Maguire, Morgan & Reiner: The Oxford Handbook of Criminology 4e 
Selected chapters from previous editions
Figures and tables from the textMaguire, Morgan & Reiner: The Oxford Handbook of Criminology 4e
Chapter 06
The student of comparative criminal justice will need to sample literatures that touch on many different disciplines. For example, a lot of the running in anything to do with judges is made by political scientists. Likewise, works inspired by the positivist, interpretative, and comparative law approaches do not communicate much, though this is slowly beginning to change. Many textbooks on comparative law and comparative criminal justice are little more than guides to classification. But Damaska's typology of hierarchical and coordinate forms of justice is still an important starting point for the attempt to theorize differences in criminal justice in civil law and common law countries (M. Damaska, The Faces of Justice and State Authority, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). The best way to get deeper into the subject is to read monographs and articles about one or two specific societies, for example David Downes, Contrasts in Tolerance (1988) or David Johnson's The Japanese Way of Justice (2001). Renee Van Swaaningen's Critical Criminology in Europe (1998) is good on different national styles of criminology. Jim Sheptycki and Ali Wardak's (2005) Transnational and Comparative Criminology is one of the best recent edited collections on the topic.
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