The Law of Homicide on the World Wide Web

There are four primary objectives:

• To offer a new upper level course to law students, now available at any other law school in Canada, relating to the law of Homicide.
• To develop this course on the world wide web. The interactive basis of web courses and the potential for problem-solving units are uniquely well suited for a course on Homicide.
• To make the course accessible to all students and, in particular, students with disabilities, students with family obligations and students with work or other commitments that limit their time at the law school.
• To utilize student assistance for all facets of the course preparation and development.

The course would be designed in a series of blocks, which each student would have to work through. The blocks would represent either a discrete doctrinal issue in the law of homicide (e.g. sentencing or defences) or a thematic issue such as domestic homicides or "compassionate homicides". This combination will demonstrate the wide range of doctrinal and policy issues raised by our most serious crimes. The course will build on the basic skills and knowledge gained by students during their mandatory first year criminal law course.

Each block would include several pages of information related to the topic, links to case-law, statutes, government publications and academic literature. Each block would also contain problems with which the students could test their own understanding of the material and questions for discussion in the discussion rooms. The problems will involve hypothetical fact situations involving homicide on which students will have to provide legal advice. The discussion rooms will focus more directly on policy issues. Each student would have the opportunity to lead/direct the discussion at least once throughout the term under the instructor's supervision.

There will be an in-person meeting at the first class of the year to establish course requirements and to introduce ourselves. Each student will have at least one in-person meeting to discuss the progress of their paper and further in-person meetings will be available at any time at the request of a student.

Student evaluation will be on a combination of research paper (60%), participation (25%) in the discussion rooms and critiquing another student paper (15%). These percentages are approximate only.

Isabel Grant, Faculty of Law
Doug Cronk, Distance Education