While writers have documented wrongful convictions for more than eight decades, only recently has systematic research focused on the problem of miscarriages of justice. Following a brief history of the scholarship on wrongful convictions, the author classifies the field of wrongful conviction scholarship into three genres: the big-picture studies, the specialized-causes studies, and the true-crime studies. Their contributions to the field and their limitations are described. Despite the recent proliferation of wrongful conviction scholarship, there are methodological, conceptual, and theoretical gaps and problems in the understanding of miscarriage of justice. The author argues that criminologists should move beyond the legal categories and concepts employed by lawyers and journalists to engage in more big-picture analysis rather than the descriptive case studies that dominate the field. Indeed, with thoughtful research questions, methodologies, and analyses, the study of miscarriages of justice could develop into a thriving field of its own. Notes, references