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.

Critics of corporate criminal liability argue that federal criminal law is far too broad, sanctions are imposed without fault, federal sentences are too harsh, and, finally, that federal prosecutors have too much power. This article makes two points about these critiques. First, although there is merit to each of these arguments, they cannot be limited to corporate criminal liability. Rather, critics of corporate criminal are exposing problems that are endemic to the federal criminal justice system. Indeed, these criticisms apply with even more force to other kinds of federal prosecutions, including those involving federal drug and firearms offenses.Second, reforming corporate criminal liability should not take priority over more general reform of federal criminal justice. Defendants in corporate and white collar crime cases are better equipped to challenge deficiencies in the system with elite legal counsel or by raising public awareness. Moreover, corporations hold great power in modern America and increasingly engage in socially harmful behavior. The law should not provide unique leniency to white collar and corporate defendants, but must in fact seek new ways to restrain corporate misconduct.

We re-examine the relationship between coordination, legal sanctions, and free-riding in light of the recent controversy regarding the applicability of the coordination problem paradigm of law-making. We argue that legal sanctions can help solve coordination problems by eliminating socially suboptimal equilibrium outcomes. Once coordination has taken place, however, free-riding can not lead to the breakdown of coordination outcomes, even if sanctions may still be effective at increasing the equity of such outcomes. Finally, we argue that it is the choice of a legal or constitutional system rather than the choice of law that is paradigmatic of the coordination problem. This view requires a re-assessment of the normative status of sanctions attached to individual laws.

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.

Criminal sanctions work to reduce crime in a variety of ways. In a simple economic sense, legal sanctions raise the cost of criminal conduct. Expressive law scholars have shown that the criminal law can help to reduce crimes in other ways as well - by shaping preferences, changing social meanings, and encouraging non-legal sanctions. Lawmakers rely on these mechanisms when they attempt to use criminal laws to change behavior. But lawmakers and scholars alike should keep in mind that the expressive function of criminal law does not always work as intended. In order to illustrate that point, this article examines street culture's reaction to criminal drug policy. The first section describes street ideology and the social meaning of crack dealing and marijuana use. It relies not only on recent academic work in the fields of sociology and history, but also on a variety of primary sources, including music, movies, magazines, poetry, and memoirs. These sources demonstrate that in street culture, drug policy has utterly failed to produce its intended social norms. In fact, if anything, criminal drug policy has helped to create a system of norms and meanings that undermine the state's goal. The second section lays a foundation in theoretical sociology for the argument that expressive criminal law can fail. It draws on several concepts, including strain theory, differential association, and labeling theory, from canonical sociological texts. The third section examines implications for recent law and norms scholarship. Finally, and most provocatively, the article questions whether criminal law's production of oppositional cultures is truly a failure or simply part of its intended function.

Recent years have seen mounting challenge to the model of the criminal trial on the grounds it is not cost-effective, not preventive, not necessary, not appropriate, or not effective. These challenges have led to changes in the scope of the criminal law, in criminal procedure, and in the nature and use of criminal trials. These changes include greater use of diversion, of fixed penalties, of summary trials, of hybrid civil–criminal processes, of strict liability, of incentives to plead guilty, and of preventive orders. The paper will assess the implications of these changes for the function of the criminal law, assessing the reasons behind them, and examining whether or not they are to be welcomed. Identifying the larger import of these changes draws attention to the changing relationship between state and citizen as well as changes in the nature of the state itself. These can in turn be attributed to a jostling among the different manifestations of the authoritarian state, the preventive state, and the regulatory state. These changes have profound normative implications for a liberal theory of the criminal law that require its re-articulation and its defence. A modest start may be to insist that where the conduct is criminal and the consequences are punitive the protections of criminal procedure and trial must be upheld.