Law in Contemporary Society

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ThaliaJulme-FirstPaper 8 - 05 Mar 2008 - Main.IanSullivan
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  The functionalist study of statistics thus allows for the exploration of many societal problems.

  • I think this is a very promising start. At the linguistic level, the primary route to improvement is the shortening of sentences. You have impressively tight control over sentence flow, which is crucial to good writing, but you let too many words ride for free. "Crime statistics and inflammatory crime reporting often convince the citizenry of the existence of increased crime," for example, means "Journalists and politicians misuse statistics to inflate people's fears." On the substantive level, I think the most effective route to improvement lies in compressing your discussion of one example (the publication of crime statistics) to offer an amplified treatment of the question you identify as important: What do statistics do? At the moment, you show what crime statistics do, which --in your accounting--has much to do with establishing the line between Us and Other, normal and deviant, in the familiar Durkheimian manner. But that's a species in some genus, and by limiting yourself to a single example you make it impossible for us to see the contour of the genus as a whole. What else, one wants to ask, does statistics do? And how do the different things it does combine into a whole?
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Revision 8r8 - 05 Mar 2008 - 21:38:46 - IanSullivan
Revision 7r7 - 19 Feb 2008 - 23:25:21 - EbenMoglen
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