In Conversation with Prof. Mary Rogan
In this chapter Prof. Mary Rogan speaks about her experience discovering criminology as a Law student and how it sowed the seeds for her later research interests. She speaks about combining elements of legal philosophy with criminological theory and how h
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In Conversation with Prof. Mary Rogan
Abstract In this chapter Prof. Mary Rogan speaks about her experience discovering criminology as a Law student and how it sowed the seeds for her later research interests. She speaks about combining elements of legal philosophy with criminological theory and how her research interests developed to focus on lived experience and penal policy. Prof. Rogan goes on to chart her journey from student to practitioner to Professor and explains how her sense of criminology as a rendezvous discipline was central to how her research career progressed. She talks about the need to share information, to give back, to inform policy and to understand how policy is experienced on the ground. Finally, Prof. Rogan speaks about her work informing, reviewing and creating policy based on her own and others’ research and the importance of this role as an academic and the potential for positive change that can come from such involvement. Keywords Law · Prison policy · Lived experience · Rendezvous discipline
The teaching of Law and legal training in Ireland has a long history reaching all the way back to the introduction of common law in 1170 (Delaney 1960). However in recent decades there has been significant change in how Law is taught in Universities with approaches ranging from © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 O. Lynch et al., Reflections on Irish Criminology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60593-3_8
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traditional, to holistic, to clinical and everything in between (Paris and Donnelly 2010). Currently, almost every law school in Ireland ascribes to the holistic approach thus allowing students the opportunity to study law in combination with other subjects. The aim of such an approach is to expand past the assumption that a lawyer should be merely a legal technician towards the belief that it is vital for lawyers and legal scholars to be able to reflect on cultural and moral questions relevant to their profession (Paris and Donnelly 2010). The discipline of criminology is a key element in this approach and its role is seen as putting the law in context. The question of whether criminology has a place in Law Schools goes back to the beginning of the twentieth century where the purity of the American legal tradition was seen as inferior to European efforts to increase the ‘intellectual and emotional nature of the student’ by introducing criminology to legal training (Ferraari and Holmes 1912, p. 828). Much commentry in this volume has referred to how criminology as a discipline has borrowed from other fields, law being amongst them, however in the literature, there is little reflection on the role of criminology in contributing to academic research in its own right. A number of Irish legal scholars turned criminologists, among them, Prof. Mary Rogan, Prof. Kilcommins and Prof. Hamilton have highlighted how their experience of learning about criminology filled a both a theoretical and conceptual gap in their education. While I
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