Advanced Issues in Criminal Law: Human Trafficking

This seminar will introduce students to the federal, selected state, and international laws and policies now available to combat human trafficking and modern-day forms of slavery. The course will begin with a brief examination of abolitionism. It will then review the adoption of U.S. anti-slavery and peonage laws, showing how those laws proved insufficient to curb modern slavery and trafficking, such failure forming the backdrop for the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act in 2000. The seminar will then conduct an in-depth analysis of federal laws prohibiting sex and labor trafficking crimes and consider how such laws are used to investigate and prosecute those offenses. A brief investigation of selected state laws as well as the problem of migrant smuggling will also be conducted. The last part of the seminar will examine the international anti-trafficking legal framework established under the U.N. Palermo Protocol and consider whether global efforts to implement the Protocol have had any success.