Comparative Criminal Justice

Explore how pre-trial processes act as a filter, applying legality and opportunity to decide prosecution. Examine pre-trial detention, its harms, and international variations illustrated by Russia, Rwanda, and the Philippines.

Analyze pretrial and prosecution across systems, from police-led prosecutions and inquisitorial oversight to grand jury indictments and diversion programs grounded in justice rather than punishment.

Compare inquisitorial and adversarial courts, highlighting how investigations, trials, and sentencing unfold through dossiers, jury roles, and evidence rules across France, Islamic law, and indigenous systems.

Examine how judges vary by country and system, wield power in civil, criminal, and appeals courts, and how selection methods and independence shape representation and accountability.

Explore how juries protect against state overreach, reflect community values, and differ worldwide across adversarial and inquisitorial systems, including verdict unanimity, voir dire, and jury nullification.

Explore the six punishment aims: general deterrence, specific deterrence, rehabilitation, incapacitation, remuneration, revenge—and the historical shift from banishment to imprisonment, plus recidivism as a measure of effectiveness.

evaluate how incarceration rates are defined and compared worldwide, noting the US leads at 639 per 100,000 and that definitions, pretrial detention, and immigration policies shape the numbers.

Explore how the death penalty is classified worldwide as abolitionist by law, abolitionist by practice, moratorium, or retention, and how the United States fits into this landscape.

Examine the death penalty in the United States, tracing its history from Furman v. Georgia to post-1976 reinstatement, and outline capital murder, aggravating factors, lethal injection, and race-related concerns.

Explore environmental crime, including poaching, illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, and waste dumping. Assess micro, mezzo, and macro wildlife crime levels and the markets for ivory and rhino horn.

Examine pollution as a global environmental crime, from air pollution and oil spills to e-waste and nuclear material disposal, and how criminogenic asymmetries, business–government entanglement, and consumerism drive harm.

Explore state crime as harm caused by state action or inaction, including human rights violations and state organized deviance; grounded in no crime without law.

Explore genocide as state crime, driven by dehumanization, authority, and routinization, with cases from colonial, totalitarian, Yugoslavia, and Rwanda contexts.

Explore how international law defines states, governs treaties and ratification, and shapes United Nations work, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and European Convention on Human Rights.

Explore postwar war crimes trials, including Nuremberg and Tokyo, and the creation of the international criminal court in 1998, with debates on retroactive law and ad hoc versus standing tribunals.