International Journal on Criminology Volume 6, Number 1, Spring 2018 | Page 42

Criminology, a Precursor to Criminal Law
By François Haut
International Journal on Criminology • Volume 6, Number 1 • Spring 2018
PhD in Law, Honorary Lecturer. Associate Professor at the
China Criminal Police University and George Mason University
(United States)
When Professor Yves Mayaud invited me to create a seminar on “criminology”
for his criminal law Master’s program, I immediately accepted.
Without any hesitation.
Indeed, his motivation was entirely clear: he considered that upstream of
the punishment, there was the crime, and therefore the criminal, and that it was
vital that his students understood who this person was.
In plain terms, the criminal, as an enemy of society, is the “client” of criminal
law. The future practitioner (whether a judge, lawyer, gendarme, or police
officer) cannot ignore this segment of the population whom he/she will have to
deal with during his/her career. To put it even more simply, criminal law was only
invented because of the existence of deviant individuals, deviant behavior, and
transgressions; thus, to protect society.
Everything thus being clear between us, I was given free rein to carry out
my task of exposing the criminal law Master’s students to the phenomena of contemporary
criminality, and to create opportunities for reflection and reaction. I
had also been teaching this as part of the “Judicial Careers” course at our university,
in the criminology course, and in a specific university course, “Analyzing
Contemporary Criminal Threats,” which I had helped establish in 1998 and which
I led.
We were in perfect harmony and this congruence of criminal law and criminology
lasted for around ten years, to the benefit of our students. At no moment
did Yves Mayaud fall into the trap of making an artificial distinction between these
disciplines, something which has resulted in criminology only being taught in a
marginal fashion in France. Fundamentally, at the time of our respective retirements,
the subject had practically disappeared from our institution altogether. I
am thus very grateful to him for allowing me to facilitate the incorporation of
criminology into his Master’s program within the corpus of criminal legal technique,
and for allowing me to reveal to future practitioners the panorama of turpitude
that they will be confronted with. I am, above all, very proud of having been
able to teach alongside Professor Mayaud.
Moreover, the lack of interest displayed by many criminal lawyers over the
basis for their own existence—the result of disputes that were as futile as they were
ridiculous—in no way erases reality. The criminal phenomenon is exponential in
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doi: 10.18278/ijc.6.1.3