Increasingly, international governmental networks and organisations make it necessary to master the legal principles of other jurisdictions. Since the advent of international criminal tribunals this need has fully reached criminal law. A large part of their work is based on comparative research. The legal systems which contribute most to this systemic discussion are common law and civil law, sometimes called continental law. So far this dialogue appears to have been dominated by the former. While there are many reasons for this, one stands out very clearly: Language. English has become the lingua franca of international legal research. The present book addresses this issue. Thomas Vormbaum is one of the foremost German legal historians and the book's original has become a cornerstone of research into the history of German criminal law beyond doctrinal expositions; it allows a look at the system s genesis, its ideological, political and cultural roots. In the field of comparative research, it is of the utmost importance to have an understanding of the law s provenance, in other words its historical DNA."

This volume presents a leading contribution to the substantive arena relating to homicide in the criminal law. In broad terms, the ambit of homicide standardisations in extant law is contestable and opaque. This book provides a logical template to focus the debate. The overall concept addresses three specific elements within this arena, embracing an overarching synergy between them. This edifice engages in an examination of UK provisions, and in contrasting these provisions against alternative domestic jurisdictions as well as comparative contributions addressing a particularised research grid for content. The comparative chapters provide a wider background of how other legal systems treat a variety of specialised issues relating to homicide in the context of the criminal law. The debate in relation to homicide continues apace for academics, practitioners and within the criminal justice system. Having expert descriptions of the wider issues surrounding the particular discussion and of other legal systems' approaches serves to stimulate and inform that debate. This collection will be a major source of reference for future discussion.

This volume presents a comparative examination of the issue of fault in criminal law. Extant law reveals significant problems in adoption of consistent approaches to doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of fault liability and culpability thresholds in criminal law. This has been exemplified by a plethora of recent jurisprudential authorities revealing varying degrees of confusion and vacillation. This collection focuses on fault liability for inculpation with contributions from leading specialists from different jurisdictions presenting alternative perspectives. The book addresses three specific elements within the arena of fault, embracing an overarching synergy between them. This structure facilitates an examination of UK provisions, with specialist contributions on domestic law, and in contrasting these provisions against alternative domestic jurisdictions as well as comparative contributions addressing a particularised research grid for content. The comparative chapters provide a wider background of how other legal systems treat a variety of specialised issues relating to fault elements in the context of the criminal law. With contributions from leading experts in the field, the book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, academics, and practitioners working in this area.

The new edition of this seminal text outlines the fundamental aspects of the German approach to criminal procedure. It explores a wide range of issues from setting out the basic procedural principles to presenting the main players in the criminal justice system, pre-trial investigations, the path from indictment to trial judgment, rules of evidence, sentencing, and appeals and post-conviction review. As far as it is useful for an introductory text, the differences between proceedings against adults and juveniles are highlighted. The theoretical discussion of decision-making and style of judgment writing is supported by practical insights through specimen translations of an indictment, a trial judgment and an appellate judgment by the Federal Court of Justice.

There is no limit to the number of crimes--including acts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, piracy, drug smuggling, governmental corruption and illegal intelligence gathering--committed by various national governments. In STATE CRIME, the volume editors gather together some of the best new research on state transgressions, in addition to asking senior scholars to reflect on their past research and bring it up to date.The first section of the book features a well-rounded set of cases exemplifying state criminality, including an examination of the Holocaust through a criminological framework, and a look at the illegal aggressions committed by the US army in Iraq. The second section of the book focuses on various methods for controlling these governmental transgressions, including domestic legal sanctions and also international enforcers such as the International Court of Human Rights. Contributors to this section of the book examine worldwide policies, such as the international rule against the assassination of regime elites regardless of the acts of aggression and criminality committed by them. The book taps into a previously overloked area that is most relevant for understanding what policies or responses to governmental crime would be most effective in constraining the worst acts. Contributors include leading scholars in criminology such as Ray Michalowski, David Friedrichs, and Peter Iadicola.

