David Nelken
Biographic Data
| ID | 189185 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Nelken |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Nelken |
| SIGNATURE | NELKEN D |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 75 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Platform Governance, Wikipedia, and Misinformation
This article surveys writing about Wikipedia governance with special reference to what other social media and networking platforms can learn from it to better deal with misinformation. It samples 20 years of work ranging from writing in computer, media, and communication journals to more political science and sociolegal enquiries to focus on who governs Wikipedia, what is governed, and how it is governed. It shows that although commentators have …
Out of time? Going back to the Cotterrell–Nelken debate
These brief comments revisit my side of the argument in the so‐called Cotterell–Nelken debate in the light of responses from two younger scholars. I suggest that the debate presupposed a considerable level of shared commitment to studying sociology's relationship to law, together with some disagreement about what was required for sociology of law to be truly reflexive about the limits of its own intellectual resources. Amongst the valuable points…
Wikilegality and legal consciousness 1
This article begins by commenting on recent work on legal consciousness, concentrating especially on the pioneering work of Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey and later commentary, including research by Ayelet Oz that attempts to extend their ideas to cases of non‐state private ordering such as Wikipedia. It goes on to outline some of the distinctive features of Wikipedia's legal system and its ambivalence about (state) law and discusses the objecti…
Memories of Keebet
Combining the Legal and the Social in Sociology of Law
This open access book pays homage to Reza Banakar, who passed away in August 2020, exploring the many different areas of socio-legal research that he worked on and influenced. It begins with a summary of his career and explains how he sparked a debate on the identity and aims of legal sociology. The book is then split into five sections which look at theory, methods and interdisciplinarity, legal culture, law and sociology of law, and applied soc…
Criminal Justice and The Ideal Defendant in the Making of Remorse and Responsibility
This book investigates how defendants are assessed by criminal justice decision-makers, such as judges, lawyers, probation officers, parole board members and those involved in restorative justice. What attitudes and emotions are defendants expected to show? How are these expectations communicated? With contributors from across the world, the book opens new comparative possibilities and research agendas. The book argues that defendants, at various…
Combining the Legal and the Social in Sociology of Law
Between comparison and commensuration
Global social indicators, as a form of governance and soft regulation, exert pressure for change and compliance through the way they compare and rank the relative performance of states or other units. Is it reasonable then to expect the comparisons they make in the process of carrying out such strategic exercises to be accurate and fair? In particular, how far can they, or should they, be required to be faithful to the requirement to ‘compare lik…
Numbers in an emergency
First published online: 10 June 2021
Beyond Social Constructionism? Cicourel and the Search for Ecological Validity
This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a major book that has influenced the author. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André‐Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt, Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger Brownsword, Roger Cotterrell, Nicola Lacey, Carol J. Greenhouse, David Garland, and Peter Fitzpatrick
Justice Without Measure
Whose Best Practices? The Significance of Context in and for Transnational Criminal Justice Indicators
To what extent is it possible to identify transnational good or best practice and what are the difficulties and challenges in doing so validly? The claim made in this article is that it may be helpful to examine the spread of global social indicators as a series of projects that themselves reproduce ideas of what counts as ‘good’ practice. This will help identify the ‘politics of comparison’ in each case. Taking as an example recent calls for cri…
Introductory note
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Global social indicators and the concept of legitimacy
Global social indicators have become a core point of interest of scholarship in law and other social sciences. The term ‘legitimacy’ is occasionally mentioned in this literature but without in-depth discussion. This paper aims to fill this gap by way of exploring the relationship between global social indicators and the concept of legitimacy. The crucial issue of such indicators is that, being drafted in a general fashion and based on a quantitat…
Introduction
