LECTURE/BOOK: Campbell on Organised Crime and the Law - A Comparative Analysis

Organised Crime and the Law:

A Comparative Analysis

By Dr. Liz Campbell 

5:00 p.m., Thursday, March 7^th, 2013

Criminal Courts of Justice, Parkgate Street, Dublin 8, Ireland

Those wanting to attend should contact joanne.davidson@fulbright.ie / 01.660.7670 by February 28^th, 2013 . Please indicate if you will join us for the tour at 5:00 or just the reception at 6:00.

Organised Crime and the Law (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2013)

Organised Crime and the Law presents an overview of the laws and policies adopted to address the phenomenon of organised crime in the United Kingdom and Ireland. It assesses the degree to which these justice systems have been recalibrated in preventing, investigating, prosecuting, and punishing organised criminality. While the notion of organised crime is a contested one, States’ legal responses treat it and its constituent offences as unproblematic in a definitional sense. This book advances a systematic doctrinal critique of those domestic criminal laws, the laws of evidence, and sentencing practices.

Organised Crime and the Law constructs a theoretical framework on which an appraisal of these legal measures may be based, focusing in particular on the tension between due process and crime control, the demands of public protection and risk aversion, and other adaptations. In particular, it identifies parallels and points of divergence between the different jurisdictions in the UK and Ireland, bearing in mind the shared history of subversive threats and anti-terrorist policies. It further examines the extent to which policy transfer is evident in the UK and Ireland in terms of emulating the United States in reacting to organised crime.

Dr. Liz Campbell is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Law and Evidence at the University of Edinburgh School of Law, having being based at the University of Aberdeen previously (2007-2012). Liz carried out her doctoral study at University College Cork as a Government of Ireland scholar (2004-2007) and received her BCL and LLM degrees from UCC also. 

Liz's principal areas of research are criminal law/justice, with a particular interest in the legal responses to organised crime, DNA databases, and the presumption of innocence. She publishes widely in leading academic journals and co-authored a textbook on Irish criminal law. Liz is a regular participant at national and international conferences, frequently provides expert commentary to the media, and was a key participant in an RTÉ documentary on organised crime.

In 2011 Liz was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to support her research on counter-organised crime measures in the UK and Ireland and spent 2011-2012 at the University of Maryland, writing Organised Crime and the Law.