Shows
The Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastCriminal Law and the Constitution of the Postcolony: India (A Book Panel)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+ event assembles a panel of scholars and lawyers to explore fundamental issues of popular sovereignty and the intersection of constitutional and criminal law that lie at the heart of Sandipto Dasgupta’s Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitu...
2025-11-051h 43The Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastIndian Criminal Law Since 2010: What’s Changed?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. This workshop follows up on last year’s MCLR+ event on India’s New Criminal Codes: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead (Mar 14, 2024) [https://crimlrev.net/2024/02/21/india...], which featured the same expert line-up, as well...
2025-04-051h 40The Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastFrom Treason to Trump: Felony’s Medieval Origins and Modern ResilienceIn 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, “attainted,” and just plain despised “with words of felony.” The following passage from Pollock & Maitland’s classic history of medieval English law gives a nice flavor:
"When the adjective felon first appears it seems to mean cruel, fierce, wicked, base. Occasionally we may hear in it...
2025-01-1838 minThe Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastBetween Modern Debtors’ Prison & Modern Peonage (Pt. 2)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 bargaining stage (from a lack or scarcity of public defender services to fees for available public defenders, along with various other fees, charges, and hidden taxes) to the sanction stage (fines, more fees, surcharges, restitution, etc.). What’s more, each time an economic sa...
2024-09-222h 04The Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastBetween Modern Debtors’ Prison & Modern Peonage: Economic & Poverty Sanctions in Global PerspectiveThis 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 available public defenders, along with various other fees, charges, and hidden taxes) to the sanction stage (fines, more fees, surcharges, restitution, etc.). What’s more, each time an economic sanction isn’t paid, further economic—or non-economic—sanctions are trig...
2024-09-142h 00The Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastLawfare in Comparative ContextFor 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 prosecutions involving Donald Trump and his associates.
This event brings together an international and interdisciplinary panel of commentators to investigate domestic lawfare and its rhetoric from a wide range of perspectives across a number of national, regional, and systemic contexts. Is there...
2024-06-142h 24The Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastNordic Criminal Law as a Normative ProjectNordic 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 dominant perception of Nordic criminal law?
Jørn Jacobsen’s Power, Principle, and Progress: Kant and the Republican Philosophy of Nordic Criminal Law (2024) addresses this multifaceted challenge of analysis and justification by developing a norma...
2024-05-312h 00The Modern Criminal Law Review PodcastIndia’s New Criminal Codes: Taking Stock and Looking AheadThis 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 Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023 (to replace the Indian Evidence Act 1872). [See also Abhinav Sekhri, “Colonialism Redux for the Digital Age? What to Make of India’s New Criminal Codes,” MCLR+ (Jan. 10, 2024) available at https://crimlrev.net/colonialism-redux-for-the-digital-age-what-to-make-of-indias-new-criminal-codes-abhinav-sekhri additional supplementary materials available @ MCLR+ Resour...
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