Introduction

This Special Issue of Law in Context is comprised of articles developed at the 2015 Criminal Law Workshop, co-hosted by the La Trobe University and Melbourne University Law Schools. This annual workshop brings together criminal law academics from across Australia and New Zealand, and results in a day of intense, diverse, and fascinating discussion about contemporary criminal law issues. This collection of articles is accordingly wide-ranging. From the creation of new offences dealing with contemporaneous political panics (such as one-punch homicides and the spectre of out-of-control teenagers using social media to gatecrash suburban parties) and new processes such as paperless arrest warrants, to the re-purposing of old crimes (consorting, conspiracy) and processes (such as bail) in the service of new targets of social/political concern (bikies, domestic violence perpetrators), the articles in this Special Issue interrogate the boundaries of the criminal law and the extent to which it can or should legitimately be used as a tool to police the margins of society. Full text also available via Informit