The CJC is delighted to have been awarded funding by the ESRC to host an event as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science on Saturday 14 November 2015.

The CJC multi-format event aims to bring together different perspectives on the experience of punishment, in order to raise awareness of, promote social science research on and generate debate on prisoner wellbeing and its consequences to criminal justice policy and practice. The full-day event will encourage an interactive open debate between academics and non-academics through drawing on a range of perspectives on the topic, from that of those responsible for formulating and implementing prison policy, and that of social scientists researching punishment and criminal justice, to that of those with first-hand, lived experiences of punishment within prisons. Interactive sessions will include: screening and discussion of the film ‘Herman’s House’ (a movie about the communication between an architect and a life prisoner in the US); a workshop run by the Empty Cages Collective about the conditions and experience of imprisonment in England and Wales; and an exhibition of prisoners’ creative self-expression (letters, photography, paintings, etc.) followed by discussion.

Professors Jackie Hodgson and Roger Leng have been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), and will be conducting a research study into“Securing a fair trial through excluding evidence? A comparative perspective” . The project runs from 2015-2017 and is a collaboration between the criminal Justice Centre at Warwick and scholars from Switzerland, Germany, China, Taiwan and Singapore.

This volume brings together a broad range of scholars working within a variety of procedural traditions in Europe, North America and China. The first section contains three papers that address the use of discretion during the investigation and prosecution stage of criminal proceedings; the second section deals with negotiated justice and various types of plea agreements in Spain, China and Italy.In the third section, different approaches to the exclusion of evidence are discussed, relating to Switzerland, Germany and a potential EU approach. The fourth section discusses discretion in relation to the death penalty in the US. At the heart of these issues is the problem of reconciling prosecutorial and judicial discretion with the principle of legality. The need to avoid arbitrary decisions is key,but the authors come to differing conclusions as to the impact and value of judicial discretion at different stages of the process and in different jurisdictions.

Dr Ana Aliverti has been awarded the British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (BARSEA).

The BARSEA aims at providing an opportunity for early career researchers who have established their academic credentials as leaders in their field to enhance their skills and career development through playing a leading role in engaging others through the organisation of engagement events.

Professor Jackie Hodgson, Director of the University of Warwick’s Criminal Justice Centre at the School of Law, said: “Once again the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that a complete ban on prisoner voting rights is incompatible with the UK’s commitment to the First Protocol to the European Convention of Human Rights."

The House of Commons Justice Committee held its first evidence session for its inquiry into the effectiveness of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), taking evidence from academics and solicitors. Jackie Hodgson was questioned by MPs.

In the UK Research Excellence Framework results (announced 18 December 2014), Warwick Law School was assessed as coming 6th out of 67 Law Departments in terms of its Research Environment, 7th in terms of the Quality of its Research and 10th overall.

Full details can be found on the REF website.

Ana Aliverti's research on "Foreign nationals before the criminal courts: immigration status, deportability and punishment" has been awarded funding from the British Academy. Beginning in October the project wims to investigate the impact of immigration status on the treatment of defendants before the criminal justice system.

Alan Norrie will present a keynote address on ‘Criminal Justice and the Blaming Relation’ at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC) Conference in Sydney, Australia from 1-3 October 2014.

Professor Norrie's address will expand upon his longterm research in criminal law and social theory as well as the development of a new project that will move from the standard legal form of criminal justice (“blaming relation”) to criminal justice's connection with social injustice, the problems of justice when societies perpetrate genocide, the nature of the preventive turn in recent criminal justice, and issues concerning law, transitional and restorative justice.

Alan Norrie’s essay ‘Justice on the Slaughter-Bench: The Problem of War Guilt In Arendt and Jaspers’ is being translated into Spanish and published as a short book (La Justicia en el banquillo de la muerte : El problema de la Culpa de la guerra en H. Arendt y K. Jaspers) by the Universidad Libre, Bogota.

He will discuss it at a seminar in Bogota on ‘Constitutions for Peace’ for law students, legal academics and practitioners on 25 September 2014. The purpose of the seminar is to think about the role of law in Colombia’s postconflict situation, following peace negotiations in Habana.

The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally, how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order.

Professor Victor Tadros has been awarded a Major Research Fellowship from The Leverhulme Trust. The Fellowship will continue through September 2017.

The Fellowship project, entitled "To Do, To Die, to Reason Why; The Ethical Lives of Combatants", will provide a wide-ranging ethical investigation of the military lives of combatants before, during and after war.