The Modern Criminal Law Review Podcast

Indian 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 as other MCLR+ events, publications, and resources focussed on Indian criminal law. [For further information, please consult MCLR+ Resources: India https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources-2/]
Abhinav Sekhri (moderator) is a legal writer and lawyer practicing in New Delhi, India. He specializes in criminal law, evidence, and procedure.
Kunal Ambasta is Assistant Professor of Law at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.
Preeti Pratishruti Dash is Assistant Professor of Law at NLSIU, Bengaluru.
Mrinal Satish is Professor of Law at NLSIU, Bengaluru.
Anup Surendranath is Professor of Law and Executive Director, Square Circle Clinic, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.
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From Treason to Trump: Felony’s Medieval Origins and Modern Resilience

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, “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 a note of admiration, for fierceness may shade off into laudable courage; but in general it is as bad a word as you can give to man or thing, and it will stand equally well for many kinds of badness, for ferocity, cowardice, craft."
That’s memorably harsh, even for medieval law. More startling yet, talk of “felony” and “felons” survives to this day. Courts continue to quote the passage above to give their modern audience a flavor of what felony means today. In public discourse, the “branding” of a criminal defendant as a “felon”–as opposed to a mere “convict”–still appears as definitive evidence of that person’s (more or less permanent and total) exclusion from the political community, i.e., a type of civil death or outlawry (incl. disenfranchisement, deportation, and ineligibility for jobs, benefits, or privileges).
How can this be? What did felony mean in medieval law and literature? What does (and should?) it mean today? Does felony have a place in modern criminal law discourse and practice?
In this event, an interdisciplinary panel of commentators engages with Professor Wang’s book:
Elise Wang (Cal State Fullerton, English) (author)
Elizabeth Papp Kamali (Harvard, Law) (moderator)
Sara Butler (Ohio State, History)
Jennifer Jahner (Cal Tech, English)
Alice Ristroph (Brooklyn Law School)
Jamie Taylor (Bryn Mawr, English)
The event proceedings, including the panelists’ commentaries and the author’s response, will appear in a special online MCLR+ book forum (https://crimlrev.net). For additional materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources (“Felony”) (https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources/).
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Between 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 sanction isn’t paid, further economic—or non-economic—sanctions are triggered, including imprisonment and a panoply of “collateral” sanctions such as ineligibility for or loss of drivers’ and occupational licenses and public services.
The result is the systemic criminalization of poverty across the entire criminal justice process—wholly apart from the long-familiar roster of individual criminal offenses punishing poverty explicitly or implicitly (vagrancy, loitering, etc.) which has traditionally attracted the lion’s share of judicial and scholarly attention.
The phenomenon of criminal justice systems operating as modern debtors’ prisons cuts across countries and legal systems in the Global South and North. In countries from India to Germany, prison–literally–is imposed as punishment for failing to pay a fine. The practice of using economic penalties as a source of government revenue is also widespread. The Kenyan judiciary finances itself partially through court fees. In the United States, local governments enrich themselves through a net of punitive economic sanctions so dense and wide that many ensnared in it—and notably those living from paycheck to paycheck and, disproportionately, racialized individuals—find it impossible to escape. In effect, they live in a state of perpetual penal peonage that resembles less a modern debtors’ prison (whose occupants, some two centuries ago, enjoyed enough public empathy to result in its demise) and more a form of modern slavery.
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website [https://crimlrev.net]; to receive notifications about new video content, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
The workshop proceedings will appear in a special issue of the Modern Criminal Law Review [https://crimlrev.net]. For a collection of supplemental materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources “Economic & Poverty Sanctions.” [https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources-2/]
Participants include:
Gustavo Beade, Universidad Austral de Chile, Law
Morten Boe, Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Crime, Security & Law, Freiburg, Germany
Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff, Gender and Justice Unit, Malawi
Patricia Faraldo Cabana, University of A Coruña, Spain, Law
Jean Galbraith, University of Pennsylvania Law School Mao-hong Lin, National Taipei University, Taiwan, Criminology
Chikondi M. Mandala, Gender and Justice Unit, Malawi
Abhinav Sekhri, Advocate, Delhi High Court & Independent Scholar, New Delhi
Robert Stewart, University of Maryland, Criminology
Brieanna Watters, University of Minnesota, Sociology
Part 2: September 21, 2024 @ 12pm (EDT)
Abhinav Sekhri, Welcome and Introduction 00:00
Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff & Chikondi M. Mandala, “Beyond the Bars: Unmasking Malawi’s Journey with Economic Sanctions in the Criminal Justice System” 02:27
Abhinav Sekhri, “The New Indian Criminal Codes: A Missed Opportunity to Restore Fairness” 25:31
Mao-hong Lin, “Location, Relocation, and Dislocation: Sanctioning the Poor through Service in Taiwan’s Criminal Legal System” 57:58
Patricia Faraldo Cabana, “On the Affordability of Fines, or Why Fines Were Made Affordable for Low-Income Offenders” 1:28:49

