Research on trial: fifty years of research on the courts
How has the activity of the courts been dealt with in articles published in Criminologie? This article describes fifty years of research on the courts, relying on 63 articles selected from the journal’s archives. First, the critical importance of the selected articles is considered. Then, the picture presented of the traditional and binary pattern of activity in the courts – to judge and to punish – is discussed and illustrated. Finally, the authors provide a synthesis of the critical themes discussed in the selected articles. Four instances of “injustice” were observed in the corpus under analysis: exclusion of victims during the course of the penal process ; inequalities between offenders; inequalities resulting from social biases in arrests; and weaknesses in implementing “alternatives”.