Switzerland

Law and society activities in Switzerland are highly fragmented. The country has no central, interdisciplinary forum where scholars interested in law and society questions can publish and exchange ideas. Thus, those activities mainly take place within disciplines such as law, sociology, political science, and the humanities.

There is, however, one central database to search systematically for law and society research projects—the Swiss Information and Data Archive Service for the Social Sciences (SIDOS). SIDOS systematically collects information and data on research projects in the social sciences, humanities, and law and makes data sets, whenever possible, which are accessible to the research community. Another important source is [Page 1448]the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law, located in Lausanne. It has an important collection on comparative law issues and organizes symposia.

Since 2001, the Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Soziologie (Swiss Sociology Association) has had a special research committee for sociolegal research, the Forschungskomitee Rechtssoziologie. The task of this committee is to foster the modest development of research and teaching in the field of the sociology of law. The current focus of research activities includes issues such as health care, geriatrics, organized crime, money laundering, drug policy, prostitution, and sex trafficking. The committee regularly organizes meetings and conferences. Some of these questions were addressed by Mark Pieth and others within the National Research Program on “Violence in Daily Life and Organized Crime,” financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

The interest of political scientists in the judiciary has remained modest. There is no standing work group on law and courts within the Swiss Political Science Association. The limited interest has to do with the fact that political science was late in establishing itself as an independent discipline in Switzerland. The specific features of the Swiss political system also contribute to scholars not focusing on courts. The power of constitutional review in the Swiss Federal Supreme Court is limited and does not allow the court to nullify federal laws. Direct democracy provides for a more efficient venue to influence policy making on the federal level. Recent research, nevertheless, indicates that courts have gained in influence on policy-making processes in Switzerland and can have a decisive effect on public policies under certain conditions.

Within law faculties, specialized research centers address a broad variety of questions on such topics as the history of law, e-government, regulatory issues, and criminology. The Schweizerische Vereinigung für Kriminologie (Swiss Association for Criminology) publishes the Schweizer Zeitschrift für Kriminologie and organizes conferences on such topics as the attitudes of the Swiss population toward law, punishment, and the experience of violence. One long-term study comparing the evolution of attitudes and perceptions over time was done by Univox studies, a regular opinion poll on a variety of issues including sociolegal questions (with the data at SIDOS). Given the lack of a coordinating platform for sociolegal activities within Switzerland's community of legal scholars, the best source of information on research activities in this field is the Web sites of the law faculties of Swiss universities, listed at the Swiss Education and Research Network.

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