The Modern Criminal Law Review Podcast

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 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

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)]
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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.

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.

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

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 Law Theory at the University of Sydney Law School. Her research concerns criminal law, legal theory and legal history.
Kris Wilson is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Law University of Technology Sydney researching in the fields of cybersecurity, computer related crime and Indigenous traditional knowledge in a digital context.
Ana Aliverti is Professor of Law at the University of Warwick. Her work covers criminal justice and border control regimes, and their intersections.
Henrique Carvalho is Reader in Law and co-Director of the Criminal Justice Centre at the University of Warwick (United Kingdom). He works on social theories of law, punishment and justice.
Anastasia Chamberlen is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research covers themes around gender, prisons and punishment, and the arts in criminal justice.
Máximo Sozzo is Professor of Sociology of Law and Criminology at the National University of Litoral (Argentina). 

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 constitutional law.
Rocío Lorca is Associate Professor of Law & Director of Research at University of Chile’s School of Law. Her research focuses on the philosophy of punishment and the interaction between criminal justice and other spheres of justice.
Íñigo Ortiz de Urbina is criminal law professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (on leave, working for the Spanish presidency of the Council of the European Union). He specializes in white collar and corporate crime, economic analysis of crime policy, and criminal law making.

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.