Reflections on Methodology offers a new and engaging means of teaching Honours students or those starting a PhD in Sociology about methodological issues. Instead of the usual survey approach, it shows the importance of debates about methodology, the value of an ethnographic approach and the challenges of applied research through a series of case studies.The text offers insightful short essays on methodological issues such as critical theor...

This book arises from a research project funded in Australia by the Criminology Research Council. The topic, bail reform, has attracted attention from criminologists and law reformers over many years. In the USA, a reform movement has argued that risk analysis and pre-trial services should replace the bail bond system (the state of California may introduce this system in 2020). In the United Kingdom, Europe and Australia, there have been concerns about tough bail laws that have contributed...

Understanding legal rules not as determinants of behavior but as points of reference for conduct, this volume considers the ways in which rules are invoked, referred to, interpreted, put forward or blurred. It also asks how both legal practitioners and lay participants conceive of and participate in the construction of facts and rules, and thus, through decisions, defenses, pleas, files, evidence, interviews and documents, actively participate in law’s life. With attention to the formulati...

Ethnomethodologists and Conversation Analysts have always been interested in the study of law and legal institutions and there is now a large body of empirical studies, representing a range of analytic traditions in each field. This collection introduces this literature and the research questions pursued by ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts, in an accessible form to a general audience in the inter-disciplinary field of law and society studies.

There is a growing interest within law schools in the intersections between law and different areas of social theory. The second edition of this popular text introduces a wide range of traditions in sociology and the humanities that offer provocative, contextual views on law and legal institutions.The book is organised into six sections, each with an introduction by the editors, on classical sociology of law, systems theory, critical approaches, law in action, postmodernism, and la...

This edited volume presents the diversity of comparative criminology research in Asia, and the complex theoretical and methodological issues involved in conducting comparative research. With contributors both from the West and the East exploring these questions, the Editors have created a balanced resource, as well as set an agenda for future research.The increasing pace of globalization means that researchers should be armed with an understanding of how criminal justice systems wo...

Socio-legal researchers increasingly recognise the need to employ a wide variety of methods in studying law and legal phenomena, and the need to be informed by an understanding of debates about theory and method in mainstream social science. The papers in this volume illustrate how a range of topics, including EU law, ombudsmen, judges, lawyers, Shariah Councils and the quality assurance industry can be researched from a socio-legal perspective. The objective of the collection is to show h...

This textbook on the sociology of law is organised according to the theoretical traditions of sociology, and oriented towards providing an accessible, but sophisticated, introduction to, and overview of, the central themes, problems and debates in this field. The book employs an international range of examples - including the state, minority rights, terrorism, family violence, the legal profession, pornography, mediation, religious tolerance, and euthanasia - in order to distinguish a soci...

[![A companion website is available for this text][]][A companion website is available for this text 1]This is an essential introduction to undergraduate studies in criminology. Short, clear and concise, it provides a comprehensive overview of the key themes covered on your criminology course.The second edition provides:- Summaries of key course content, including new sections on race and ethnicity, cybercrime, ordinary crime, state crime, global and comparative cri...

Naming What We Know, Classroom Edition examines the core principles of knowledge in the discipline of writing studies, using the lens of “threshold concepts”—concepts that are critical for epistemological participation in a discipline. This edition focuses on the working definitions of thirty-seven threshold concepts that run throughout the research, teaching, assessment, and public work in writing studies. Developed from the highly regarded original edition in response to grassro...

Second edition of the introductory guidebook to the basic principles of constructing sound arguments and criticising bad ones. Non-technical in approach, it is based on 186 examples, which Douglas Walton, a leading authority in the field of informal logic, discusses and evaluates in clear, illustrative detail. Walton explains how errors, fallacies, and other key failures of argument occur. He shows how correct uses of argument are based on sound strategies for reasoned persuasion and criti...

Social Policy: Themes and approaches is a fully revised, updated and extended edition of a bestselling social policy textbook, extensively reworked and adapted to meet the needs of its international readership. The book lays out the architecture of social policy as a field of study, providing a sense of the scope, range and purpose of the subject while developing critical awareness of problems, issues and common fallacies.