This course will examine the criminal justice response to a series of particular social issues at three different “levels”. The first concerns the body of formal law (both legislative and judicial), with its own theoretical underpinnings and general principles, setting out the behaviour that is prohibited by criminal sanction. This law is to be found in many different places. It is most commonly associated with the range of “traditional” criminal offences - from the less to the more serious - which seek to regulate or deter behavior on the part of persons or corporate bodies that is potentially damaging to the physical well being or property interests of other people or bodies. These are to be found in the Crimes Act 1961 and Summary Offences Act 1981. In addition, criminal offences are used to enforce many other systems of legal regulation – although often as a last resort to punish the most flagrant breaches of that system. It has been said that “[r]ecourse to criminal law as a mode of regulation is pervasive in our society, covering many aspects of the day-to-day behavior of individuals and corporate bodies.” The second level of examination concerns the “criminal justice system” - the phrase used to describe the process by which the state responds to actual instances of criminal offending in society. The “criminal justice system” refers to the stages and processes an alleged offender traverses as their guilt is determined and any punishment is set and executed. It also encompasses the role played by the many different criminal justice agents who are charged with processing referrals according to their own institutional and legal conventions, guidelines, resource limitations and legal imperatives at different stages of the process. Criminal justice agents include the police, the courts (including judges, prosecution and defence lawyers, jury members and court personnel), and the penal institutions. Throughout this process there are other stakeholders – for example, the accused, the victims and various witnesses – whose interests may potentially be diametrically opposed around certain issues and outcomes. There is a formal body of law and regulation that governs the criminal justice process, both in terms of how an alleged offender is managed at each stage and in terms of which information and material can be acted upon and how it must be presented at every stage of that process. Professor David Brown refers to “the criminal justice system” as an “ubiquitous shorthand” which “serves to obscure the plurality of and conflict between the aims, objectives, processes and agencies involved and forecloses some of the interesting questions and debates.” Instead, he prefers to speak of “the complexities of the ways in which different aims and objectives are pursued by different criminal justice agencies and become woven into a narrative that travels uneasily under the title of ‘the criminal justice system’.” The third level of examination concerns the social and political context within which the criminal law operates. Because the criminal law and the “criminal justice system” comprise such coercive state sanctioning and are used to regulate the most dangerous forms of social breakdown and deviance across the body politic, they have a political and symbolic prominence that supersedes most other areas of social and legal regulation. Media and political debate is conducted regularly in respect of potentially every aspect of the law and it’s operation, generally triggered by contemporary cases or phenomenon that are occurring within the system at any point in time as a result of social or legal changes. Public reaction feeds back into the legal and procedural process of criminal law in the form of law reform and changes in the institutional practices and ideologies of criminal justice agencies and agents. Social attitudes, values and understandings regularly transform and in doing so, transform the practice, application and impact of the criminal law. This is a year long course which is taught in a small group seminar style. In the first semester, students are expected to actively participate in a series of seminars that will be led by the lecturers. The casebook contains prescribed readings for each seminar in this semester and students are expected to do these readings ahead of the class so that they are in a position to contribute to the discussion. The first semester of this course will be spent examining a range of issues selected in order to stimulate student interest and thinking around criminal law and policy. We will commence by examining the question of why certain activities are criminalised. We will then examine the criminal justice response to a series of social issues that are largely, although not exclusively, organised around the theme of interpersonal violence. We will look at the legal response to those issues from contrasting political and theoretical perspectives, with awareness of the different tiers of legal functioning – formal law, legal process and the broader social/political context. In the course of examining the specific issues chosen as a focus for each class we will engage in more general reflections around the role and practices of different criminal justice agencies and of the criminal justice system itself. Finally, we will broadly look at theories of punishment. In addition, there will be some class time in the first semester given to reflecting on the process of legal research and writing. In the second semester, individual students will lead class discussion on the topic they have chosen to prepare their end of year research paper on. Each student will do a short oral presentation on their topic after which they will be expected to lead class discussion on that subject. Students will be allocated one hour of class time for this purpose. Accordingly, the specific issues examined in the second semester will be dictated by the research interests of those students participating in the course.