Photos of Northwestern University Law School facilities, Loop location, circa 1900. Click on images to view full-sized versions.

Criminology - the study of crime, the police, the judicial system and the interaction of these institutions within the society - began to be a serious academic enterprise in Chicago during this period. The city, its crimes, its police, and its social institutions became the laboratory for the city’s study of itself, and resulted in the production of a reservoir of important data, commentary and contemporaneous accounts concerning this period.

Criminology combines the study of law, crime, the police, and their social and political affiliations. The discipline was born in America in Chicago JCLC p.477-486Jane Addams Hull House.

The founding of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1910 at Northwestern University School of Law was a landmark in the history of criminology, and occurred in conjunction with the celebration of the founding of Northwestern University School of Law fifty years earlier.

The founding of The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology by Dean Henry Wigmore and his colleagues was also a milestone. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology continues to be published at Northwestern University School of Law and remains a preeminent scholarly journal in the fields of both criminal law and criminology. The Journal continues to publish path breaking research and is the publisher for the first research papers, included here, of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project: “Learning from the Past, Living in the Present: Understanding Homicide in Chicago, 1870-1930.”