Shane Kilcommins

The governance of crime and the negotiation of justice

With increasing frequency, criminologists have documented the growth of a culture of control that has ushered in repressive penal policies and diminished people’s freedoms. Contra the portrayal offered by these ‘criminologies of catastrophe’, this article argues that there are several factors within contemporary European societies that militate against authoritarian rule and impel justice towards a negotiated model. European political integration is responsible for advancing a more complex form of justice as powerful supra-national actors are able to articulate their own understanding of the harms that national criminal laws should repel in countries such as Ireland. Societies are also becoming more internally complex as victims are increasingly critical of their exclusion from the criminal justice system and have demanded greater inclusiveness. Penal changes do not necessarily arise from crime being the last common social denominator by which politics can appeal to the people. They may reflect a more complex form of democracy in which various ‘counter-democratic’ forces challenge the powers of elected governments and justice emerges from a continuous cycle of negotiations.

The Europeanization of Human Rights An Obstacle to Authoritarian Policing in Ireland

There is a widespread conviction that contemporary criminal justice developments can best be analysed in terms of their capacity to reassure an anxious public rather than to reduce crime in any straightforward way. Construing current changes as primarily driven by efforts to placate public insecurity downplays several crucial factors of contemporary political rule. States, especially those within Europe, are increasingly integrated around human rights values that circumscribe their actions. These norms provide a resource for national citizens to make claims against states for interests that have been downgraded. This article analyses how this process of the Europeanization of human rights, coupled with crucial domestic factors, has tempered the shift toward a repressive model of criminal justice by introducing greater regulation and oversight of policing by the Irish state. This may presage a splintering of state sovereignty as some of its organizations are inspired by adherence to transnational values, an allegiance that may impede any move towards authoritarian state rule.

Signature pedagogies and legal education in universities: epistemological and pedagogical concerns with Langdellian case method

This paper offers an analysis of Lee S. Shulmans concept of ‘signature pedagogies’ as it relates to legal education. In law, the signature pedagogy identified by Shulman is the Langdellian case method. Though the concept of signature pedagogies provides an excellent infrastructure for the exchange of teaching ideas, Shulman has a tendency to portray the concept in Manichean terms with the forces of light of professional education (where students are engaged in a rigorous and systematic education) ranged against the forces of darkness of non-professional education (where students are non-participative and where education is to some extent in a state of flux). It will be argued in this paper that the signature pedagogy of law has a number of pedagogical and epistemological shortcomings that should make those from non-law and non-professional backgrounds cautious about imitating its various constituent elements in their respective disciplines.

Crime control, the security state and constitutional justice in Ireland Discounting liberal legalism and deontological principles

It is clear that Ireland has witnessed evidence of a ‘tooling up’ of the state in the fight against crime over the last two decades. Crime control analyses—often relying upon the use of stark juxtaposition—are very useful in describing this trend. They can, however, also conceal the complexities that exist underneath the illusory comfort of binary labels such as ‘crime control’, ‘security state’, ‘actuarial justice’ or ‘Rule by Law’ governance. In employing examples of recent case-law relating to terrorism and sexual offending, this article will argue that crime control analyses fail to properly account for particular legal liberal properties such as rights as trumps, deontological reasoning, fidelity to precedent, the coordinated and hierarchical features of law, and the last ‘authoritative voice’ possessed by the judiciary in dispute resolution. These properties continue to possess institutional and epistemic authority in Ireland, and need to be written in to any ‘history of the present’ of the Irish criminal justice system.

Taxing Crime: A New Power to Control

This chapter deals with the taxation of criminal activities. In addition to tracing the development of the relevant jurisprudence across a number of jurisdictions, it examines the increasing regulation, and thus control, of criminal activity through the tax authorities as distinct from the police. In that way it reflects a general trend towards the ‘civil’ising of the criminal process. The traditional criminal process is now viewed as only a part of a wider spectrum of tools available to the state. These tools are geared towards controlling the criminal environment through regulation rather than correctional interventions.

