It's Your Education, Make an Informed Choice.

Criminal law was created to protect society’s interests. It can be used to advance the greater good of society, apply punishment to advance the interests of justice or even as a way to improve a person.

Each of these three theories uses the amount of punishment differently as a way of ensuring order and safety in the society. Criminal law focuses on the intent (or mens rea) of a potential criminal to justify a ruling or it could punish the crime (or actus reus) without examining the intent at all.

Course Objectives

• By the end of this course, students will have researched Jeremy Bentham’s philosophical theory for how law should advance the interests of society -- utilitarianism -- and review criticisms of this approach. The class will contrast utilitarianism with the retributivist approach -- which focuses on punishment as a necessary and natural consequence for engaging in wrongdoing.
• Participants will have an understanding of how the rehabilitative model believes punishment should alter the criminal to excise the inappropriate behavior, although critics suggest that there is no clear understanding of what is “inappropriate” and weigh the criticisms and defense of this distinction.
• Students will discuss the purposes and goals of punishment, under the utilitarian, retributivist and rehabilitative approaches and consider the appropriateness of punishment where there is mens rea. They will apply J.S. Mill’s "harm principl" to a utilitarian approach for punishment and study Devlin’s rights-based arguments for having criminal law.
• By the end of this course, students should be familiar and able to identify the following key terms: utilitarianism, the retributivist approach, the therapeutic model, mens rea, strict liability and the “harm principle.”