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. It is essential that the proposed research overlaps with the research interests of a member of the CCCJ. 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, detailing briefly their proposed subject of research, proposed visiting period, and which member(s) of the CCCJ they view as having related research interests.
Previous Visiting Students
2024
Beatriz Martínez Perpiñá (University of Girona, Spain)
Beatriz's research focuses on the protection of underage victims from secondary victimisation in the setting of criminal proceedings. Based on her legal and criminological research profiles, she is developing a multidisciplinary and empirical study of the benefits of and difficulties posed by the pre-recorded witness evidence, as well as the main challenges facing the standardisation of such evidence in the Spanish criminal justice system. Beatriz's research stay at the University of Cambridge involves a comparative law study of the functioning of the English criminal process and the identification of potential good practices.
Ayesha Kakar (University of Gent, Belgium)
Ayesha Kakar is a doctoral researcher at the University of Ghent, Belgium, exploring mob violence as a critical social and legal phenomenon in Pakistan. Her research delves into the prevalence, dynamics, patterns, and underlying causes of mob violence, scrutinizing its detrimental impact on the legal system and the rule of law. Furthermore, her academic interests extend to criminal law and the criminal justice system, the implementation of human rights law, international criminal law, humanitarian law, and constitutional law.
Johannes Weigel (MPI Freiburg/University of Göttingen, Germany)
Johannes's doctoral research focuses on the criminalisation of inadvertent negligence, a topic that has sparked long-standing debates in both German and Anglo-American criminal law. These discussions have historically developed independently within their respective legal traditions, without much cross-pollination. While the German discussion seems to have come to a standstill in recent decades, the Anglo-American debate has been, and continues to be, highly dynamic. Johannes aims to construct a bridge between the discussions in German and the Anglo-American criminal law, especially addressing the question of how current theories of responsibility for negligence align with psychological findings on inadvertence and its causes.
Lorenzo Bigazzi (University of Siena, Italy)
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.
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