Contrary to current tendencies, the founders of sociology as a discipline regarded the sociology of law as an integral part of social theory. Law and its historical variations were treated by them as constitutive components of social life. This can be demonstrated especially with regard to Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. It also provides an opportunity to highlight the diVerences between these au...

The growth of the prison system over the last three decades represents a critical institutional intervention in the lives of American families. The massive buildup in the size of the penal population has not been due to large scale changes in crime or criminality. Instead, a host of changes at the local, state, and federal levels with respect to law enforcement and penal policy are implicated i...

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Counte...

The collapse of confidence in anonymization (sometimes also known as de-identification) as a robust approach for preserving the privacy of personal data has incited an outpouring of new approaches that aim to fill the resulting trifecta of technical, organizational, and regulatory privacy gaps left in its wake. In the latter category, and in large part due to the growth of Big Data-driven biome...