🎥 YouTube Lecture Notes — Understanding Criminology & Criminal Law

Source

YouTube playlist (reference): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQe8ZUZBIxt-X1qRVwO8XUck3IeCuUVZE

Notes extracted from Lecture 2 of the CSS Criminology lecture series (Section I, Topic: Understanding Criminology — covering meaning of crime, elements of crime, crime vs sin vs vice, and criminal law).

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Lecture Notes — Understanding Criminology (CSS Criminology Lecture Series, Video 2)

1. What is Crime

• Simple definition: Crime is a social harm that has been made punishable by law.
• Blackstone's definition: Crime is an act committed or omitted, in violation of a public law, either forbidding or commanding it.
• Key exam point — crime is relative to a country's penal code: an act is a crime only if it violates the existing penal code of that specific country. The same act can be a crime in one country and perfectly legal in another.
  • Example used in the lecture: in Italy, owning a pet without regularly walking it can be treated as an offence; in Pakistan there is no such law, so it isn't a crime here.
  • Similarly, in Lebanon/Syria, certain everyday acts are not criminalized that would be elsewhere — but universal offences like rape and theft are crimes virtually everywhere.
  • Exam tip: this "crime is relative to the penal code of the country" point is a strong critical-analysis addition to any "define crime" answer.

2. Types of Crime

• Mala in se: acts that are "wrong in themselves" — inherently wrong regardless of whether a law exists (e.g. murder).
• Mala prohibita: acts that are wrong only because they are prohibited by statute (from Latin "prohibitum" = prohibited by law) — not inherently wrong, but criminalized by specific legislation. Example given: kite-flying (basant) is not inherently wrong, but became a crime in Pakistan once specific laws prohibited it around festival seasons due to public-safety risk.

3. Elements of Crime (very examinable — with landmark case law)

Four elements must generally be present together for criminal liability; missing any one typically reduces or removes liability:

1. Actus reus (criminal act): the physical criminal act itself. Historically, in ancient/medieval law, actus reus alone was considered sufficient to punish someone. Modern criminal jurisprudence requires more than just the act.
2. Mens rea (criminal intent): the mental intention behind the act. Modern criminal law will not punish an act without also examining whether the accused had the intent to commit that specific harm.
   • Landmark case — R v Faulkner (1877, Ireland): A sailor named Faulkner stole rum from the ship's cargo hold and lit a match to see what he was doing, accidentally setting the entire ship on fire. He was originally charged with both larceny (theft) and arson. On appeal, the arson charge was dropped, because his mens rea was only to steal — he had no intention to burn the ship. He was convicted only of theft. This case established that mens rea must correspond to the specific harm caused, not just any wrongdoing.
3. Causation (the act must actually cause the harm):
   • Landmark case — R v White (1910, England): Mr. White planned to poison his mother by putting poison in her milk. She drank only a small sip (not enough to be fatal) and set the glass aside — but that same night she died of an unrelated heart attack. White had both actus reus (put in the poison) and mens rea (intended to kill her), but was not charged with murder because the poison did not actually cause her death (causation was missing). He was instead charged with attempted murder. This is the key case for teaching that actus reus + mens rea alone are not enough — causation must connect the act to the actual harm.
4. Concurrence (harm must occur in the manner planned/contemplated):
   • Landmark case — R v Shryock (cited in the lecture): A wife planned with her intent to kill her husband by shooting him. Before she could carry out the shooting, she was driving her car and accidentally struck and killed her husband in a road accident. She had mens rea (planned to kill him) and actus reus (her driving caused his death) and causation (her act did cause the death) — but she was not convicted of murder, because the death did not occur in the way she had planned (concurrence was missing). She was instead charged with attempted murder/conspiracy to murder.
   • Exam takeaway: these three case examples (Faulkner, White, and the driving case) are excellent illustrations to cite when answering any question on "elements of crime" — each one demonstrates a different element being absent and how that changed the resulting charge.

4. Crime, Sin and Vice (recurring CSS exam question — asked in CSS 2022)

Crime vs Deviance (also covered): Deviance is violating a society's own social norms/conventions (e.g., not following the customary steps of a wedding — mehndi, baraat, etc. — in your specific way is deviance, not crime, since the law doesn't mandate a specific ritual format). Deviance varies by society/culture, while crime — though its punishments differ from state to state — for a striking number of offences (theft, rape, murder, robbery) is treated as a crime in almost every society. Deviance draws social sanctions/stigma (police and judiciary are not the "agents of control" here — social pressure is), while crime draws legal sanctions.