This volume presents a leading contribution to the substantive arena relating to consent in the criminal law. In broad terms, the ambit of legally valid consent in extant law is contestable and opaque, and reveals significant problems in adoption of consistent approaches to doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of consent. This book seeks to provide a logical template to focus the debate. The overall concept addresses three specific elements within this arena, embracing an overarching synergy between them. This edifice engages in an examination of UK provisions, with specialist contributions on Irish and Scottish law, and in contrasting these provisions against alternative domestic jurisdictions as well as comparative contributions addressing a particularised research grid for consent. The comparative chapters provide a wider background of how other legal systems' treat a variety of specialised issues relating to consent in the context of the criminal law. The debate in relation to consent principles continues for academics, practitioners and within the criminal justice system. Having expert descriptions of the wider issues surrounding the particular discussion and of other legal systems' approaches serves to stimulate and inform that debate. This collection will be a major source of reference for future discussion.

The law relating to general defences is one of the most important areas in the criminal law, yet the current state of the law in the United Kingdom reveals significant problems in the adoption of a consistent approach to their doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings, as exemplified by a number of recent developments in legislation and case law. A coherent and joined-up approach is still missing. This volume provides an analysis of the main contentious areas in British law, and proposes ways forward for reform. The collection includes contributions from leading experts across various jurisdictions. Part I examines the law in the United Kingdom, with specialist contributions on Irish and Scottish law. Part II consists of contributions by authors from a number of foreign jurisdictions, all written to a common research grid for maximum comparability, which provide a wider background of how other legal systems treat problems relating to general defences in the context of the criminal law, and which may serve as points of reference for domestic law reform.

Following on from the earlier edited collection, Loss of Control and Diminished Responbility, this book is the first volume in the Substantive Issues in Criminal Law series. It serves as a leading point of reference in the area relating to participation in crime and identifies the need for a consistent approach to the doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of complicity liability. With a section on the UK analysing points of current interest, the book also has a large comparative section dealing with foreign jurisdictions and examines on the basis of a unified research grid how different legal systems treat core issues of participation in the context of criminal law. This book is a valuable reference resource for those in the criminal justice community in the UK and abroad and for academics, the judiciary and policy-makers.

This book provides a leading point of reference in the field of partial defences to murder and with respect to the mental condition defences of loss of control and diminished responsibility in general. The work includes contributions from leading specialists from different jurisdictions. Divided into two parts, the first provides an analysis from the perspective of the UK, looking at particular concerns such as domestic violence, revenge and mixed motive killings, mistaken beliefs. The second part presents a comparative and international view to provide a wider background of how alternative systems treat issues of human frailty short of full insanity (loss of control, diminished responsibility) in the context of the criminal law.

This book addresses potential avenues of criminal liability for public health crisis management in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, under national and international criminal law, especially for causing death and bodily harm. The national case studies are geographically representative and follow a common research grid. Each national case study is prefaced by an overview of the detection and subsequent spread of the pandemic in the country concerned. The relevant legal and constitutional frameworks that governed the government and corporate conduct in the face of the pandemic are also discussed, followed by the consideration of forms of criminal liability. Government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic differed vastly in terms of both the choice of strategies adopted (herd immunity, test-and-trace, lockdown, etc) and the quality and speed of government implementation of those strategies and associated interventions. Both factors impacted the number of infections and casualties. It is therefore appropriate to consider forms of criminal liability for failure of individual members of government, including specific public authorities, to act to the best of their abilities, as timely as possible, and in accordance with expert advice.

This volume presents a leading contribution to the substantive arena relating to homicide in the criminal law. In broad terms, the ambit of homicide standardisations in extant law is contestable and opaque. This book provides a logical template to focus the debate. The overall concept addresses three specific elements within this arena, embracing an overarching synergy between them. This edifice engages in an examination of UK provisions, and in contrasting these provisions against alternative domestic jurisdictions as well as comparative contributions addressing a particularised research grid for content. The comparative chapters provide a wider background of how other legal systems treat a variety of specialised issues relating to homicide in the context of the criminal law. The debate in relation to homicide continues apace for academics, practitioners and within the criminal justice system. Having expert descriptions of the wider issues surrounding the particular discussion and of other legal systems' approaches serves to stimulate and inform that debate. This collection will be a major source of reference for future discussion.