“Deaths in Prison Custody” Capstone Course: Engaging Final-Year Law Students In Service Learning and Public Value

Capstone service learning courses are designed to overcome the negative effects of fractioned knowledge by enabling students to consolidate and apply what they have learned over a program of study. They also promote a scholarship of engagement. This article documents the learning experiences of students on a Deaths in Prison Custody capstone service learning course. Though such a criminal justice course requires significant staff input and involves some loss of educational control, it has many benefits including enhanced learning, meaningful service, public value, and civic engagement. The focus on this article is on student learning experiences. It outlines how the pragmatic focus of such a course made knowledge and student learning relevant and actionable. It also describes how the deliberately unstructured design of the course, together with its emphasis on pubic value, encouraged autonomous and self-directed learning, prompting the students to take greater ownership of their learning.

Victims of crime with disabilities: hidden casualites in the 'vision of victim as everyman'

In recent decades, criminal justice systems are, at least partially, being reconstructed as they demonstrate an increased sensitivity to the needs and concerns of victims of crime. As part of this, a new cultural theme of the victim as ‘Everyman’ is emerging. However, these generalizing tendencies conceal the multiplicity of experiences of victimhood and of interactions with the criminal justice system. As a result, certain categories of victim are rendered invisible and unable to share in the benefits of this more inclusive approach. One such category is victims with disabilities, and in particular those with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities. The purpose of this article is to write victims with disabilities in Ireland into the victim story more generally. Against a background of greater recognition of victims in Irish law and policy, it demonstrates the variety of ways in which victims with disabilities do not fit more orthodox, ‘everyman’, conceptions of victimization. It identifies the range of ways in which the outsider status of victims of crime with disabilities continues to be maintained in criminal justice policy, the adversarial process, the language employed by the criminal law, and service provision and identifies ways in which the failure to address the marginalization of victims with disabilities is a breach of international human rights obligations.

Victims of crime with disabilities in Ireland Hidden casualties in the ‘vision of victim as everyman’

In recent decades, criminal justice systems are, at least partially, being reconstructed as they demonstrate an increased sensitivity to the needs and concerns of victims of crime. As part of this, a new cultural theme of the victim as ‘Everyman’ is emerging. However, these generalizing tendencies conceal the multiplicity of experiences of victimhood and of interactions with the criminal justice system. As a result, certain categories of victim are rendered invisible and unable to share in the benefits of this more inclusive approach. One such category is victims with disabilities, and in particular those with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities. The purpose of this article is to write victims with disabilities in Ireland into the victim story more generally. Against a background of greater recognition of victims in Irish law and policy, it demonstrates the variety of ways in which victims with disabilities do not fit more orthodox, ‘everyman’, conceptions of victimization. It identifies the range of ways in which the outsider status of victims of crime with disabilities continues to be maintained in criminal justice policy, the adversarial process, the language employed by the criminal law, and service provision and identifies ways in which the failure to address the marginalization of victims with disabilities is a breach of international human rights obligations.

Victims of crime with disabilities in Ireland

In recent decades, criminal justice systems are, at least partially, being reconstructed as they demonstrate an increased sensitivity to the needs and concerns of victims of crime. As part of this, a new cultural theme of the victim as ‘Everyman’ is emerging. However, these generalizing tendencies conceal the multiplicity of experiences of victimhood and of interactions with the criminal justice system. As a result, certain categories of victim are rendered invisible and unable to share in the benefits of this more inclusive approach. One such category is victims with disabilities, and in particular those with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities. The purpose of this article is to write victims with disabilities in Ireland into the victim story more generally. Against a background of greater recognition of victims in Irish law and policy, it demonstrates the variety of ways in which victims with disabilities do not fit more orthodox, ‘everyman’, conceptions of victimization. It identifies the range of ways in which the outsider status of victims of crime with disabilities continues to be maintained in criminal justice policy, the adversarial process, the language employed by the criminal law, and service provision and identifies ways in which the failure to address the marginalization of victims with disabilities is a breach of international human rights obligations.