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; new interpretive emphasis on the limits of state infrastructural power; detailed study of the pluralist nature of legal authority in ancient empires in particular; and the extraordinary recovery of previously unknown documentary materials, especially in central Asian and East Asian contexts. This issue seeks to bring these new insights to bear on the study of criminal law in a global array of contexts:  the Ancient Near East, classical Athens, Qin and Han period China, the high Roman empire, and rabbinic Judaism.
Participants include:
Clifford Ando, University of Chicago (moderator)
Beth Berkowitz, Columbia University
Ari Bryen, Vanderbilt University
Liang Cai, University of Notre Dame
Benjamin Gallant, Harvard University
Adriaan Lanni, Harvard University
Mark Letteney, University of Washington
Seth Richardson, University of Chicago
Andrew Wolpert, University of Florida
June 24, 2026 @ 12pm (ET)
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website; to receive notifications about upcoming livestreams, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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 include:
Anya Bernstein, University of Connecticut, Law
John M. Conley, University of North Carolina, Law
Oliver Gerson, University of Passau, Law
Tatiana Grieshofer, Birmingham City University, English
Jean-Louis Halpérin, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, Law
Janny Leung, University of Hong Kong, English
Arpeeta Mizan, University of Dhaka, Law
Robin Riner, Marshall University, Anthropology
Morten Boe, MPI Freiburg, Law (moderator)
June 4, 2026 @ 9am (ET)
 
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website; to receive notifications about upcoming livestreams, subscribe to our YouTube channel.

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, laying out a broader methodological framework for similar accounts of other penal systems, and–crucially–advancing a theory of the relation between political economy and crime control and a realistic framework for pursuing progressive change.
Patricia Faraldo Cabana & José Ángel Brandariz García (University of A Coruña, Law)
Katja Franko (University of Oslo, Criminology)
Rocío Lorca (University of Chile, Law)
Sara Wakefield (Rutgers University, Criminal Justice)
David Garland (New York University, Law & Sociology) (author)
Morten Boe (MPI Freiburg) (moderator)
The event proceedings, including the panelists’ commentaries and the author’s response, will appear in a special online MCLR+ book forum.

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 Constitution of the Postcolony (Cambridge UP 2024) (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/... ).
This book panel forms part of the MCLR+ series of events, publications, and resources focussed on Indian criminal law. [For further information, please consult MCLR+ Resources: India. (https://crimlrev.net/mclr-resources/)]
 
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website; 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.
Gautam Bhatia Lawyer, Scholar & Author, Delhi, India
Anuj Bhuwania, SNU Chennai
Arudra Burra, IIT Delhi
Aparna Chandra, NLSIU
Sandipto Dasgupta, New School, NYC (author)

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 the Modern Criminal Law Review, which will engage with Kennedy’s monograph to explore a wide range of connected issues (sex offenses, consent, deception, identity, criminalization, etc.) from several perspectives (doctrinal, historical, comparative, theoretical, etc.).
Participants include:
Tatiana Badaró, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil
Moa Bladini, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Beatriz Corrêa Camargo, Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil
Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff, Gender and Justice Unit, Malawi (moderator)
Aya Gruber, University of Southern California, US
Preeti Pratishruti Dash, National Law School of India University
Nora Scheidegger, University of Bern, Switzerland
Rachel Tolley, Cambridge University, UK
Cristina Valega, Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law & Pontifical Catholic University of Peru
Chloë Kennedy, University of Edinburgh, Scotland (author)
June 4, 2025 @ 11:30 (ET)
► To stay informed about upcoming MCLR+ events, publications, and projects, please sign up for the MCLR+ mailing list and check the MCLR+ website; to receive notifications about upcoming livestreams, subscri

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.
► 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.
 

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/).
► 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.

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

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

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”