Today, global social indicators reach across many societal fields. For example, some deal with good governance and the rule of law, such as the Corruption Perception Index and the various indicators by the World Bank; some with personal rights and economic freedom, such as the World Press Freedom Index and the Global Competitiveness Report; some with human development and political stability, such as the Human Development Index and the Country Ri…
In Memoriam
Governance of Security and Ignored Insecurities in Contemporary Europe
Security can be regarded as a set of governmental devices (dispositifs according to Foucault) which in modern states have ensured the management of the population and allowed the ordinary and regular functioning of liberal societies (Foucault, 2008). In this framework, ‘security devices’ are a set of governance techniques that emerged in the eighteenth century in order to act on the population, this being defined as a phenomenon which can be regu…
From pains-taking to pains-giving comparisons
This paper distinguishes three ideal-type contexts in which comparisons are used: comparison as a contribution to disciplinary enquiry, as part of deliberately trying to learn lessons and as an essential element of a new form of governmentality concerned with ranking places in terms of social indicators. After offering examples of the way comparisons are employed (and criticised) in each of these exercises, the paper ends by discussing the overla…
Comparative Legal Research and Legal Culture
This article seeks to provide an overview of how the controversial concept of legal culture has been used so as to clarify its potential role in further developing comparative studies of law in society. It shows that the term is currently given a variety of meanings, ranging from treating it as a variable that explains the turn to law, to exploring law as culture in different settings. As a way of moving forward, attention should be given to what…
The Quiet Power of Indicators
Using a power-knowledge framework, this volume critically investigates how major global indicators of legal governance are produced, disseminated and used, and to what effect. Original case studies include Freedom House's Freedom in the World indicator, the Global Reporting Initiative's structure for measuring and reporting on corporate social responsibility, the World Justice Project's measurement of the rule of law, the World Bank's Doing Busin…
John Pratt and Anna Eriksson, Contrasts in Punishment
Post-Soviet criminal justice and comparative criminology
Response 3
This reply to Valverde seeks to examine what she means by speaking of the logics of security. After critiquing the elements she uses to characterize such projects it then applies her approach to the examples of fighting cybercrime and creating global social indicators
Of Rights and Favors
Thinking About Legal Culture
This paper addresses the controversial concept of legal culture. It first considers the different meanings of the term and the variety of debates in which it figures. It then goes on to consider difficulties in deciding the units to which the term "legal culture" is applied, and the problems in using the term in explanations. It concludes by examining the way assumptions about what gives legal culture its coherence have implications for explainin…
The Judges and Political Corruption in Italy
In the two years following April 1992, all the established parties of government in Italy were swept away in the course of judicial investigations, which revealed centrally organized systems of illegal financing of political parties and corrupt agreements between politicians and businessmen. Some of these parties, founded as long as a hundred years before, had played notable parts in the construction of the Italian Republic but, since the Second …
Disclosing/Invoking Legal Culture
Global social indicators and the concept of legitimacy
Global social indicators have become a core point of interest of scholarship in law and other social sciences. The term ‘legitimacy’ is occasionally mentioned in this literature but without in-depth discussion. This paper aims to fill this gap by way of exploring the relationship between global social indicators and the concept of legitimacy. The crucial issue of such indicators is that, being drafted in a general fashion and based on a quantitat…
Blinding Insights? The Limits of a Reflexive Sociology of Law
Is there a danger that sociological approaches to law end up creating law in their own image? Can they set their own limits? Could they help further rather than hinder the process by which law becomes more technocratic? Continuing a debate with Roger Cotterrell, this paper offers an examination of Cotterrell's suggestion, in the last issue, that these dangers can be avoided provided that sociological interpretation of legal ideas recognizes an al…
Of Rights and Favors
Comparative Legal Research and Legal Culture