This volume presents a leading contribution to the substantive arena relating to consent in the criminal law. In broad terms, the ambit of legally valid consent in extant law is contestable and opaque, and reveals significant problems in adoption of consistent approaches to doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of consent. This book seeks to provide a logical template to focus the debate. The overall concept addresses three specific elements within this arena, embracing an overarching synergy between them. This edifice engages in an examination of UK provisions, with specialist contributions on Irish and Scottish law, and in contrasting these provisions against alternative domestic jurisdictions as well as comparative contributions addressing a particularised research grid for consent. The comparative chapters provide a wider background of how other legal systems' treat a variety of specialised issues relating to consent in the context of the criminal law. The debate in relation to consent principles continues for academics, practitioners and within the criminal justice system. Having expert descriptions of the wider issues surrounding the particular discussion and of other legal systems' approaches serves to stimulate and inform that debate. This collection will be a major source of reference for future discussion.

Following on from the earlier edited collection, Loss of Control and Diminished Responbility, this book is the first volume in the Substantive Issues in Criminal Law series. It serves as a leading point of reference in the area relating to participation in crime and identifies the need for a consistent approach to the doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of complicity liability. With a section on the UK analysing points of current interest, the book also has a large comparative section dealing with foreign jurisdictions and examines on the basis of a unified research grid how different legal systems treat core issues of participation in the context of criminal law. This book is a valuable reference resource for those in the criminal justice community in the UK and abroad and for academics, the judiciary and policy-makers.

Increasingly, international governmental networks and organisations make it necessary to master the legal principles of other jurisdictions. Since the advent of international criminal tribunals this need has fully reached criminal law. A large part of their work is based on comparative research. The legal systems which contribute most to this systemic discussion are common law and civil law, sometimes called continental law. So far this dialogue appears to have been dominated by the former. While there are many reasons for this, one stands out very clearly: Language. English has become the lingua franca of international legal research. The present book addresses this issue. Thomas Vormbaum is one of the foremost German legal historians and the book's original has become a cornerstone of research into the history of German criminal law beyond doctrinal expositions; it allows a look at the system's genesis, its ideological, political and cultural roots. In the field of comparative research, it is of the utmost importance to have an understanding of the law's provenance, in other words its historical DNA.

It is statistically unlikely that humans are the only intelligent species in the universe. Nothing about the others will be known until contact is made beyond a radio signal from space that merely tells us they existed when it was sent. That contact may occur tomorrow, in a hundred years, or never. If it does it will be a high-risk scenario for humanity. It may be peaceful or hostile. Relying on alien altruism and benign intentions is wishful thinking. We need to begin identifying as a planetary species, and develop a global consensus on how to respond in either scenario.

German criminal law doctrine, as one of the more influential ones over time and on a global scale, takes rather different approaches to many of the problems of substantive law from those of the common law family of countries like the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia etc. It also differs markedly from the system which is most often used in Anglophone writing as a civil law comparison, the French law. German criminal law is a code-based model and has been for centuries. The influence of academic writing on its development has been far greater than in the judge-oriented common law models. The book will serve as a useful aid to debates about codification efforts in countries that are mostly based on a case law system, but who wish to re-structure their law in one or several criminal codes. The comparison will show that similar problems occur in all legal systems regardless of their provenance, and the attempts of individual systems at solving them, their successes and their failures, can provide a rich experience on which other countries can draw and on which they can build. The book provides an outline of the principles of German criminal law, mainly the so-called 'General Part' (eg actus reus, mens rea, defences, participation) and the core offence categories (homicide, offences against property, sexual offences). It sets out the principles, their development under the influence of academic writing and judicial decisions. The book is not meant as a textbook of German criminal law, but is a selection of interrelated in-depth essays on the central problems. Wherever it is apposite and feasible, comparison is offered to the approaches of English criminal law and the legal systems of other common and civil law countries in order to allow common lawyers to draw the pertinent parallels to their own jurisdictions.