5. What is Criminal Law

• Core legal maxim: Nullum crimen sine lege — "no crime without law." No act is a crime unless a law specifically declares it to be one; without that law, even a harmful act cannot be punished as a crime.
• Corollary principle (cited in the lecture): the imputed offence must correspond exactly to the type of crime described by the law — if no law applies exactly to the facts of the case, there is no criminal offence.
• Definition (cited in the lecture, attributed there to a criminologist referred to as "Paul Tappan"): Criminal law is "a body of rules regarding human conduct that have been promulgated by a political authority, which apply uniformly to members of the classes to which the rules refer, and which are enforced by punishment administered by the state through the process and procedure of the courts."
• Elements of criminal law (from this definition): political authority (who makes it — the legislature), specificity, uniformity (applies equally to every class/citizen), and a penal element (punishment).

6. History of Criminal Law (useful chronology for a "trace the history of criminal law" question)

• Code of Ur-Nammu — generally cited as the first written legal code.
• Code of Hammurabi (~1754 BCE) — the famous Babylonian code, from Mesopotamia.
• Roman Law / Law of the Twelve Tables (~449 BCE) — the foundation of Roman law.
• Manusmriti (~300 CE) — a foundational Hindu legal/criminal code.
• Islamic law / Sharia — introduced in the 6th century CE, still a notable and influential criminal-law system today.
• English Common Law — the most recent major system, developed after the Norman Conquest of 1066 CE; became the template criminal law exported around the world through British colonialism, which is why Pakistan's own Penal Code (1860) and Criminal Procedure Code (1898) retain strong British-law elements from the colonial period.

7. Objectives of Criminal Law

• Retribution: revenge/"an eye for an eye" — punishing the offender with harm proportionate to the harm they caused victims.
• Deterrence: making the punishment severe enough that the offender (specific deterrence) or society at large (general deterrence) is discouraged from committing that crime again. (The lecture draws an analogy to nuclear deterrence — a country maintains nuclear weapons specifically so an adversary is deterred from attacking, illustrating the same underlying logic as criminal deterrence.)
• Incapacitation: removing the offender from society (e.g., imprisonment) so they physically cannot harm others while incapacitated.
• Rehabilitation: reforming the offender into a productive member of society so they do not reoffend.
• Restoration: restoring the victim, as far as possible, to the position they were in before the harm occurred (e.g., compensation) — this objective is victim-centred, unlike the other four which are offender-centred.

8. Sources of Criminal Law

• Common law: unwritten law based on legal precedent established by the courts (classic example: England, which has no single written constitution and relies heavily on judicial precedent). A court decision that sets precedent can later be cited/applied in similar future cases — this is why landmark cases (like Faulkner and White, above) matter so much in common-law systems.
• Constitution: the basic principles and laws of a nation/state that determine the powers and duties of government and guarantee rights to the people; violating constitutionally defined provisions can itself carry penalties.
• Statutory law: written laws passed by a legislative assembly (bills, acts, ordinances that later become acts) — most modern criminal law, including Pakistan's, is statutory. Governments generally prefer statutory law over common law/judicial precedent, since precedent-based law can be seen as inconsistent or open to manipulation over time; a written statute passed in response to a specific problem (e.g., a new anti-rape law responding to a spate of rape cases) is considered more predictable and controllable.
• Administrative law: the body of law governing the activities of administrative/regulatory government agencies — covering rule-making, adjudication, and enforcement of specific regulatory agendas.

9. Substantive vs Procedural Criminal Law

• Substantive criminal law: defines what conduct is criminal and what punishment applies to it. Example: the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC), 1860.
• Procedural criminal law: provides the process by which a crime is detected, reported, investigated, and tried (interviews, investigation procedure, trial procedure). Example: the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), 1898.
• Both PPC 1860 and CrPC 1898 date from the British colonial period, which is why Pakistan's criminal-justice framework still carries strong British-law elements.

10. Criminology vs Criminal Law (a direct comparison — good for a "differentiate" question)

11. Recent Developments (worth citing for currency/marks in a Pakistan-specific answer)

• Criminal Law (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020: amended the Pakistan Penal Code by widening the definition/scope of rape under Section 375 PPC (building on an earlier amendment via the Protection of Women Act, 2006) and introduced/updated Section 376 PPC on punishment for rape.
• Anti-Rape (Investigation and Trial) Ordinance, 2020: provides the legal structure for Anti-Rape Crisis Cells, which can be established by the Prime Minister at any place, headed by Commissioners at the divisional and district level. (Citing this structure by name — PM-established crisis cells headed by Commissioners at divisional/district level — is flagged in the lecture as a strong, examiner-pleasing detail to include in a gender-based-crime or criminal-law-reform answer.)
• General study tip from the lecturer: read good English-language sources (e.g., magazine/newspaper criminology columns such as those by legal commentators like Kamran Adil) to pick up citable facts/figures for exam answers.

*(Source note: this is a study summary of Lecture 2 of the same CSS-prep YouTube lecture series referenced on the parent chapter's lecture-notes subpage, covering FPSC Section I's "Understanding Criminology" sub-topic — meaning/definition of criminology recap, crime, criminal law, and crime vs sin vs vice. Cross-check against this chapter's main notes and against "Chapter 4a" for the fuller treatment of case law and legal theory.)