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Exploring criminology: problem-solving courts
Social life is characterised by various relationships – those with family and friends, neighbours, wider communities and those people have with social institutions such as governments, schools or universities. But what happens when things go wrong in social relationships – how do societies deal with that? When social relationships rupture, the forms of formal repair that many Western societies rely on tend to be facilitated through legal or court processes.
This course considers how well these different formal court processes work to repair ruptures to social relationships. It explores the strengths, weaknesses and limitations of adversarial versus problem-solving courts and encourages you to think about alternatives to existing dominant knowledges and practices.
This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course DD315 Researching current issues in criminology.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- examine the concepts of rupture and repair as a means of understanding formal court processes
- define and describe problem-solving versus adversarial courts
- contrast the strengths and weaknesses of problem-solving and adversarial courts
- identify the limitations of both problem-solving and adversarial courts in social and criminal justice settings.
First Published: 13/05/2025
Updated: 13/05/2025
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