Special Edition on Policing (at) the ESC - Perspectives from the Lausanne School of Criminal Justice

Abstract

known as the Ecole des sciences criminelles 1 (ESC) in French, has a long history for an academic institution, dedicated to the study of crime in a broad sense. Affiliated to the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, it was founded by Archibald Rudolph Reiss in 1909 as the Institut de police scientifique 2 and was affiliated since then, to the law faculty, renamed relatively recently as Faculté de droit, des sciences criminelles et d'administration publique. 3 Reiss was a chemist passionate about photography, and more precisely judiciary photography. Very early, he understood that 'scientific police' was intrinsically linked to a legal framework and needed interdisciplinarity in order to address crime problems efficiently. In fact, Reiss already combined criminological and forensic