Introduction to Criminology, Law & Society

Criminal Law employs a variety of instructional techniques which will engage your students from start to finish.

First, every chapter contains embedded videos, ethical scenarios, charts, diagrams, and/or tables to demonstrate the legal concepts and examples provided. These enhancements break up the text and also appeal to various learning styles.

This text uses a two-step process to augment learning, called the applied approach. First, after building a strong foundation from scratch, Criminal Law will introduce your students to crimes and defenses which have been broken down into separate components. Lisa's goal was to make it easier for students to comprehend the subject matter when it is simplified this way. Lisa wrote under the premise that an application must be seen, experienced, and practiced before it comes naturally. Thus, the second step of the applied approach is reviewing examples of the application of law to facts after dissecting and analyzing each legal concept. Some of the examples come from cases, and some are purely fictional. All of the examples are memorable, even quirky, so they will stick in your students' minds when they need them the most (like during an exam). The examples clarify the principles, which can lighten their workload significantly.

Additionally, instead of bulking up the textbook by reprinting edited cases, Criminal Law includes links to cases online. This allows students to read more cases, as Lisa feels cases are like examples-they demonstrate the application of law to facts. Also, linking to the actual judicial opinion allows students to read the entire case exactly the way the judge wrote it, instead of an edited version which has been shrunk to fit into a limited amount of pages.

Finally, Criminal Law includes hundreds of footnotes which link to online cases and statutes, supplementary links to articles, web sites, and statistics online, and plenty of reference material for a term paper or other research project. In short, Criminal Law contains everything your students need to successfully complete the course, and it is also a valuable guide that students can refer to throughout their criminal justice career.

If you teach a course where case examples drive learning and comprehension and you would like your book to support that endeavor, Criminal Law is for you. Order your desk copy today.