This article seeks to provide an overview of how the controversial concept of legal culture has been used so as to clarify its potential role in further developing comparative studies of law in society. It shows that the term is currently given a variety of meanings, ranging from treating it as a variable that explains the turn to law, to exploring law as culture in different settings. As a way of moving forward, attention should be given to what…
Thinking About Legal Culture
This paper addresses the controversial concept of legal culture. It first considers the different meanings of the term and the variety of debates in which it figures. It then goes on to consider difficulties in deciding the units to which the term "legal culture" is applied, and the problems in using the term in explanations. It concludes by examining the way assumptions about what gives legal culture its coherence have implications for explainin…
Reading and writing youth justice in Italy and (England and) Wales
This article draws on an ongoing comparative study of youth justice in Italy and (England and) Wales to pose two questions. First, to what extent does the construction and use of social reports in the youth justice systems in the two jurisdictions conform to projected ‘new’ transnational trends in neo-liberal penal discourses? Second, in so far as differences in the influence of these discourses can be identified, how are they to be explained and…
"Beyond Compare? Criticizing "The American Way of Law
Law and Knowledge/Law as Knowledge
Denouncing the penal state
Patterns of Punitiveness
The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption
David Nelken, Michael Levi, The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption: An Overview, Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 23, No. 1, The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-17
Between comparison and commensuration
Global social indicators, as a form of governance and soft regulation, exert pressure for change and compliance through the way they compare and rank the relative performance of states or other units. Is it reasonable then to expect the comparisons they make in the process of carrying out such strategic exercises to be accurate and fair? In particular, how far can they, or should they, be required to be faithful to the requirement to ‘compare lik…
Introduction
Today, global social indicators reach across many societal fields. For example, some deal with good governance and the rule of law, such as the Corruption Perception Index and the various indicators by the World Bank; some with personal rights and economic freedom, such as the World Press Freedom Index and the Global Competitiveness Report; some with human development and political stability, such as the Human Development Index and the Country Ri…
An e-mail from Global Bukowina
This paper uses Teubner’s reinterpretation of Ehrlich’s idea of ‘living law’ in his paper on ‘Global Bukowina’ as a test case of what is involved in making a classical author speak to current issues. It argues that interpretation is a form of appropriation and that the process of re-contextualising ideas involves an unstable compromise between establishing what an author meant and what an author means
Getting at Law’s Boundaries
"Beyond Compare? Criticizing "The American Way of Law
Law’s Embrace
Is There a Crisis in Law and Legal Ideology
Is There a Crisis in Law and Legal Ideology
Critical Criminal Law
To come to criminal law in a spirit of criticism is to find a subject full of paradoxes. It is an area where there is both an abundance of criticism and yet where critique has hardly started. It is the branch of law where most social studies have been done of the 'law in action' and where the gulf between ideals of equality and the reality of differentiation has been shown to be glaring and recurrent, and where official arbitrariness and repressi…
Recent Texts on White-Collar Crime
Journal Article RECENT TEXTS ON WHITE-COLLAR CRIME: AN OVERVIEW Get access THE EMERGENCE OF THE SCOTTISH CHILDREN'S HEARING SYSTEM: AN ADMINISTRATIVE/POLITICAL STUDY OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF NOVEL ARRANGEMENTS IN SCOTLAND FOR DEALING WITH JUVENILE OFFENDERS 1960–1982. By D. J. COWPERTHWAITE . (Southampton: Institute of Criminal Justice, Southampton University. 1988. 77 pp. £5.50.) David Nelken David Nelken Faculty of Laws University CollegeLondon …
Discipline and Punish
This paper re‐analyses a debate between Cohen and Bottoms over the alleged growth of the ‘disciplinary society’. It then takes as a test case empirical evidence concerning a new technique of social control used by social workers, namely the use of ‘contracts' in welfare interventions, especially with parents suspected of maltreating their children. It argues that this form of social control illustrates the limitations of the analytical framework …
Special Issue
Why Punish
Nicola Lacey 's discussion of the justifications for punishment and Bridget Hutter's description of the work of environmental health officers each represents a clearly argued and valuable contribution to the study of criminal justice. Both writers offer a careful and reasonably comprehensive analysis of the previous literature in their subjects but also advance new programmes of research. Lacey argues strongly for a revival of a communi-. tarian …
