Alice Ristroph, The Curriculum of the Carceral State, 120 Colum. L. Rev. 1631 (2020)"Since the middle of the twentieth century, American law schools have offered (and often required) a course in criminal law in which homicide is the paradigm crime and legality is a core organizing principle. The curricular canon depicts criminal law as a necessary and race-neutral response to grave injuries, and it also depicts criminal law as capable of self-restraint through various internal limiting principles. This model does not correspond closely to actual legal practices, and it never did . . . . The Essay reveals the pro-carceral implications of the prevailing canon, and it offers the outline of a different model that could alter American attitudes toward criminal law."
Jennifer M. Denbow, The Pedagogy of Rape Law: Objectivity, Identity and Emotion, 64 J. Legal Educ. 16 (2014)Explores the pedagogy of rape law through a framework that looks critically at the questions of knowledge, emotion and authority that are implicated in both identity politics and traditional ways of thinking about the law. Many scholars have examined the relationships among law, identity and emotion4 and some critical attention has been paid to the way in which identity and emotion play out in legal pedagogy.5 No one, however, has examined critically how identity and emotion affect the pedagogy of rape law. By critically analyzing instructors' reluctance to teach rape law, this article fills that gap. In doing so, I use the pedagogy of rape law to illuminate broader issues of gender, identity and emotion as related to rape and the law.
Richard E. Redding, Why It Is Essential to Teach About Mental Health Issues in Criminal Law (and A Primer on How to Do It), 14 Wash. U.J.L. & Pol'y 407 (2004)"Studies consistently show a high prevalence of mental disorders among criminal defendants. . . . Forensic mental health issues should be an integral part of the criminal law curriculum, beginning with the first-year criminal law course. This Article presents recommendations for teaching mental health issues in first-year criminal law, presents empirical data indicating that first-year students have mixed, though generally positive, reactions to incorporating such non-traditional content into the course, and provides a syllabus for an upper-level course in criminal law and psychology. Incorporating mental health topics into the traditional criminal law curriculum is part of the ongoing trend in legal education towards expanding pedagogy beyond legal doctrine *408 into relevant social science disciplines that can inform legal policy and students' understanding of the criminal justice system, perhaps more so than many of the doctrinal lessons we now teach.
Paula C. Johnson, The Social Construction of Identity in Criminal Cases: Cinema Verite and the Pedagogy of Vincent Chin, 1 Mich. J. Race & L. 347 (1996)Discusses use of the film Who Killed Vincent Chin?, as a method: (1) to analyze the relationship of social constructions of identity, particularly race, on the rules and discretionary application of criminal jurisprudence; (2) to provide an interactive pedagogical tool for law teachers, especially criminal law teachers, to examine the social contexts of criminal jurisprudence from multiple perspectives; and (3) to examine the ability of criminal law doctrine to address issues of race.
Dorothy E. Roberts, Democratizing Criminal Law As an Abolitionist Project, 111 Nw. U.L. Rev. 1597 (2017)The criminal justice system currently functions to exclude black people from full political participation. Myriad institutions, laws, and definitions within the criminal justice system subordinate and criminalize black people, thereby excluding them from electoral politics, and depriving them of material resources, social networks, family relationships, and legitimacy necessary for full political citizenship. Making criminal law democratic requires more than reform efforts to improve currently existing procedures and systems. Rather, it requires an abolitionist approach that will dismantle the criminal law's anti-democratic aspects entirely and reconstitute the criminal justice system without them.
[CONTEXT FOR CASES] Donna Coker and Robert Weisberg, eds., Criminal Law StoriesThis collection of case stories illustrates the balance, continuity, and evolution in substantive criminal law doctrine in light of the social and political contexts in which those doctrines are perennially tested. These stories focus on the pre-litigation behavior of defendants, raising important moral and cultural questions about human nature and human society and how social norms get translated into workable legal doctrines. They survey the typical variety of doctrines addressed in a standard criminal law course, elucidating the classic themes of common law jurisprudence
[TEXTBOOK] Cynthia Lee and Angela P. Harris, Criminal Law, Cases, and MaterialsFrom publisher: "authored by two progressive female law professors of color, provides the reader with both critical race and critical feminist theory perspectives on criminal law while following a traditional format. All of the usual subject areas are covered, but the book is unique in highlighting the cultural context of substantive criminal law. The book seamlessly integrates issues of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation so the teacher who wishes to address such issues does not have to assign supplemental reading assignments in order to do so."
[TEXTBOOK] Michelle Oberman et al, The Ball/Oberman Crim Law Casebook (H20, OpenAccess)From the authors: "Our project aimed to redress some of the shortcomings of conventional casebook approaches to criminal law. Too often, casebooks surface issues of mental health, sex, gender, race and sexual orientation without meaningful context to situate how these issues have been treated by the criminal legal system, how they reflect social norms, how they have changed over time, etc.). Too seldom do casebooks invite a meaningful discussion of the role of race in the criminal legal system. Instead, most are marked by a failure to acknowledge, let alone grapple with ongoing discussions of alternatives to policing, alternatives to criminalization, and critical thinking about why we deal with social problems via the criminal legal system."