PSYC 313 - Study Questions

T/F - According to John Borrows, the Supreme Court describes Canadian law as inter-societal

True

T/F - According to John Burrow's lecture, the term Chi-Naaknigewin functions as an indigenous term for law

True

According to the Two Row Wampum belt (from the John Burrows lecture), what are the three values at the heart of the relationship between First Nation peoples and settlers?

Peace, friendship, respect

In Indigenous Law, why do we look to sacred, origin stories and founders?

They constitute messages passed down from the ancestors; they teach us about how we should behave today

How does Canadian criminal law treat honour-based violence and killings?

As ordinary homicide or assault, with “honour” having no legal recognition

Miles-Johnson and Courtenay (2021) use culture conflict theory to explain policing challenges around forced marriage. What is the main implication of this framework?

Conflicts between community norms and legal standards can prevent officers from recognizing coercion as criminal

What is interpersonal violence?

Direct violence (person A hits Person B)

What is impersonal violence?

Indirect structural violence (person A runs a company that creates a harmful substance that, years later, gets person B sick)

What are personal safety strategies?

Informal safety tactics

What is the responsibility strategy?

A neoliberal approach that shifts responsibilities from employers/systems to frontline workers

How many drivers reported purposely taking risks in Gray and Lindsay?

27% (48)

What was the number one most observed risk behaviour that truck drivers encounter in Gray and Lindsay?

Driving in a truckers “Front No Zone’

What is the instrumental view of law?

Law is separate from social life (done exclusively in court)

According to “The Pull of the Policy Audience” by Austin Sarat and Susan Silbey, much research in the sociology of law seeks to play what kind of role?

The role of informing policy makers about the effects of particular policy initiatives and to participate in debates about how to use law as an instrument of public policy

What do Austin Sarat and Susan Silbey argue would benefit the sociology of law in their paper?

That it would benefit from an effort to interrogate the basic premises which inform policy debate and that such an interrogation itself requires greater distance from the policy audience

What is the constitutive approach to law?

Law embedded in social relationships (how practices of everyday life sustain the rule of law)

Why might people not comply with water restrictions in Calgary?

Behaviour/psychological (why would someone ignore the rules even if they know about them?); Social/cultural (does it matter what your neighbours are doing? Social norms?); Legal (is there enforcement issues? Penalties too weak? Too hard to catch violators?); communication (do people know about the water restrictions?)

What is the most popular/dominant theory/view of law?

Positivist view

What is the positivist view of law?

Views law and its transactions as morally neutral exercises of logic and interpretation

In the positivist view, law is what?

A subjective thing to be used

What is the principle of nulla pena sine lege (no penalty without a valid law)

It does not allow for repressive retroactive law

What do all other theories of law believe about positivism?

That it is insufficient

What is the natural law response theory?

Proponents of natural law insist on a clear link between law and morality

What does lex iniusta non est lex mean?

An unjust law is no law at all (authority is not legitimate unless it is good and right)

What are the limits of relying on God-given morals?

Not much variation

What is the narrative spin/strategy?

Individuals/groups intentionally use policy narrative elements to persuade and manipulate

In the view of natural law, you argue don’t argue with people’s ____, you argue with people’s ____

Conclusions; premises

What is the view of legal realism?

The political orientation and personality of individual judges, community sentiments, specific economic realities, and political factors all contribute to the growth of laws and judicial decisions

What are regulations?

Standards or requirements of conduct adopted as rules to interpret, implement, and enforce law

What are regulating risks?

The probability that a particular adverse event will occur during a stated period of time, or result from a particular challenge

What does Ulrick Beck say about risk?

Human decisions/choice will lead to risks or events brought on by ourselves that will impact society

Are risks exclusively external?

NO

What are the types of risk?

Voluntarily undertaken risks; socially imposed risks; discrete risks; pervasive risks

What is the difference between discrete risks and pervasive risks?

Discrete = highly identifiable threats and events; pervasive = part of normal life

What does Bladwin say about cases in which there is suspected, but not proven, risk to the public or environment?

The burden of proof is on the producer of  the risk to prove the lack of harmfulness

What did the Sarbanes-Oxely Act of 2002 do?

Ended the self-regulation of the auditing profession

What are the two regulation strategies?

Command and control regulation; self-regulation

What is the no-fault liability insurance system?

Workers surrender their rights to sue employers for damages relating to health and safety failing, and, in return, are entitled to statutory compensation

What is the technical perspective of risk regulation?

Look at the relative frequencies of events that are amenable to ‘objective’ observation and assess probabilities by extrapolating from statistics of past events

What is the economic perspective of risk regulation?

Codes and benefits are assessed in pursuit of the allocation of resources

What is the psychological approach of risk regulation?

Individuals display biases in their behaviour when faced with different risks

What are nudge regulatory strategies?

Allows for decisions to be manipulated by public authorities while allowing individuals to make their decisions

Regulators can be seen as what?

A threat, an ally, or an obstacle

What do regulators want to be seen as?

An ally

What is normativity in regulators?

Values achieved by regulators through interactions with regulated parties

What is capacity in regulators?

Conditions, circumstances, and resources that enable regulators ot secure compliance

What is constraint in regulators?

Restrictions on the ability of regulators to secure compliance

What is time/space in regulators?

Temporal pace and duration of face-to-face engagements between regulators and organizational actors

How do organizational actors view regulators as an ally?

