'Law Books in Action: Essays on the Anglo-American Legal Treatise' explores the history of the legal treatise in the common law world. Rather than looking at treatises as shortcuts from 'law in books' to 'law in action', the essays in this collection ask what treatises can tell us about what troubled legal professionals at a given time, what motivated them to write what they did, and what they hoped to achieve. This book, then, is the first study of the legal treatise as a 'law book in action', an active text produced by individuals with ideas about what they wanted the law to be, not a mere stepping-stone to codes and other forms of legal writing, but a multifaceted genre of legal literature in its own right, practical and fanciful, dogmatic and ornamental in turn. This book will be of interest to legal scholars, lawyers and judges, as well as to anyone else with a scholarly interest in law in general, and legal history in particular.

Criminal Law: A Comparative Approach presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the substantive criminal law of two major jurisdictions: the United States and Germany. Presupposing no familiarity with either U.S. or German criminal law, the book will provide criminal law scholars and students with a rich comparative understanding of criminal law's foundations and central doctrines. All foreign-language sources have been translated into English; cases and materials are accompanied by heavily cross-referenced introductions and notes that place them within the framework of each country's criminal law system and highlight issues ripe for comparative analysis. Divided into three parts, the book covers foundational issues - such as constitutional limits on the criminal law - before tackling the major features of the general part of the criminal law and a selection of offences in the special part. Throughout, readers are exposed to alternative approaches to familiar problems in criminal law, and as a result will have a chance to see a given country's criminal law doctrine, on specific issues and in general, from the critical distance of comparative analysis.

This handbook explores criminal law systems from around the world, with the express aim of stimulating comparison and discussion. General principles of criminal liability receive prominent coverage in each essay--including discussions of rationales for punishment, the role and design of criminal codes, the general structure of criminal liability, accounts of "mens rea," and the rights that criminal law is designed to protect--before the authors turn to more specific offenses like homicide, theft, sexual offenses, victimless crimes, and terrorism.
This key reference covers all of the world's major legal systems--common, civil, Asian, and Islamic law traditions--with essays on sixteen countries on six different continents. The introduction places each country within traditional distinctions among legal systems and explores noteworthy similarities and differences among the countries covered, providing an ideal entry into the fascinating range of criminal law systems in use the world over.

Criminal Law: A Comparative Approach presents a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the substantive criminal law of two major jurisdictions: the United States and Germany. Presupposing no familiarity with either U.S. or German criminal law, the book will provide criminal law scholars and students with a rich comparative understanding of criminal law's foundations and central doctrines. All foreign-language sources have been translated into English; cases and materials are accompanied by heavily cross-referenced introductions and notes that place them within the framework of each country's criminal law system and highlight issues ripe for comparative analysis. Divided into three parts, the book covers foundational issues - such as constitutional limits on the criminal law - before tackling the major features of the general part of the criminal law and a selection of offences in the special part. Throughout, readers are exposed to alternative approaches to familiar problems in criminal law, and as a result will have a chance to see a given country's criminal law doctrine, on specific issues and in general, from the critical distance of comparative analysis.