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Interrogating Richard Leo's Claims about Police Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Michael Musheno
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Extract

In a recent issue of Law & Society Review, Richard Leo (1996) takes full advantage of the intellectual freedom given to review essayists in “Police Scholarship for the Future: Resisting the Pull of the Policy Audience.” He claims that most of police scholarship of the 1990s is “impoverished theoretically” and “often not worth reading” (p. 865) and blames the current generation of police scholars for falling into the grip (and deep pockets) of the policy audience. He contrasts current scholarship with a golden age of police inquiry, the 1960s, in which theoretical breakthroughs were common, and scholars were driven by their critical instincts rather than by material interests. His review of current works is narrower than most published in the Review, covering only two monographs published in the 1990s, and holding out but one (Bayley 1994) as evidence of all that is wrong with contemporary, sociolegal inquiry of policing.

Type
Review Essay Note
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , 1997 , pp. 389 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

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