Approaching or Re-thinking the Realm of Criminal Law?

Abstract

In his latest monograph, The Realm of Criminal Law, Antony Duff gives us a further, magisterial statement of the vision of criminal law, its procedural framework, and its sanctioning system, which he has been developing over the past 35 years. This is Duff’s own book-length contribution to the tremendously fruitful collaborative Criminalization project. That project has already generated four edited volumes (Duff et al. in The boundaries of the criminal law, 2010; The structures of the criminal law, 2011; The constitution of the criminal law, 2013; Criminalization: the political morality of the criminal law, 2014) and two fine monographs by Farmer (Making the modern criminal law: criminalization and civil order, 2016) and Tadros (Wrongs and crimes, 2016; see also Tadros in The ends of harm: the moral foundations of criminal law, 2011). It will shape the field for decades to come; and it has decisively laid to rest a longstanding puzzle about why, within criminal law theory, the principles underlying criminalisation had received relatively little attention as compared with those underlying, most obviously, criminal responsibility (cf. Lacey in Frontiers of criminality, 1995).

Methodology of The Initial Stage of The Preparation of The Master’s Thesis on Criminal Law

“…relevant for the present time. This may be proved by several factors of a legal nature related to the trends in the state's criminal policy [10]. This may be a clear desire to reduce the number of people convicted for crimes of small or medium gravity or to avoid further and significant material losses, to weaken criminal repression in certain categories of cases or to increase responsibility for the most dangerous criminal offenses, to increase the opportunities for law enforcers to be relieved of criminal liability or to make wider use of the exemption from punishment, etc.…”

Exorcism and children: balancing protection and autonomy in the legal framework

“…All of these areas involve navigating treacherous moral straits in terms of introducing legal sanctions that may disproportionately affect minority communities and imposing majority norms into the private sphere, in addition to raising practical questions as to whether the weight and stigma of hard law are counter-productive when it comes to enabling victims to seek help and protection. Furthermore, where criminal provisions are proposed, there are also links with wider controversies around the impact of criminalisation, as the work of authors such as Lacey (2020) has revealed.…”