LL215: New Frontiers in Law Enforcement, Crime and Punishment

Criminal justice has become one of the defining battlegrounds of democratic politics and law reform. Debates about defunding the police, facial recognition, immigration enforcement, online hate speech, predictive technologies, and mass incarceration dominate headlines and divide communities. Yet these debates often generate more heat than light – strong opinions, but little understanding of how criminal law and justice actually work, or why democracies facing similar challenges have adopted such different solutions. This course cuts through the noise.

Over three intensive weeks, you'll examine how police, prosecutors and courts exercise the state's most coercive powers – the power to stop, to detain, to deport, to imprison, even to execute. You'll ask why the US has 4% of the world's population but 20% of its prisoners. You'll examine whether facial recognition and algorithmic sentencing make justice fairer or automate existing biases. You'll study how online hate travels from screen to street – and whether law can stop it without chilling free speech. You'll compare democracies that have abolished the death penalty with ones that sentence children to die in prison.

The approach is comparative, interdisciplinary and hands-on. You'll get under the bonnet of landmark cases and study the legal rules that govern state power across jurisdictions (US, Canada, Europe and Australia) – but you'll also engage with cutting-edge empirical research that reveals how police, prosecutors and judges actually make decisions in practice. Through simulations and exercises, you'll develop and defend law reform proposals of your own.

Prerequisites: An introductory course in a social science subject (for example law, history, sociology, politics, international relations, economics), philosophy, or a related discipline.

Level: 200 level. Read more information on levels in our FAQs

Fees: Please see Fees and payments

Lectures: 36 hours

Classes: 18 hours

Assessment: A two-hour hand-written exam at the end of the course (worth 50% of the final grade), and a take-home essay (1,500 words) at the end of the second week (50%).

Typical credit: 3-4 credits (US) 7.5 ECTS points (EU)

Please note: Assessment is optional but may be required for credit by your home institution. Your home institution will be able to advise how you can meet their credit requirements. For more information on exams and credit, read Teaching and assessment

Whether you're in law school, heading there, or pursuing a career in policy or public life, this course will give you the analytical tools to engage seriously with issues reshaping democratic societies. Students who have taken similar courses at LSE Law have gone on to graduate programmes at leading law schools, and to careers as prosecutors, public defenders and policy advisers.

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Evaluate competing explanations for why democracies differ so dramatically in how they police, prosecute and punish – and assess which reforms actually work.
• Analyse how law constrains – or fails to constrain – the discretionary power of police officers, prosecutors and judges, drawing on US, Canadian, European and Australian examples.
• Interrogate the causes of racial disproportionality in criminal justice – from stop and frisk to sentencing – and critically assess proposed remedies.
• Assess whether algorithmic tools – from facial recognition to risk assessment – can deliver fairer criminal justice, or whether they entrench existing biases.
• Develop and defend evidence-based reform proposals, engaging with both the promises and the political realities of criminal justice change.

The design of this course is guided by LSE faculty, as well as industry experts, who will share their experience and in-depth knowledge with you throughout the course.