Abstract:
As Gledhill and Livings (2017) suggested in a recent book-length publication, criminal law course content and pedagogy are severely outdated. Most criminal law syllabi throughout the common law world, including in Hong Kong, primarily focus on homicide, sexual offences, and property offences when they consider substantive crimes. They do this largely for traditional reasons – because these are the crimes which the syllabus has always focused on. This paper employs crime statistics data from Hong Kong as well as a self-reporting survey of local criminal law practitioners in an effort to more closely align the LLB criminal law teaching syllabus with the realities of legal practice in Hong Kong, while maintaining student mastery over the general principles of criminal liability. Through novel discovery-based learning assessments focusing on crimes which practitioners most commonly encounter in the court system, criminal law students stand to benefit from this research by becoming better prepared to practise criminal law upon graduation, by being more closely informed about the realities of criminal practice as they make decisions on their future careers, and by gaining greater ownership over and self-confidence from the knowledge they themselves attain while studying criminal law.
Speaker:
Prof. Daniel Pascoe, Assistant Professor, School of Law, City University of Hong Kong