Online research in philosophy

The Grammar of Criminal Law is a 3-volume work that addresses the field of international and comparative criminal law, with its primary focus on the issues of international concern, ranging from genocide, to domestic efforts to combat terrorism, to torture, and to other international crimes. The first volume is devoted to foundational issues. The Grammar of Criminal Law is unique in its systematic emphasis on the relationship between language and legal theory; there is no comparable comparative study of legal language. Written in the spirit of Fletcher's classic Rethinking Criminal Law, this work is essential reading in the field of international and comparative law.

This paper describes and analyses Indonesia's Anti-terrorism Law of 2002. It provides a brief background to the law’s enactment, the crimes it defines, and compares the law with pre-existing provisions of Indonesia’s Criminal Code that had been applied against those accused of terrorism before 2002. The paper focuses on the special procedural rules on evidence, arrest and detention provided by the Anti-terrorism Law for use in terrorism cases.

Topics covered in this volume include the question of criminalization and the proper scope of the criminal law; the grounds of criminal responsibility; the ways ...

After an initial discussion (§i) of what a theory of criminal law might amount to, I sketch (§ii) the proper aims of a liberal, republican criminal law, and discuss (§§iii–iv) two central features of such a criminal law: that it deals with public wrongs, and provides for those who perpetrate such wrongs to be called to public account. §v explains why a liberal republic should maintain such a system of criminal law, and §vi tackles the issue of criminalization—of how we should determine the proper scope of the criminal law.

I take it as obvious that attempts to justify the criminal law must be sensitive to matters of criminalization—to what conduct is proscribed or permitted. I discuss three additional matters that should be addressed in order to justify the criminal law. First, we must have a rough idea of what degree of deviation is tolerable between the set of criminal laws we ought to have and the set we really have. Second, we need information about how the criminal law at any given time and place is administered, since the law in action is bound to differ radically from the law on the books. Finally, we must have some basis for speculating what life would be like in the absence of a system of criminal justice—if the state ceased to impose punishments.

I provide a brief history of the common law governing the criminal liability of intoxicated offenders, and the codification and application of the intoxication rules in Canada. I argue that the common law and its statutory application in Canada violate a number of principles of criminal justice. I then argue that the rules cannot be saved by attempts to subsume them under principles of prior fault. I end with a modest proposal for law reform.

I begin by discussing the ways in which a would-be blamer's own prior conduct towards the person he seeks to blame can undermine his standing to blame her (to call her to account for her wrongdoing). This provides the basis for an examination of a particular kind of 'bar to trial' in the criminal law – of ways in which a state or a polity's right to put a defendant on trial can be undermined by the prior misconduct of the state or its officials. The examination of this often neglected legal phenomenon illuminates some central features of the criminal law and the criminal process, and some of the preconditions for the legitimacy of the criminal law in a liberal republic.

There are several reasonable conceptions of liberalism. A liberal polity can survive a measure of disagreement over just what constitutes liberalism. In part, this is because of the way a liberal order makes possible a dynamic, heterogeneous civil society and how that, in turn, can supply participants with reasons to support a liberal political order. Despite the different conceptions of justice associated with different conceptions of liberalism, there are reasons to distinguish the normative focus of criminal justice from other aspects of justice in a liberal polity. Given the fundamental commitments of liberalism?of whatever variant?there are reasons for criminal justice not to be assimilated to wider conceptions of justice overall. Such assimilation risks undermining some of liberalism's distinctive commitments concerning the standing of individuals as voluntary, responsible agents. Criminal justice is not independent of other aspects of justice but has a distinct focus in a liberal polity.