Expanding Sources of Knowledge in Legal Scholarship
Do police help keep us safe? Do prisons make the world less violent? This Essay argues that effectively engaging with these and other notoriously difficult questions about our criminal legal system requires a diverse suite of methodologies. Too often, however, scholars have purported to answer these questions definitively by reference only to top-down, state-created, data categories and numbers: arrest rates, crime rates, formal adjudication outcomes. This Essay argues that opening up research methods to seek knowledge from grounded and communal sources can help unseat assumptions and guide researchers toward more nuanced and expansive understandings of the relationships between law, politics, economics, and our material world. The Law and Political Economy movement (LPE) has provided a natural intellectual home for those who turn to bottom-up sources of knowledge, precisely because of the attention given by LPE scholars to interplays of power, politics, and the law.