معرفی
Professor Penny Crofts is an internationally recognized expert in criminal law at the University of Technology Sydney's Faculty of Law. Her socio-legal scholarship focuses on models of culpability, the legal regulation of the sex industry, and corporate criminal responsibility, drawing upon historical, philosophical, empirical, and literary materials. She serves on multiple committees including the Academic Selection Panel and Graduate Research Students Appeals Committee, and contributes to editorial boards including Current Issues in Criminal Justice.
Her research interests coalesce around justice in criminal law both in practice and theory, making distinctive contributions to critical evaluations of criminal legal models of culpability and enforcement. Professor Crofts' work examines how criminal law constructs models of wickedness and blameworthiness, and how corporations fit within criminal legal doctrine originally designed for human subjects. Her research extends into horror fiction as a lens for understanding corporate harms, exploring how cultural representations can inform legal conceptualizations of corporate responsibility.
Professor Crofts' publications reveal a consistent trajectory examining the intersection of criminal law with corporate personhood, historical accountability, and cultural narratives. Her recent work increasingly focuses on applying concepts from horror fiction to understand corporate harms, developing frameworks like 'routine horror' to analyze how systemic corporate harms become normalized through everyday practices and regulatory systems.
- National Learning and Teaching Citation (2015)
- National Learning and Teaching Citation (2014)
- UTS Learning and Teaching Citation (2014)
- Citation for outstanding contribution to student learning (2014)
Professor Crofts has supervised numerous PhD and Masters students and secured significant research funding including an ARC DECRA grant for 'Rethinking institutional culpability: criminal law, philosophy and horror.' Her influential work on brothel regulation has informed Parliamentary debates, council planning policies, and proposed law reforms. She actively engages with media and serves as an expert witness, including for the Australian Law Reform Commission's Inquiry on Corporate Criminal Responsibility.