German substantive criminal law has been influential in many civil law countries, most notably in the Hispanic world. In the common law countries, not surprisingly because of the systemic differences in approach, its impact has been much less, if not negligible. This may be largely explained as a result of the language barrier. An up-to-date and reliable English translation of the German Criminal Code has been conspicuously missing for some time. This book presents a new English translation of the Strafgesetzbuch, (the Criminal Code), in its most recent amended form of August 2007. The Code is the centrepiece of German substantive criminal law and informs the interpretation and application of any other criminal provisions which can be found in specific legislation. The translation thus affords an opportunity to profit from a legal tradition that has had a major influence over history and has a rich experience of doctrinal analysis. The translation adheres as closely as possible to the textual structure of the original, but has been made palatable to an English ear. It is intended as a companion to the author's Principles of German Criminal Law which was published in December 2008. Please click on the link below for further details. www.hartpub.co.uk/books/details.asp?isbn=9781841136301.

This volume contributes to the codification debate by bringing together research articles which compare and contrast the experience of countries which have a criminal code with those operating a case law system. The articles consider the criticisms that are often made of criminal code systems such as: the implicit restrictions on judicial discretion; the tendency towards inflexibility; the discrepancy that can develop between the theory and the development of the law in practice; and the potential difficulty of a criminal code fitting into a country's domestic socio-legal culture. The advantages of the case law system are also considered such as reliance on the judiciary for the development of the nation's criminal law as well as the ability to legislate on the problems of the day by enacting topical laws for distinct subjects. Whereas wholesale codification is a much more accepted phenomenon in the continental law traditions, simplistic transplants from one legal tradition can result in systemic frictions and other anomalies which may offend domestic culture. This collection is an invaluable reference tool which supports the discussion over codification and promotes better understanding across the common law/civil law divide.

There is no limit to the number of crimes--including acts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, piracy, drug smuggling, governmental corruption and illegal intelligence gathering--committed by various national governments. In STATE CRIME, the volume editors gather together some of the best new research on state transgressions, in addition to asking senior scholars to reflect on their past research and bring it up to date.The first section of the book features a well-rounded set of cases exemplifying state criminality, including an examination of the Holocaust through a criminological framework, and a look at the illegal aggressions committed by the US army in Iraq. The second section of the book focuses on various methods for controlling these governmental transgressions, including domestic legal sanctions and also international enforcers such as the International Court of Human Rights. Contributors to this section of the book examine worldwide policies, such as the international rule against the assassination of regime elites regardless of the acts of aggression and criminality committed by them. The book taps into a previously overloked area that is most relevant for understanding what policies or responses to governmental crime would be most effective in constraining the worst acts. Contributors include leading scholars in criminology such as Ray Michalowski, David Friedrichs, and Peter Iadicola.

The new edition of this seminal text outlines the fundamental aspects of the German approach to criminal procedure. It explores a wide range of issues from setting out the basic procedural principles to presenting the main players in the criminal justice system, pre-trial investigations, the path from indictment to trial judgment, rules of evidence, sentencing, and appeals and post-conviction review. As far as it is useful for an introductory text, the differences between proceedings against adults and juveniles are highlighted. The theoretical discussion of decision-making and style of judgment writing is supported by practical insights through specimen translations of an indictment, a trial judgment and an appellate judgment by the Federal Court of Justice.

Genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing are terms which in recent years have entered common usage. The worst cases of these crimes seen in the Yugoslav secession conflict and the Rwandan slaughter resulted in attempts by the international legal community to initiate an international mechanism for establishing criminal accountability. In 1998, after many States signed the Rome Statute, it was expected that justice would prevail over state power and impunity be eliminated. However there is a serious question mark over the effectiveness of this process. That is the starting point for this collection. It is not an acclamatory collection that is meant to celebrate the undoubted advances of international criminal justice. The articles in the first part show the importance of comparative criminal law research to the development of international criminal justice, and in the second part they deal with the foundations, substantive and procedural aspects of international criminal law.