This course introduces students to foundational concepts and theories in criminal justice. Students will examine how crimes are defined (mens rea, actus reus, causation, and the absence of a valid defense) through landmark cases addressing varying degrees of fault (intention, recklessness, negligence) and the major criminal law defenses (self-defense, duress, insanity, and others), including decolonial feminist critiques of how these defenses have historically been constructed. The course covers foundational theories of punishment (deterrence, retribution, incapacitation) alongside Islamic jurisprudence on Qisas and Diyat, and contests traditional aims of incarceration through anti-carceral and prison abolitionist scholarship. Drawing on cases and criminal codes from across jurisdictions including the Indian Penal Code of 1860, the death penalty in the US, UK, and Pakistan, and current anti-terrorism statutes in Pakistan, students will examine criminal justice as an instrument of state control: how it perpetuates systemic bias, how extra-legal practices such as enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings operate alongside the ordinary criminal process, and how procedures such as sedition retain a colonial character. Students will also study key procedural and evidentiary protections established in seminal cases, including burdens of proof, the privilege against self-incrimination, protection against double jeopardy, and distinct protections for juveniles in criminal proceedings alongside the study of miscarriages of justice and wrongful conviction across jurisdictions.
