Criminal Law Futurism

Max Planck Guest Lecture

Date: Nov 9, 2026
Time: 05:00 PM - 07:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Arlie Loughnan (University of Sydney Law School)
Arlie Loughnan is Professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Law Theory at the University of Sydney Law School. Her work spans criminal law, legal theory and history, focusing on constructions of criminal responsibility and non-responsibility, the law-medicine interface, and criminal law’s historical development. Her monograph Self, Others and the State: Relations of Criminal Responsibility (CUP, 2020) examines responsibility in socio-historical context, that criminal responsibility is significant as it organizes key sets of relations – between self, others and the state – as relations of responsibility. She also wrote Manifest Madness: Mental Incapacity in Criminal Law (OUP, 2012), which maps doctrines and practices on mental incapacity and integrates legal, historical, psychological, and philosophical insights to illuminate “manifest madness”.
At the Max Planck Institute, Arlie is developing a project on the legitimation of criminal law today. It moves beyond generic notions of social trust, democratic deficit, or accountability to examine time and space, including colonial and post-colonial contexts, and the impact of “hyper-knowledge” (Loughnan 2024, 2025).
Location: Freiburg/Germany, Günterstalstr. 73
Room: Auditorium | Guests are welcome; please register
Host: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law
Contact: c.hillemanns@csl.mpg.de

In the current era, criminal law is facing profound challenges due to social, cultural, and epistemic transformation. These challenges include public expectations that criminal law address “wicked problems” like sexual and interpersonal violence at the same time as there is growing awareness of its inefficacy in this and other areas. There is also concern about the coherence of criminal responsibility, with, for example, both support and opposition to consideration of prior victimization in adjudicating and sentencing offenders. Overlaid on these challenges are those related to criminal justice processes, in which the role and integrity of individuals and institutions have come under attack. These challenges are so significant that they raise questions about the nature and scope of the criminal law of the future and provide reasons to believe it might be radically different from the present. In this lecture, Arlie Loughnan explores these issues and presents the aspects of contemporary criminal law that she has been analyzing as responses – including initiatives in transformative criminalization, the development of hybrid offenses/defenses in criminal legislation, and the personalization of aspects of criminal responsibility. In this discussion, she begins to sketch out a vision for future criminal law.

Professor Arlie Loughnan is one of our current Barbara Huber Scholarship holders. This program, in honor of the late researcher Dr. Barbara Huber, is open to outstanding academics from foreign research institutions for particularly innovative research projects. These projects contribute significantly to scientific progress by advancing new insights, perspectives, and understanding in the fields of criminal law, criminology, and public law. Barbara Huber Scholarships are awarded for research stays at the Institute for up to six months. The Barbara Huber Scholarships and this Barbara Huber Guest Lecture are funded in part by the family of Dr. Barbara Huber – in memory of her legacy.

External guests – Please register your participation using the following registration form.