For a complete list of course offerings in Criminal Law, including full descriptions and faculty who will be teaching the offerings in 2008-2009, refer to the online Curriculum Guide.
Criminal law addresses the most fundamental issues of the relationship of individuals with each other and with the state. What behavior so transgresses our basic values that it should be met with the most serious condemnation of society? How should we treat those who violate such fundamental rules? How can we secure ourselves against abuse by the state of the awesome power of criminal punishment, while still enabling the use of that pwer, where appropriate, to secure ourselves against criminal acts? The practitioner or student of criminal law must come to terms with deep philosophical questions about the nature of justice. But, at the same time, both lawyer and scholar must have an appreciation of the human and practical side of these issues.
Criminal practice deals with intensely human and emotional matters. Criminal lawyers must be skilled in dealing with clients, police officers, witnesses, and jurors; their practice, more than most others, is in the courtroom, in the station house, and even in the street. The scholarly work of Columbia's criminal law faculty has ranged from the philosophy and comparative dimensions of substantive criminal law to the practices of police officers on the street, from rape to white-collar crime, from the ethics of ending life in a hospital to the morality of ending life by execution; its members are not without practical experience, having prosecuted or defended cases from death row to the White House. The course work available to students is equally wide-ranging, and th estudent interested in criminal law should be prepared to study both the philosophy of justice and the skills involved in its day-to-day administration.
The basis of the curriculum is the first-year foundation course in Criminal Law, which deals with the substantive law of crimes. The next basic building block is the sequence of criminal procedure courses: the course in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments deals with the law governing police investigation and the constitutional rights that limit the police. Students interested in enriching their understanding of the theoretical foundations of criminal law should enroll in International and Comparative Criminal Law. A range of seminar options is available for advanced study. The curriculum regularly includes seminars on death penalty, policing and drugs, law and policy, white-collar crime, criminology, sentencing, prisoners' rights, the intersection of civil and criminal regulation of behavior and advanced problems in substantive criminal law. The clerkship program permits students to sit with judges in criminal cases and observe the actual operation of criminal courts. Because criminal practice is essentially a litigation practice, a student interested in this specialty is well advised to develop the knowledge and skills involved in courtroom work. Any criminal lawyer must be expert in the law of evidence, for example, and the courses in such areas as trial practice, briefcraft and negotiation teach skills critical for the criminal litigator.
Participation in the moot court and trial advocacy competitions also allows students to improve their courtroom skills. Finally, any student thinking of criminal law as a career should take at least one clinical course, in which students can experience and reflect on the entire range of lawyering skills and ethical issues involved in understanding and solving a client's problems, from interviewing and counseling to repsenting the client in court.