Between Modern Debtors’ Prison & Modern Peonage: Economic & Poverty Sanctions in Global Perspective

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 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 triggered, including imprisonment and a panoply of “collateral” sanctions such as ineligibility for or loss of drivers’ and occupational licenses and public services.
The result is the systemic criminalization of poverty across the entire criminal justice process—wholly apart from the long-familiar roster of individual criminal offenses punishing poverty explicitly or implicitly (vagrancy, loitering, etc.) which has traditionally attracted the lion’s share of judicial and scholarly attention.
The phenomenon of criminal justice systems operating as modern debtors’ prisons cuts across countries and legal systems in the Global South and North. In countries from India to Germany, prison–literally–is imposed as punishment for failing to pay a fine. The practice of using economic penalties as a source of government revenue is also widespread. The Kenyan judiciary finances itself partially through court fees. In the United States, local governments enrich themselves through a net of punitive economic sanctions so dense and wide that many ensnared in it—and notably those living from paycheck to paycheck and, disproportionately, racialized individuals—find it impossible to escape. In effect, they live in a state of perpetual penal peonage that resembles less a modern debtors’ prison (whose occupants, some two centuries ago, enjoyed enough public empathy to result in its demise) and more a form of modern slavery.
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website [https://crimlrev.net]; to receive notifications about new video content, subscribe to our YouTube channel. The workshop proceedings will appear in a special issue of the Modern Criminal Law Review [https://crimlrev.net]. For a collection of supplemental materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources “Economic & Poverty Sanctions.” [https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources-2/]
Participants include:
Gustavo Beade, Universidad Austral de Chile, Law
Morten Boe, Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Crime, Security & Law, Freiburg, Germany
Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff, Gender and Justice Unit, Malawi
Patricia Faraldo Cabana, University of A Coruña, Spain, Law Jean Galbraith, University of Pennsylvania Law School
Mao-hong Lin, National Taipei University, Taiwan, Criminology
Chikondi M. Mandala, Gender and Justice Unit, Malawi
Abhinav Sekhri, Advocate, Delhi High Court & Independent Scholar, New Delhi
Robert Stewart, University of Maryland, Criminology
Brieanna Watters, University of Minnesota, Sociology
Part 1: September 13, 2024 @ 12pm (EDT)
Morten Boe, Welcome and Introduction 0:00
Gustavo Beade, “Debtor’s Prison in Latin America: Fines, Imprisonment, and Community Services as Punishment” 2:56
Morten Boe, “Interrelations of Debt and Guilt in Criminal Law: Reconsidering a Nietzschean Narrative in the Context of Late Capitalism” 29:33
Jean Galbraith, “Tracking Poverty Penalties Around the Globe: Challenges and Opportunities” 51:37
Robert Stewart & Brieanna Watters, “Settler Colonialism and Financial Extraction/Predation” 1:17:04

Criminal Law, Literature, and History

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 law and procedure.
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, including the forthcoming special issue, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website; to receive notifications about new video content, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Special issue contributors include:
Simon Stern, Law & English (Guest Editor), University of Toronto
Geoffrey Baker, Literature, Yale-NUS College
Daria Bayer, Law, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
Anna Schur, English, Keene State College “‘Higher Justice’ and Russian Law”
Abhinav Sekhri, Law, New Delhi “The ‘Lady’ Again: The Persecution, and Prosecution, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in India”
Hannah Walser, NYU Law “Free Indirect Hearsay: Horsmanden’s Journal of the 1741 New York Conspiracy”
Elise Wang, English, Comparative Literature, & Linguistics, Cal State Fullerton, “‘Felon and Villain’: The Literary Inheritance of Felony”

