Foundational Texts In Modern Criminal Law

Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law presents essays in which scholars from various countries and legal systems engage critically with formative texts in criminal legal thought since Hobbes. It examines the emergence of a transnational canon of criminal law by documenting its intellectual and disciplinary history and provides a snapshot of contemporary work on criminal law within that historical and comparative context. Criminal law discourse has become, and will continue to become, more international and comparative, and in this sense global: the long-standing parochialism of criminal law scholarship and doctrine is giving way to a broad exploration of the foundations of modern criminal law. The present book advances this promising scholarly and doctrinal project by making available key texts, including several not previously available in English translation, from the common law and civil law traditions, accompanied by contributions from leading representatives of both systems.

The fifth book in the series offers an historical and conceptual account of the criminal law, as it has developed in England and spread to common law jurisdictions around the world. It traces how and why criminal law has come to be accorded with a central role in securing civil order in modernity, and justifies who and what should be treated as criminal under the law. Farmer argues that the emergence of the modern state in which criminal law is recognized as an instrument of government is a result of the distinct body of rules which have emerged from the modern criminal law.

Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law presents essays in which scholars from various countries and legal systems engage critically with formative texts in criminal legal thought since Hobbes. It examines the emergence of a transnational canon of criminal law by documenting its intellectual and disciplinary history and provides a snapshot of contemporary work on criminal law within that historical and comparative context. Criminal law discourse has become, and will continue to become, more international and comparative, and in this sense global: the long-standing parochialism of criminal law scholarship and doctrine is giving way to a broad exploration of the foundations of modern criminal law. The present book advances this promising scholarly and doctrinal project by making available key texts, including several not previously available in English translation, from the common law and civil law traditions, accompanied by contributions from leading representatives of both systems.

In The Dual Penal State, Markus Dubber addresses the rampant use of penal power in Western liberal democracies. The interference with the autonomy of the very persons upon whose autonomy the legitimacy of state power is supposed to rest is systemically normalized, rather than continuously scrutinized. The fundamental challenge of the penal paradox-the prima facie illegitimacy of modern punishment-remains unaddressed and unresolved. Focusing on the United States and Germany, and drawing on his influential account of the patriarchal origins of police power, Dubber exposes the persistence of a two-sided criminal justice regime: the dual penal state. The dual penal state combines principled punishment of equals under the rule of law, on one side, with punitive discipline of others under the rule of police, on the other. Slavery has long played a central role in drawing the line between the two sides of the dual penal state. In Europe, the slave appears in the classic and still foundational accounts of liberal punishment (from Beccaria to Kant) as the paradigmatic other beyond the protection of law, not a legal subject but a mere object of the master's or the state's discretionary discipline. In America, the patriarchal power to police portrays the continuum from the antebellum slaveholder's whipping of his slaves in private and the racial terror perpetrated by slave patrols in public, to the apartheid regime of Jim Crow and the treatment of prisoners as "slaves of the state," and eventually to the late 20th century's systemic racial violence of the “war on crime" and the widespread killing of Black suspects by an increasingly militarized and armed police force that triggered the global Black Lives Matter movement.

A comparative and collaborative study of the foundational principles and concepts that underpin different domestic systems of criminal law.

Modern Criminal Law of Australia is a guide to interpreting and understanding statutory offence provisions in every Australian jurisdiction. It covers the common law, traditional code and model code systems, and includes examples from all states. This unique book provides students with the skills to practise law anywhere in Australia.

This book provides a clear, concise and highly accessible overview of the key aspects of criminal law doctrine as it applies in England and Wales. The content has been revised and updated, reflecting the constantly evolving nature of the subject.