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Application Process

The CCCJ's Committee of Management may confer Visiting Student status on postgraduate research students of other Universities who wish to pursue their research project into criminal justice in Cambridge. The benefits of Visiting Student status shall be determined in each case by the Committee of Management. Visiting Student status requires the approval of the Squire Law Librarian, Mr David Wills (dfw1003@cam.ac.uk) to ensure that access to and work space in the Squire Law Library are available. Such access (and accommodation, which a Visiting Student will be responsible for finding and funding) is more likely to be available outside of Term time (Term dates are available here: https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/term-dates-and-calendars). A Visiting Student cannot be provided with formal research supervision by a Faculty member during their time at the Faculty.

Those wishing to pursue the possibility of being a Visiting Student at the CCCJ are encouraged to contact cccj@law.cam.ac.uk

 

Previous Visiting Students

 

2018

Fabio Salerno (University of Palermo, Italy)

Fabio’s research looks at the tools deployed by English criminal law to fight organised crime. His research focuses on section 45 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, which introduced an offence of participating in the criminal activities of an organised crime group. Section 45 responds to the proliferation of activities carried out by organised criminal groups, a phenomenon which the UK government regards as a threat to its national security.

Fabio’s project analyses and evaluates whether the offence of conspiracy captures the activities of all persons taking part, directly or indirectly, in the criminal activities of an organised crime group.  More specifically, it asks whether section 45 filled a legal vacuum and explores the relationship between Section 45 and the existing law on conspiracy and encouraging or assisting crime.

Fabio’s research also looks at the concept of an ‘organised crime group’ as defined in section 45, which provides the first legislative definition of this term in English criminal law. It assesses whether this definition reflects or, instead, departs from the definitions provided by relevant international and regional instruments, such as the United Nation Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime and the Council Framework Decision 2008/841/JHA on the Fight Against Organised Crime.

2017

Márk Némedi (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy)

Márk’s PhD research focuses on the relevance of Continental and Anglo-American principles to the relationship between criminal law to criminalisation, in light of their contemporary critiques and counterparts, most notably functionalism. Recent increased interest in criminalisation has raised doubts about whether such principled views of criminal law are tenable, especially when confronted with a proliferation of competing, non-trivially-related ideas. Relativistic arguments have appeared in scholarship ranging from epistemic and cultural relativism to a more radical conceptual relativism to ‘argue away’ classical principles. Relativisms seem to suggest that different frameworks of criminalisation are all true, analytically, relative to their own domain and, perhaps, in some ways incompatible with one another. Márk's research seeks to clarify how coherent these relativisms are and what their consequences are for principled accounts of criminal law, with a view to determining whether there are grounds to prefer some principled or non-principled views over others.