Works with actors to serve public interest; knowledgeable, credible, and an expert; constrained by rile and rules; built relationships, face-to-face meetings, and conferencing

How do organizational actors view regulators as a threat?

Punishes actors when trying to serve public interest; capacity of role and rules; must find evidence of non-compliance; periodic observation

How do organizational actors view a regulator as an obstacle?

Unable to work with actors to serve public interest; capacity of their role; lack knowledge, credibility, and expertise; mediated by staff and/or forms

How do individualists view risk?

As an opportunity

How do egalitarians view risk?

As a danger to Earth

How do hierarchists view risk?

As being managed by rules

How do fatalists view risk?

As having no control

How does responsive regulation work?

Start with compliance and education, then incentives and disclosure, then command and control/sanctions

What is a critique of responsive regulation?

If nothing’s working, it may create many more victims before reaching the punishment level

T/F - Honour killings are not just impulsive acts but are embedded in social norms about family reputation and communal expectations

True

What are honour killings?

Homicide framed by perpetrators as justified or mitigated by honour-based motives

What is honour-based violence?

A pattern of coercive control and violence justified through claims of family or community honour

T/F - honour has no legal recognition as a justification?

True

How does hockey use honour?

To uphold the integrity of the sport

T/F - collectivist norms and religious moral codes sustain community approval of honour-based punishment when women’s behaviour is perceived as threatening family legitimacy

True

T/F - Research from Jordan and Palestine shows that support for honour killings is significantly lower among individuals who endorse patriarchal gender norms, authoritarian family structures, and moral disengagement around restoring family reputation?

False

How does honour function within systems of social control?

As a powerful moral logic

T/F - Many penal codes previously included provisions allowing sentences for crimes committed with so-called “honourable motives”

True

What do scholars argue about future research and intervention moving on from?

Moving beyond purely legal approaches and adopt a social work-orientated strategies

T/F - South Asia, especially Pakistan, represents one of the most extensively studied regions in honour killings literature

True

What does various research identify in south asia (honour killings)

Clear demographic and regional patterns, showing that women are disproportionately targeted

What do scholars highlight about how honour can be framed?

That it is framed as a legitimate form of justice within local governance and tribal negotiations

What is a critique of the “rescue narrative”

It minimizes the survivors

What do feminist scholars argue about the rescue narrative?

That it reproduces colonial assumptions of cultural inferiority and reinforced the stereotype of “saving brown women from brown men”

Honour is not only a cultural concept, but also a:

Form of symbolic capital tied to political power, tribal negotiations, and local governance

Turkish media coverage often _____, while ______

Sensationalizes cases; reinforcing patriarchal norms

Kurdish diaspora communities outside Turkey may experience ____, ____, and ____ which can intensify ____

Heightened visibility; marginalization; pressure to maintain cultural solidarity; honour-based control

Scholars emphasize that effective responses to honour-based violence depends on:

Strong inter-agency coordination

What is stressed by researchers in the Netherlands in regards to honour violence?

Tensions between gender-neutral policy frameworks and gendered realities of honour violence

What was found in Swedish research about honour violence victims accessing resources?

Women exposed to honour violence often face barriers to accessing social services due to institutional uncertainty around cultural sensitivity and risk assessment

What do Spanish critiques of forced marriage suggest?

That punitive legal reforms alone have failed to provide meaningful survivor protection or realistic alternatives for those seeking to escape violence

How does Canada treat honour violence?

As acts of homicide or assault

What do many scholars argue about honour violence in Canada?

It gets muddy with legal and state recognition, policing, prevention, and reporting

Homicide is often the ____, not the _____ of honour violence

Endpoint; beginning

How does honour violence link to feminist theory?

Violence is not an individual act, but a manifestation of structured power; gender-neutral framing can obscure real risks

How would the Criminal Code classify murders driven by hate or that occur alongside controlling coercive behaviour of an intimate partner, sexual violence or exploitation?

First degree murder

How does abuse often escalate?

Through patterns of control long before physical violence occurs

What is the non-enforcement model?

Explains when and why honour norms are upheld strongly in a community

What does a family’s loss of reputation carry within a community?

High social cost

T/F - when honour norms are stronger, laws are more lenient toward honour-based violence

True

T/F - families face lower reputational costs for norm violation

False

T/F - stronger community cohesion correlates with stronger internal enforcement of norms

True

T/F - In communities where norms are very strict, there a more killings

False

T/F - In settings where norms are weak, community members don’t act to enforce them violently

True

What did Aksoy and Szekely find honour killings were the product of?

Social contests over norms

Many researchers note what about the legal systems relation to legal vulnerability?

That they contribute to it

Why does early intervention in honour violence fail?

Due to fears of stigmatization, harm, and deportation

How is forced marriage distinguished from arranged marriage in Miles-Johnson and Courtenay (2021)?

The differences is distinguished by the absence of free and full consent

What is the cultural conflict theory?

Suggests that conflicts arise when diverse cultural norms and legal frameworks intersect, creating challenges in how law enforcement interprets and acts on certain behaviours

What were some of the key findings from Miles-Johnson and Courtenay (2021)?

Lack of recognition and awareness; inadequate training; cultural and investigative barriers

What did officers report in Miles-Johnson and Courtenay (2021)?

Insufficient education on forced marriage and uncertainty about when and how to intervene

When was forced marriage criminalized in England and Wales?

In 2014 with the Crime and Policing Act