Lawfare in Comparative Context

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 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 such a thing (or things) as Lawfare? If not, is there at least a common core shared by a number of disparate concepts, phenomena, and political or rhetorical tools? Where does lawfare come from? Is it a new phenomenon or as old as law (and war) itself? What has it been used for, and by whom, and how? How does “lawfare” relate to other, possibly related or adjacent, concepts or labels, such as “rule of law,” “fake news,” “enemy criminal law,” “war on crime,” “war on terror,” “police state,” “wehrhafte Demokratie,” or–more prosaically–“cause lawyering”? In the end, is lawfare a fruitful topic of thought and study, and international and interdisciplinary reflection in particular? Does it have normative bite? Analytical power? Can it shed more light than heat?
The event proceedings will appear in a special online MCLR+ forum later this year. Supplemental resources on domestic lawfare are available on the MCLR+ website [MCLR+Resources "Lawfare": https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources-2/] ​
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Gautam Bhatia 1:39:43 Lawyer, Scholar & Author, Delhi, India
Manuel Cancio Meliá 1:11:38 Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, Law
Stephanie Dennison 38:41 University of Leeds, UK, Brazilian Studies
Siri Gloppen 27:41 University of Bergen, Norway, Government
Mark Friis Hau 17:21 University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Sociology
Rocío Lorca Ferreccio 1:27:08 University of Chile, Santiago, Law
Tyler McBrien 1:53:22 Managing Editor, Lawfare, US
Valeria Vegh Weis 03:27 University of Buenos Aires, Argentina/University of Konstanz, Germany, Law/Criminology

Nordic Criminal Law as a Normative Project

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 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 normative account of Nordic criminal law as a distinctive regional approach to the broader obligation of constructing and implementing a conception of criminal law as an essential part of the political arrangements necessary to promote external freedom. The event proceedings, including the panelists’ commentaries and the author’s response, will appear in a special online MCLR+ book forum.
The book is available online open access here https://oa.fagbokforlaget.no/index.php/vboa/index; for additional materials, please consult MCLR+ Resources (“Nordic Criminal Law”): https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources ​
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Jørn Jacobsen (author) University of Bergen, Norway
Law Katja Franko University of Oslo, Norway, Criminology
Linda Gröning University of Bergen, Norway, Law
Marie Kagrell University of Stockholm, Sweden, Law
Kimmo Nuotio University of Helsinki, Finland, Law
Heikki Pihlajamäki University of Helsinki, Finland, Law

India’s New Criminal Codes: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead

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 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+ Resources: Indian Criminal Code Reform (https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources-india-criminal-code-reform)]
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website [https://crimlrev.net]; to receive notifications about upcoming livestreams, subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Abhinav Sekhri (moderator) is a legal writer and lawyer practicing in New Delhi, India. He specializes in criminal law, evidence, and procedure.
Kunal Ambasta is Assistant Professor of Law at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru.
Preeti Dash is Assistant Professor of Law at NLSIU, Bengaluru and Doctoral Candidate in Law at the University of Cambridge.
Mrinal Satish is Professor of Law at NLSIU, Bengaluru.
Anup Surendranath is SK Malik Chair Professor on Access to Justice and Executive Director of Project 39A at National Law University, Delhi.

The Prison and the Varieties of Suffering: An Exchange

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 tends to put it). Reflecting on her long and path-breaking career devoted to understanding prisons, in her forthcoming book (working title: Aristotle’s Prison: A Search for Humanity and Justice), Prof Alison Liebling exposes the excesses of suffering and inhumanity often, perhaps increasingly, found in prisons. It is not merely that bad prisons happen to punish much more severely than they are supposed to do, but that the excessive suffering they inflict is often damaging and cruel in ways that are actually at odds with the declared rehabilitative goals of the criminal justice system. With Prof Liebling’s forthcoming book as a background, this conversation will explore some of the problematic aspects of modern prisons and punishment.

The Ubiquity of Universal Jurisdiction: Perspectives on the Nexus of Domestic and International Criminal Law

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 diplomatic factors should states take into account?
Featuring:
Morten Boe (moderator), Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany
Alejandro Chehtman, Dean and Professor of Law at the Law School of the University Torcuato Di Tella and a Fellow at the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET)
Elies van Sliedregt, Professor of Criminal Law & Procedure at the University of Tilburg
Mari Takeuchi, professor of International Law at Kobe University