The Modern Criminal Law Review Podcast

This international workshop features contributors to our forthcoming  Modern Criminal Law Review  Special Issue on “Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective,” guest edited by Clifford Ando (University of Chicago). Recent years have witnessed several revolutions in the study of ancient law. These include new models for the study of ancient states, deriving in particular from comparative study; ne...

This MCLR+ workshop brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of contributors to a forthcoming Special Issue of the Modern Criminal Law Review, showcasing a selection of cutting-edge work representing a wide spectrum of methodological approaches to the study of the intersection between language and the law and governance of crime and punishment, broadly construed. Participants i...

This MCLR+ event on David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan: America’s Extraordinary Regime of Policing and Punishment (Princeton 2025) gathers an international and interdisciplinary panel of scholars to reflect on several of the fundamental analytic and normative issues explored in this important and ambitious book, including developing a nuanced comparative-historical analysis of U.S. penality,...

Imagine adopting a constitution notionally designed to install “The People” as the true repository of sovereign power and to throw off the colonial yoke, yet retaining a criminal justice system designed to maximize the police power of the colonial sovereign. That’s what happened when India adopted its Constitution in 1950 while leaving its 19th century colonial criminal codes in place. This MCLR+...

Chloë Kennedy’s  Inducing Intimacy: Deception, Consent and the Law  (Cambridge 2024) tackles an important and timely topic that resonates across jurisdictions worldwide–the regulation of deceptively induced intimacy, notably through the criminal law–by taking a broadly interdisciplinary approach. This workshop brings together an international group of contributors to a forthcoming Special Issue of...

On the occasion of the forthcoming publication of the second edition of the Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (1st ed. 2010) [ https://www.sup.org/books/law/handboo... ], a panel of experts reflects on what has (and hasn’t) changed in Indian criminal law over the past decade and a half. Among the panelists is Professor Preeti Pratishruti Dash, who is updating the Handbook’s chapter on India. Th...

In The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature (Oxford 2024), Elise Wang explores the medieval origins and surprising modern resilience of “felony” in contemporary criminal law. Since its appearance as the ur-crime of Anglo-Saxon proto-criminal law, commentators, historians, and judges have waxed poetic about the radically exclusive evil attached to those who are branded, “attainte...

This is Part 2 of a two-part international & interdisciplinary workshop exploring economic discrimination in criminal justice systems around the world. [Part 1 (Fri, Sept 13, 2024) is here: https://crimlrev.net/2024/09/14/betwe... ] Criminal justice systems the world over are run through with economic discrimination: from the pre-trial stage (bail, and cash bail in particular) to the trial or...

This is Part 1 of a two-part international & interdisciplinary workshop exploring economic discrimination in criminal justice systems around the world. Criminal justice systems the world over are run through with economic discrimination: from the pre-trial stage (bail, and cash bail in particular) to the trial or bargaining stage (from a lack or scarcity of public defender services to fees for...

This international & interdisciplinary MCLR+ workshop brings together contributors to the forthcoming Modern Criminal Law Review special issue on Criminal Law, Literature, and History (guest edited by Simon Stern, University of Toronto). The issue will explore relations between criminal law, literature, and history, covering a wide geographical and historical range, on topics relating to both...

For some time, the term “lawfare” has spread throughout the domestic political-legal discourse, jurisprudence, and scholarship of countries and political systems in Latin America, notably–but by no means exclusively–Brazil and Argentina. It has been invoked, in various senses and for various purposes, elsewhere around the world, including recently in connection with the criminal investigations and...

Nordic criminal law is often thought of as a distinctive tradition and mode of thinking about and making criminal law. But what are we talking about when we are talking about “Nordic criminal law”? Is Nordic criminal law worth appreciating, preserving, or perhaps even developing, and, if so, why? What about the increasingly clear indications that Nordic penal practice does not align with the domin...

This panel discussion of the new Indian criminal codes featuring five leading Indian criminal law experts provides an overview of the reform project as well as exploring what has–and hasn’t–changed in the three codes in question: Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita 2023 (to replace the Indian Penal Code 1860), Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita 2023 (to replace the Criminal Procedure Code 1973), and Bharatiya...

Alison Liebling and Leo Zaibert of the University of Cambridge, England, explore the modern prison as a site of suffering from the perspectives of empirical criminology and philosophical ethics. Prisons are the predominant means through which states punish wrongdoers. Punishment, by definition, is supposed to be painful, unpleasant, or a matter of making wrongdoers suffer (as Prof Leo Zaibert tend...

This international panel reflects on the increased number of cases in domestic criminal courts that rely on each country’s assertion of universal jurisdiction. What justifies the assertion of universal jurisdiction beyond the territoriality principle, in civil law and common law countries, in the age of international criminal law? In exercising universal jurisdiction, what legal, procedural, and d...

An international panel discussion of Decolonizing the Criminal Law: Colonial Legacies, Contemporary Problems (Oxford UP 2023), the first work of its kind to comprehensively place colonialism and its legacies at the heart of criminological enquiry. Featuring the four co-editors of the book. Co-sponsored by the Sydney Institute of Criminology. Arlie Loughnan is Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal...

Sedition: classic legacy of colonialism, or necessary to protect the nation-state from threats to its sovereignty? An international panel of experts from India, Chile, and Spain explores the issues. Abhinav Sekhri is a legal writer and lawyer practicing in New Delhi, India. He specializes in criminal law, evidence, and procedure. Gautam Bhatia is a constitutional lawyer and scholar of comparative...

Think of it as MCLR+ Radio! For more information on the Modern Criminal Law Review project, including publications and events, please visit our website or YouTube channel .