The Futures of criminology
Disclosing/Invoking Legal Culture
The Judges and Political Corruption in Italy
In the two years following April 1992, all the established parties of government in Italy were swept away in the course of judicial investigations, which revealed centrally organized systems of illegal financing of political parties and corrupt agreements between politicians and businessmen. Some of these parties, founded as long as a hundred years before, had played notable parts in the construction of the Italian Republic but, since the Second …
The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption
David Nelken, Michael Levi, The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption: An Overview, Journal of Law and Society, Vol. 23, No. 1, The Corruption of Politics and the Politics of Corruption (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-17
The Future of Criminologies
L'A. presente l'ouvrage de M. Pavarini «The Futures of criminology». Pavarini montre que la recherche dans ce cadre tend a prendre un caractere international et que cette orientation va prendre de plus en plus d'importance. Celui-ci regrette, dans le meme temps, que les specialistes en criminologie paraissent ignorer certaines theories et domaines de recherche. L'A. estime que s'il existe une crise de la criminologie celle-ci est liee a son succe…
Blinding Insights? The Limits of a Reflexive Sociology of Law
Is there a danger that sociological approaches to law end up creating law in their own image? Can they set their own limits? Could they help further rather than hinder the process by which law becomes more technocratic? Continuing a debate with Roger Cotterrell, this paper offers an examination of Cotterrell's suggestion, in the last issue, that these dangers can be avoided provided that sociological interpretation of legal ideas recognizes an al…
Law’s Embrace
"Beyond Compare? Criticizing "The American Way of Law
"Beyond Compare? Criticizing "The American Way of Law
Law and Knowledge/Law as Knowledge
Getting at Law’s Boundaries
Patterns of Punitiveness
Crafting Transnational Policing
The book examines the phenomenon of crafting transnational policing. By this term is meant the different forms of engagement in policing reform by international donors, national governments, foreign police and law enforcement agencies in the domestic policing agencies and programs of recipient countries. It includes, inter alia, peace-keeping in post-conflict situations, reconstruction and capacity-building as part of nation- or state-building ex…
An e-mail from Global Bukowina
This paper uses Teubner’s reinterpretation of Ehrlich’s idea of ‘living law’ in his paper on ‘Global Bukowina’ as a test case of what is involved in making a classical author speak to current issues. It argues that interpretation is a form of appropriation and that the process of re-contextualising ideas involves an unstable compromise between establishing what an author meant and what an author means
Denouncing the penal state
Reading and writing youth justice in Italy and (England and) Wales
This article draws on an ongoing comparative study of youth justice in Italy and (England and) Wales to pose two questions. First, to what extent does the construction and use of social reports in the youth justice systems in the two jurisdictions conform to projected ‘new’ transnational trends in neo-liberal penal discourses? Second, in so far as differences in the influence of these discourses can be identified, how are they to be explained and…
Anthropology, corruption, and human rights
Italo Pardo, Between morality and the law: Corruption, anthropology and comparative society. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, pp. 187, ISBN 0-7546-4290-9.Monique Nuijten and Gerhard Anders, eds., Corruption and the secret of law: A legal anthropological perspective, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 234, ISBN: 978-0-7546-7110-7
Law in other contexts
This issue of the journal includes the first article to be published in an exciting new section entitled ‘Law in other contexts’. This section is dedicated to making available specially commissioned reports of socio-legal research in places where English is not the first language. In this way the journal hopes to bring attention to work which may not be easily accessible to those without knowledge of the relevant language (and culture). It is als…
Response 3
This reply to Valverde seeks to examine what she means by speaking of the logics of security. After critiquing the elements she uses to characterize such projects it then applies her approach to the examples of fighting cybercrime and creating global social indicators
Political science (38 works) · Law (31 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Law (26 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Law in Society and Culture (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works)