Public Guest Seminar - The Relationism Theory of Criminal Justice – A Paradigm Shift

with Professor Jianhong Liu

There are two significant difficulties in building a general criminal justice theory. First, different from criminology theories, criminal justice produces multiple outcomes at different levels. Second, the scopes of existing theories largely originate from Western contexts and data, few including cross-cultural variation. This paper outlines a unified theory to explain multiple criminal justice outcomes at the system, institutional, and individual levels across cultures under a paradigm shift from the current “monotonic paradigm” to a more general “comparison paradigm.” The new paradigm logically contains the existing paradigm while broadening research questions and scope of criminal justice studies. It constructs a new set of concepts and propositions, presenting an effort toward a general causal criminal justice theory.

Keywords: criminal justice theory; theory building; cross-cultural variation; theoretical paradigm; modeling criminal justice outcomes

Bio

Jianhong Liu is a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Macau. Prof Liu has authored and co-authored more than 200 academic publications. He has won a number of awards, including 2016 “Freda Adler Distinguished Scholar Award” from the International Division of the American Society of Criminology, 2018 "G. O.W. Mueller Award for Distinguished Scholar” of the International Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences’ His co-authored book has won the 2022 “Distinguished Book Award” from the Asian Criminological Society and the 2022 “Best Scholarly Publication Award from The Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences In the United States (ACPSS).” Professor Liu has served in numerous leadership roles in international academic organizations. He was the Elected Founding President and Honorary President of the Asian Criminological Society (2009 - 2015); he has been the Elected President of the Scientific Commission of the International Society for Criminology (since 2014), the Elected Chairman of the General Assembly of the Asian Criminological Society (since 2016), and a member of the Steering Committee of Campbell Collaboration’s Crime and Justice Group (since 2009); and the elected President of Macau Society of Criminology etc.

Professor Liu has actively served the academic profession. Prof Liu is the Editor-in-Chief of the Asian Journal of Criminology. He is the editor of “The Springer Series on Asian Criminology & Criminal Justice Research”. He is also a member of the editorial boards of more than 20 international academic journals, including the British Journal of Criminology, Journal of Experimental Criminology, etc. He has been appointed to take many roles, such as serving as an Expert Nominator for the Stockholm Prize in Criminology appointed by the Stockholm Prize in Criminology Foundation, Grant Reviewer for the European Research Council, a Council member of the World Economic Forum for the Global Agenda Council; a consultant for United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) East Asia and Pacific Center; Advisor of Centre of Excellence for Statistics on Crime and Criminal Justice in Asia and the Pacific, UNODC; Senior Advisor of Chinese Society of Criminology etc. Professor Liu has been appointed by numerous prominent universities and research institutes as an honorary professor or research fellow. He has been invited to give numerous keynote speeches and seminars internationally.