Empiricism and the Critique of Marxism on Law and Crime

In this paper I take issue with the critical reaction that has recently sought to test the empirical adequacy of Marxist accounts of law and crime. I argue that this reaction has seriously misrepresented its own conceptual object by confusing it with concepts generated in theoretical structures less alien than Marxism, such as labeling theory and conflict theory. Because it uses “naive falsificationism” as its criterion of empirical adequacy, this reaction also inadvertently lends plausibility to some of the empirical objects specified by current Marxist concepts.