An LGF reader attending law school at the University of Pennsylvania has forwarded an email describing a new seminar in which law students will not only study Islamic shari’a law—they will actually draft a new criminal code for the Islamic nation of the Maldives, based on shari’a, under the auspices of the United Nations.

I assume this will include the proper punishments for stealing, homosexuality, and apostasy, which are amputation, execution, and execution, respectively.

The student who forwarded this to me wrote:

“I find it both interesting and disturbing that students at a U.S. law school will be charged with WRITING THE CRIMINAL CODE OF A MUSLIM NATION UNDER SHARIA LAW. SHARIA is not law, the way we in the West conceive the idea, and the very IDEA that this should be not only a class in which such ‘law’ is critically examined, but DRAFTED! is offensive not merely to the ideals of the Constitution, but the premise of Common Law and basic tenets of Western Society.

Did a US law school draft the Nazi constitution back in the 1930s? I don’t think so.”

Dear People,

There have been two major changes to the registration materials. They are:

1) Professor Robinson’s Criminal Law Theory Seminar has been CANCELLED and is being replaced by the following three-credit seminar. Please note that there are deadlines which you must adhere to in order to be accepted into this new seminar. The description follows:

Seminar in Islamic Criminal Law:
Drafting a Criminal Code for the Maldives

The seminar will revolve around a single project: drafting a new criminal code for the Maldives. The work has been requested by the Maldivian government and is sponsored by the United Nations Development Program. Because the Maldives is by constitutional mandate an Islamic nation and, as a matter of law, all citizens are Muslim, the code will be the world’s first criminal code of modern format that is based upon the principles of Shari’a. After studying the existing Maldivian criminal law statutes and the criminal law principles contained in Shari’a, student teams will propose criminal code provisions and critique the proposals of others. Selected students will have the opportunity to travel to the Maldives as part of the U.N. mission to coordinate the criminal code drafting work. (The Maldives is a nation of 1200 islands in the Indian Ocean that has for centuries been a transit point between Africa, the Middle East, and Asia and continues to have strong cultural connections to all three.)

Prerequisite: It is desirable but not mandatory that a student has taken or is taking Advanced Criminal Law.