Dr Siti Shari

I research and teach Criminal Law, with a focus on what creates a criminal and how the criminal justice system responds to serious offences, including homicide.

My research sits within Criminal Law and criminal justice, with a focus on understanding what creates a criminal and how individuals come to be involved in serious crime. I am particularly interested in how early life experiences, including childhood trauma, shape pathways into offending and interact with criminalisation and legal responsibility.

My current work examines serious violence, including homicide, through a socio-legal lens, exploring how criminal law explains, categorises, and responds to individuals whose offending is often rooted in vulnerability and adverse life experiences. Across my research, I seek to move beyond abstract doctrine to understand crime in its real-world context and to inform more responsive and humane approaches to criminal justice.

Criminal Law, Criminal Justice and Criminology:

• Doctrinal and socio-legal analysis of murder and infanticide
• Pathways into serious offending shaped by trauma and vulnerability, especially in  homicide cases.
• Structural inequality and social context shaping criminal responsibility
• Conceptions of responsibility and blameworthiness in cases of serious violence

Undergraduate

• Criminal Law
• Criminology
• Foundations of Law

• Criminal law and criminal justice
• Serious crime and violence, including homicide and infanticide
• Why people offend and how individuals become criminalised
• Childhood trauma and its relationship to crime
• Legal responses to serious offending

• “The Status of Victorian Women and the Infanticide Act 1938” – Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, 
  CSWG - Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Warwick, December 2021 
• “Sociocultural Context of Infanticide in Malaysia” – Warwick PGR Conference, February 2022 
• “Infanticide: A Crime or a Cry for Help?” – Midlands Graduate School (MGS) DTP Conference, June 2022 
• “Infanticide and Punitive Societies” – Warwick Law PGR Conference, February 2023 
• “Conservative Legal Systems and Morality” – Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) Annual Conference, Portsmouth, March 2024 
• Roundtable on Islamic Law and Gender – Warwick Law School, June 2024

• LLB (International Islamic University Malaysia)
• LLM (Brunel University London)
• PhD in Law (University of Warwick)