jury bias

Jury Bias

Annotated bibliography

For this assignment I have selected an article of Roger Cotterrell, the name of the topic is

, Durkheim's Sociology Clarify Legal Values?

Introduction

Can sociology tell us what is right or wrong? For most social scientists (and surely most citizens) the answer is clearly no. Sociology claims to be science, not moral philosophy. Sociology of law, for example, aims to explain the social character of law, but not whether any particular law or legal regime is just, or morally sound. A few leading modern legal sociologists have disagreed. Philip Selznick, for example, influenced especially by John Dewey's teaching on the relations of fact and value, claims that sociology, studying legality as an ideal pursued in practice, can also help to clarify and realize that ideal. But this has been an unusual minority position. In fact, however, classic sociological theory provides some still useful resources for reconsidering orthodox views about sociology's capacities for informing moral and legal evaluation. Most importantly, these resources are found in E´ mile Durkheim's elaborately developed sociology of morality. Yet this central aspect of his work has remained largely unexploited and often ignored as regards its potential relevance for contemporary legal studies, despite all the attention that has been devoted to relating other parts of Durkheim's sociological thought to the study of law.

Durkheim offers a powerful and distinctive sociological template for examining legal values, aiming to show how they gain such resonance as they have from their congruence with conditions needed to ensure cohesion and integration of the society in which they exist. This article explains his main ideas on what he sees as a sociologically necessary framework of values for modern law. It then tries to show the kind of illumination that these ideas may provide by considering, in Durkheimian perspective, two recently prominent legal-moral issues: the acceptability of torture in defence of national security; and restrictions on the wearing of the Islamic headscarf. These issues may seem wholly distinct and unrelated but, in the context of this article, they provide convenient vehicles for exploring aspects of 'moral individualism' - the value system that, for sociological reasons, Durkheim argues must be the foundation of all law in modern complex Western societies.

The central element of Durkheimian moral individualism is universal respect for the equal human dignity and autonomy of every member of society, whatever differences there may be in the outlook, position, life conditions or roles of society's members. I suggest that Durkheim offers, through his analyses of moral individualism, a thought-provoking and critical sociological alternative to familiar legal-philosophical debates on human dignity. I argue that this alternative provides important insights relevant to contemporary issues. It can be used, for example, not only to show unambiguously why the use of torture is morally indefensible for contemporary complex societies, but also to clarify the context (in terms of various conceptions of national security) in which efforts have been made to defend torture. In relation to Islamic dress, an application of Durkheim's ideas on solidarity and ...