Essay themes (preliminary)

• Gender and legal professions • Restorative Justice

• Gender violence and law
• Sexual identity and law
• Surveillance state
• Symbolic power of law
• Neoliberal legality
• Stigma and deviant career
• Resistance to legal authority
• Community Control and crime
• White-collar crime
• Community policing
• Police culture
• Wrongful conviction: cases and causes
• System of citizen's complaints to police misconduct
• Cybercrime
• Predictive policing
• Artificial intelligence in law and criminal Justice
• Face recognition technologies in criminal Justice

How to start working on an essay

The aim of the analytical essay is student’s training in application of the theories, terms, and
categories to analysis of operation of specific legal institution, practices and police activities.
Choose an empirical case for your analysis. Your main goal in analytical essay to explain social
mechanisms behind particular case. For instance, I want to write about Police and focus on police
brutality. I will start by selecting a case to ground my analysis. Podcast “74 seconds” produced by
Minnesota Public Radio describes routine traffic stop escalated to the use of deadly force by a
police officer. I think this is a rich empirical case for my hypothetical essay.

Beware of ending up with a descriptive essay (“реферат”) where you just retell a bunch of articles.
Such essays generally have a descriptive thesis rather than an argumentative one.
For essay outline we suggest you follow this instruction:
1. Decide what you are planning to write about. Choose the topic among the suggested ones. If
you would like to offer your own, please, let us know, and get approved by the instructor before
starting work on it.
2. What are you going to analyze? Search for any case relevant to your topic in a media.
3. How do you plan to interpret your findings? I strongly recommend you first find a short
description of the topic in an encyclopedia or dictionary. After that you can look for relevant
articles in this field (read paragraph about literature and the list of suggested encyclopedias and
dictionaries in the end).
4. Try to identify major problems in the topics chosen, and make the outline with the focus on
the major problems

Essay outline: 1-2 pages

Essay: 4-10 pages
 Narrowing down the Topic of your essay

“The topic of an academic essay must be sufficiently focused and specific in order for a coherent
argument to be made about it. In the courtroom, the topic is never a huge abstraction like
"jurisprudence" or "the legal system" or even "capital punishment" or "guilt and innocence." All
of those are subjects. A topic is particular: The Case of So-and-So v. So-and-So. Academic
arguments, too, have topics”1.

For a hypothetical essay on police brutality I will use precise topic. Bad and broad topic in this
case would be “Police brutality in USA”. I obviously can not cover this huge theme with many
aspects in just one essay. So, I would choose more moderate topic: “Connection between police
training and police misconduct: case of Philando Castile shooting”.

Literature and theoretical framework

“If you were a lawyer and had to present a case for your client, the worst thing you could do would
be to face a jury and spout out random beliefs and opinions. ("Trust me. This guy's really
honorable. He'd never do what he's accused of.") Instead, you would want to look for evidence and
clues about the situation, investigate suspects, maybe head for the library to check out books on
investment fraud or lock-picking. Whatever the circumstance, you would need to do the
appropriate research in order to avoid looking foolish in the courtroom. Even if you knew what
you had to argue—that your client was not guilty—you still would need to figure out how you
were going to persuade the jury of it. You would need various sources to bolster your case. Writing
an academic essay is similar, because essays are arguments that make use of primary and secondary
sources”2.

Where do you find relevant literature? For superficial search you can use google.scholar. But when
you need to go into more detail, select key words from your theoretical framework and search for
relevant scientific articles in Web of Science or Scopus. You can filter your findings by date (from
oldest to newest) or by citation (from more cited to less cited articles). Full access to the texts is
provided by HSE electronic resources.

In order to support your estimates about state of affairs in a particular field use relevant and
trustworthy statistics. For instance, it would be wrong to say “Everyone knows/It is not a secret
that Russian officials are highly corrupted”. This is a bad argument and it will be regarded as a
mistake. Instead you can use supported estimates: “According to The Corruption Perceptions Index
Russia scored 28 on a scale from 0 to 100 points in 2019. The Index ranks 180 countries and the

1
Maxine Rodburg and The Tutors of the Writing Center at Harvard University. URL:
https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/moving-assignment-topic
2
Maxine Rodburg and The Tutors of the Writing Center at Harvard University. URL:
https://writingcenter.fas.harvard.edu/pages/moving-assignment-topic
average score is 43”3. In this case you can back up your original argument about perceived
corruption level.
If you are looking for a case, you can read trustworthy magazines (The Atlantic, New York Times,
Guardian etc).
You can read more about developing arguments and thesis here.

Formatting requirements

All essays must be uploaded in LMS.

Text formatting: essay should be word processed in 12-point Times New Roman fonts, 1-1,5
spacing. Essay starts with your full name and group number. After that type your essay title.
Select a citation style and use it consistently throughout your entire essay. Here you can look up
some examples of correct citation. You can also use Russian official citation style (“ГОСТ”). In
the end make a reference list.

Note! Paraphrasing or summarizing someone else’s thoughts without proper quotation will be
regarded as plagiarism. In this case you will get 0.

Encyclopedia list

Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice

https://proxylibrary.hse.ru:2084/referencework/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2

Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender

https://proxylibrary.hse.ru:2084/referencework/10.1007/0-387-29907-6

Dictionary of the Social Sciences

https://proxylibrary.hse.ru:4402/view/10.1093/acref/9780195123715.001.0001/acref-
9780195123715

A Dictionary of the Internet (4 ed.)

https://proxylibrary.hse.ru:4402/view/10.1093/acref/9780191884276.001.0001/acref-
9780191884276

3
Transparency International Report 2019. URL: https://www.transparency.org/cpi2019?/news/feature/cpi-2019
Science, Technology, and Society

https://proxylibrary.hse.ru:4402/view/10.1093/acref/9780195141931.001.0001/acref-
9780195141931

International Encyclopedia of Social Policy

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/hselibrary-
ebooks/detail.action?docID=1272855&query=Encyclopedia+of+social+theory

A Dictionary of Sociology (4 ed.)

https://proxylibrary.hse.ru:4402/view/10.1093/acref/9780199683581.001.0001/acref-
9780199683581?rskey=sHuslF&result=5

A Dictionary of Law Enforcement (2 ed.)

https://proxylibrary.hse.ru:4402/view/10.1093/acref/9780191758256.001.0001/acref-
9780191758256