Criminal Injustice

I have always loved the criminal law and I am frankly incredulous to hear that there are law students out there who don’t enjoy studying it. The cases are mostly sensational, the doctrine is fascinating and ludicrous, and the stakes don’t really get any higher. It is to the criminal law, after all, that one has to come to see the individual confront the full force of the state and its monopoly on punishment. In this chapter, I want to focus on the uneasy relationship between criminal law and what we call justice. I interrogate the key principles upon which our system of criminal law and justice proceeds and argue, with reference to the insights of queer, feminist and anti-racist scholars, that a critical approach to criminal law leads us inexorably to question much of what the criminal law tells us about justice, and that this is no bad thing.