Researching Law Volume 31 Issue 1 - Flipbook - Page 13
VO L 31 | NO 1 | SP RING 2020
with ABF Research Professors
charged someone, then that person
must have committed a crime.
These ideas now seem so naïve by
today’s standards.
Q: How does the ABF
Survey continue to affect
legal education?
Traci Burch:
It probably helps people to think
more holistically about how systems
work together, (and) about how of
all the possible cases of wrongdoing
that the government can pursue,
the number that actually become
cases where people get sent to
prison is relatively small. We think
about how the system is designed.
In looking at a system, it helps us to
JOHN P. HEINZ
Owen L. Coon Professor
Emeritus, Northwestern
University School of Law
see biases in terms of how we lose
people along the way or how certain
people are impacted in the system
that we might not see if we just look
at the endpoint.
a lot more has come into legal
education, a more fully developed
picture of what the criminal justice
system looks like and all the
agencies that are involved.
John Heinz:
John Hagan:
I started teaching criminal law in
1965. When I took criminal law
as a student in law school, and
when I taught it in my beginning
years of teaching, it was all about
the “law of the books.” It didn’t tell
you much about how the criminal
law really worked. It didn’t tell you
anything about the volume of cases,
about the race of the people going
through the courts, (etc.). That
wasn’t a part of criminal justice
education in those days. I think
One of the things that I have always
found amusing in retrospect is
thinking back to when I first took
an undergraduate course about
crime in the late 1960s. There
was still this article that was a
classic about policing called, “The
Policeman as Philosopher, Guide,
and Friend.” What would happen to
you if you wrote an article with that
kind of title today? You would be
laughed away! That article reflected
this kind of idea about problem-
When I took criminal law as a student in law
school, and when I taught it in my beginning
years of teaching, it was all about the “law of
the books”...a lot more has come into legal
education, a more fully developed picture of
what the criminal justice system looks like and
all the agencies that are involved.
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