ABSTRACT
Policework is a curiously neglected subject in legal scholarship and education. Despite the long tradition of socio-legal research on policing,1 contemporary legal scholars tend to focus on how legislative bodies make law, how judges use law in making decisions in court, or on doctrinal questions that arise from legal theory and history. By comparison, legal scholarship on the law in police hands is thin on the ground.2 It is notable that of the hundred or so articles
1See Joseph Goldstein, ‘Police Discretion Not to Invoke the Criminal Process: Low Visibility Decision in the Administration of Justice’ (1960) 69 Yale Law Journal 543; Laurence Lustgarten, The Governance of the Police (Sweet & Maxwell, 1986); David Dixon, Law in Policing (Oxford University Press, 1997); Robert Reiner, The Politics of the Police (Oxford University Press, 4th edn 2010). 2Robert Baldwin and Richard Kinsey, ‘Rules, Realism and the Police Act’ (1985) 12 Critical Social Policy 89.
