LAW5476 · The death penalty: Law, politics, and advocacy

Overview

The overall aim of this unit is to provide students with a good understanding of the scope and practice of the death penalty as well as the movement—backed by international organisations, human rights treaties and the domestic courts—to abolish the death penalty. Specific aims involve exploring the relationship between international human rights law and the domestic protection of human rights. Throughout the unit, students will be asked to draw on recent and controversial cases as well as social scientific literature. The unit aims to encourage students to explore the politics of the abolitionist movement, including the arguments and forces that have been at work to achieve abolition and those that have been used to resist it. This unit focuses on the death penalty in the Asia-Pacific region.

Offerings

Assessment

The Handbook does not list a final examination among the assessment items. That is not a guarantee there is none.

Assessment details may change. Please refer to the assessment information in Moodle closer to the start of the teaching period.

Requisites

Learning outcomes

1. Apply knowledge and understanding of recent developments to the death penalty from legal, political and advocacy perspectives.
2. Investigate, analyse and synthesise complex information, problems, concepts and theories in relation to the rights of people facing capital punishment.
3. Conduct research into capital punishment based on knowledge of appropriate international and comparative law research principles and methods.
4. Use cognitive, technical and creative skills to generate and evaluate at an abstract level complex ideas and concepts relevant to the death penalty.
5. Work collaboratively with peers to challenge assumptions, to refine knowledge through dialogue, to learn to give and receive peer-feedback, and to develop stronger communication skills.

Workload

Minimum total expected workload to achieve the learning outcomes for this unit typically comprises of a mixture of scheduled learning activities and independent study applicable to a 6 credit point unit. Learning activities may include a combination of teacher directed learning, peer directed learning, and online engagement.

Student experience, not official rules. Nothing here changes what the Handbook says.