Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue of the Annals Dedicated to the Renowned Criminologist Professor David Weisburd

The first of these is the “research component”, that is, the cutting-edge scientific research Weisburd has carried out in Israel, which has not only contributed to our understanding of the Israeli criminal justice system, but has responded (through the Israeli context) to more general questions and challenges occupying criminologists worldwide. Because these studies were carefully thought through and carried out with the highest rigour, and because they bear important, general implications for researchers, policymakers and practitioners, they were published in the top journals of the field, as well as in books and book chapters, as can be seen in Weisburd’s impressive Hebrew University profile.1 The second component of Weisburd’s contribution to Israeli criminology is the more “qualitative” component, which focuses on Weisburd’s unprecedented contribution to the field of criminology in Israel as a whole, including to the Institute of Criminology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to the Israeli Society of Criminology, to other criminology departments across the country, and more generally to raising Israeli criminology as an academic discipline to the highest international standards. Following an academic appointment at the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, in 1993 Weisburd made “Aliya”2 to Israel and began his position as an Associate Professor at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Throughout this period, Weisburd was also fully invested in keeping up with developments in criminology and criminal justice research and practice in the USA, and in the late 1990s took on, in addition to his appointment at the Hebrew University, a position as a Senior Research Scientist at the Police Foundation in Washington, DC. Studies must always be of the highest quality in terms of the research design, data collection and analysis, and contribution to the general literature.