Law Students Write Country's New Criminal Code

What an amazing opportunity. A seminar at Penn Law is spending the semester writing the new criminal code for a small, Islamic island:

Professor Paul Robinson's fall seminar at the University of Pennsylvania Law School offered a unique opportunity for the ambitious student: a chance to make law, rather than just study it.

But there was a catch. The students' client would be a regime that has outlawed dissent, jailed pro-democracy demonstrators and been accused by Amnesty International of "endemic torture and unfair trials."

As part of a project sponsored by the United Nations, the class's sole task would be to craft an updated crime code for the Republic of Maldives, an island nation of 278,000 people in the Indian Ocean.

The code was to be based on the Shariah, a body of Islamic law that fundamentalist nations have used to subjugate women, crush free religious expression and impose personal behavior laws criminalizing homosexuality, alcohol consumption and sex outside marriage.

Not everybody is pleased. Daniel Pipes, quite a controversial figure himself, suggests anything based on Shariah, or used to assist the Maldivian government, is illegitimate. And there does seem to be something rather incongruous about the Maldivian government reaching out like this at the same time they are suppressing dissent at home. Nonetheless, it seems like an opportunity for much more good than harm, and clearly a great experience for the students involved.