This research focuses on immigration and youthful illegalities in the Toronto area, one of the world's most ethnically diverse global cities. While current research documents a negative relationship between crime and immigration, there is little attention to individual-level mechanisms that explain the paths through which immigrant youth refrain from illegalities. Through a study of two cohorts of adolescents across two generations (1976, 1999), we elaborate a process model that is generic over both generations, and in which measures of bonds to parents and schools, commitments to education, and dispositions of risk aversity mediate youth involvement in illegalities. By focusing on a period when non-European immigration to Toronto increased dramatically, we then identify a compositional effect through which the more recent cohort is engaged in fewer illegalities.
Although scholars have devoted considerable attention to the formation, modification, and dissemination of knowledges in and around the legal complex, few systematic inquiries have been made into the sociology of legal knowledges. In this paper, we focus on two areas of law-liquor licensing and drunk driving-and contextwlize their development from the perspective of police science. We document the ways in which contemporary police science authorizes a "common knowledge," which is not to be confused with lay knowledge, or even trade knowledge. Rather, the "common knowledge" that is authorized is what legal authorities believe everyone should know, despite any lay or trade knowledge individuals may have. This analysis demonstrates the need for further work on the ways in which knowkdges are formed and authorized within law, with particular emphasis on documenting how a "responsibility to know" comes to be deployed beyond the state.Sociolegal scholars have documented the formation of legal knowledge for quite some time, with the literature in this area falling into three rough categories. One set of studies examines the ways in which knowledge produced by professional bodies-such as psychiatry and genetics-circulates within law and helps to shape legal outcomes and legal discourses (e.g.,
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.