Learning Objectives/Reading Guides
Social Problems, Law and Society
Chapter 2:Law and Social Change: Bringing Social Movements into the Dialectic
- Identify the two meanings of social problems.
- Understand the various theoretical approaches to understanding social problems.
- Critically compare the approaches to crime and deviance, the sociology of the law and social movements.
- Explain social problems through the lens of the dialectic process.
Social Problems, Law and Society
Chapter 3:Ontological Gerrymandering: The Anatomy of Social Problems Explanations
- Discuss what is meant by “ethnography of argument.”
- Understand the structure of social problems argument.
- Explain how ontological gerrymandering is evident in discussions about marijuana and child abuse.
- Describe what is meant by practical management of social problems as compared to solving them.
Social Problems, Law and Society
Chapter 5:A Sociological Analysis of the Laws of Vagrancy
- Explain how the social settings of laws can be analyzed to better understand the laws.
- Describe the emergence of the law of vagrancy in England in the 1300s.
- Assess how the English laws emerged in the United States and how the social setting for these laws differed.
Social Problems, Law and Society
Chapter 19: The State, The Legal Order, and Social Problems
- Assess the differences between the government and the state.
- Explain the instrumentalist perspective.
- Describe structuralist theory and dialectic theory.
- Discuss how a dialectic model of state and government decision making can solve problems that are inherent in other theories of the law.
