Writing Homework Help

Whatever means of communication you use, you will be imagining and explaining your ideal system
of criminal law. This is about YOUR ideas and is meant to be a creative assignment where you can
play with some ideas.

You will:

 Give a general overview of the priorities of the criminal law system.
o Where does the authority to design and enforce your system of criminal law come
from? Are there checks and balances to the design of your law? How do you ensure
power is not going to be abused? What are the goals of your criminal law system?
Why? What constitutes justice under your system?
o You should point out where this is similar and dissimilar to the US’s current system
of criminal law and explain your reasoning.
 Discuss the basic premises of your criminal law.
o What is the goal of your criminal law system? What are some things that you are
going to criminalize? What are things you are not going to criminalize? Who is the
victim in your system? What is the role of individuals/communities/institutions?
What are acceptable defenses against criminal prosecution (if prosecution is the
model you are adopting)?
 Focus in on one area of difference between US’s current criminal law and your system,
explaining the differences, why they are different, and why your approach is superior.
o You can choose any area of law to re-imagine: drug crimes, purposes of punishment,
crimes against the public, crimes against persons, sex crimes, environmental crimes,
wage theft, anything.
NOTE: If you use the writing center to review a draft of this assignment, and include the
rough draft, comments from the writing center, and your final draft, I will automatically
curve your paper up by one-third letter grade (i.e. if I was going to give you a B, you would
be curved up to a B+; if I was going to give you a B+, you would be curved up to an A-).
Also: You do not NEED to include any particular number of references, but when do make
reference to citable information, please cite appropriately using APA or Chicago citation style (for
both in-text AND reference list).

Paper Guidelines
 5-7 pages, double-spaced, no spaces between paragraphs.
 1” margins
 Use Times New Roman 12pt or similar
 Submitted in a .docx, .rtf, or .pdf format