Murder (LAWS50106)

A student who has successfully completed this subject should have an advanced understanding of the law of murder, as well as be able to critically analyse, engage with, and evaluate to a high standard the forms of representation, bodies of knowledge and practices that compose this specialised area of legal study. This specifically includes an expert understanding, analysis and evaluation of:

• A variety of representations of murder in criminal law and public culture, together with the complex concepts, knowledge-sets and values used in understanding them;
• The limits and difficulties of the concepts and categories of the law of homicide and allied offences, with specific reference to their various histories;
• The integration of and disjunctions between various contemporary and historical representations of murder;
• The distinctive shape of a variety of social genres and legal forms of murder, such as conjugal homicide, infanticide, murder and manslaughter;
• The complex interactions between the responses to murder by criminal law and in public culture; and
• Interdisciplinary approaches to law, specifically to the criminal law of homicide.

In addition, a student who has completed the subject will have obtained: 

• A specialised and integrated knowledge of crime and the law of murder, and its intersections with other legal areas as well as public culture;
• In-depth knowledge of and research on at least one specific response to the crime of murder;
• A rich and nuanced appreciation of the complexity and variety of the current scholarship on murder, and its contribution to the current criminal law and public culture;
• The ability to analyse complex problems of criminal law from a variety of perspectives, as well as the capacity to exhibit a well-developed judgment on the worth of those perspectives for scholarly understanding; and
• The capacity to independently conduct further specialised research in criminal law, whether in higher education or in professional practice.

On completion of the subject, students should have developed and demonstrated their skills in the following areas:

• Specialist interdisciplinary knowledge of the representation of murder in law and public culture;
• Iinvestigation, analysis and evaluation of the institutional, representational, and ethical issues that are engaged by murder;
• An ability to respond to and effectively communicate – in both oral and written forms - cogent and nuanced arguments concerning the variety of ways in which law and culture intersect in particular substantive responses to murder;
• Conducting in-depth research independently and at a high level, including the ability to generate complex ideas and form well-developed judgments as to the worth of those ideas for thinking about and understanding the law and culture of murder;
• Carrying out interdisciplinary analysis based on jurisprudence and the humanities of a particular problem or topic that is germane to the legal and cultural understanding of murder;
• Writing up research which presents an extended argument that is informed by and integrates current scholarship in criminal law and the humanities; and
• Exercise professional judgment in responding to the questions of law raised by the legal and culture life of murder.