ABSTRACT
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.
As part of a symposium about the relationship between the Law and Political Economy movement (LPE) and law and economics (L&E), this Essay connects this expansion of sources of knowledge in legal scholarship to those schools of thought. We argue that LPE has provided a natural intellectual home for those of us 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. At the same time, we do not see an inherent epistemological distinction between LPE and L&E, both of which have the potential to grapple with alternative sources of knowledge in what they measure and in how they study the law.
Davidson, Adam and Simonson, Jocelyn, Expanding Sources of Knowledge in Legal Scholarship (February 2, 2026), University of Chicago Law School, Public Law & Legal Theory Research Paper No 26-6; 93 University of Chicago Law Review 351 (2026).
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