased, their socialization into feminine roles increased, and the state's willingness to draw them into the public sphere for criminal trial declined. This pattern can be incorporated into two broader theoretical explanations: Elias' process of civilization, and Foucault's rise of disciplinary structures. We conclude by suggesting the project's value for criminology, feminist scholarship and the dialogue between history and sociology.

gender, crime, history, patriarchy, women

Abstract:
We offer a theoretical approach to federalism by defining a theoretical approach as a general account of the subject. It is general in that it applies in any political situation, at any time in history when political entities that are recognizable as nations existed. It is an account in being a systematic examination of the subject that is connected to the overall structure of analysis in one or more academic disciplines, in this case law and political science. Following this approach, we reach the conclusion that federalism must be understood as a matter of political identity. People's individual commitments in the political realm, their sense of who they are and where they belong, will determine the descriptive reality and the prescriptive necessity of federal arrangements.

Abstract:
... The connection between law and contemporary social science emerged as a consequence of the quest for social reform. ... Although it has not spoken with a single voice, the Association and its journal did establish socio-legal studies as an enterprise distinct from legal scholarship, on the one hand, and the traditional concerns of the established social science disciplines, on the other. ... Was the Supreme Court's objective in Brown v. ... Similarly, some consumer-perspective research that immerses itself in the micro-politics of its particular setting has also been criticized for its failure to provide a broader social framework for understanding the behavior. ... What much of the research identified above has in common is that law and legal institutions provide examples and settings for the social scientist, whose primary concerns are elsewhere and more general and whose primary audience is within his own discipline. ... In particular, my colleague, the sociologist Philip Selznick, has elaborated on the distinctive characteristics of law and, perhaps more than any other scholar, has laid the foundations for a distinct field of socio-legal studies. ... Perhaps the most sustained argument in favor of study of law as a distinct enterprise is Paul Kahn's book, The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship. ...