Criminal Law Reform: Continental Europe - From Enlightenment To The Rehabilitative Ideal: Early Reform Efforts, Criminal Law Reform In Continental Europe
system aspects comparative
Creating a rational criminal law system has since the eighteenth century been an important issue of public policy on the European continent. In the course of time, the focus of reformers shifted from rationalization of existing legislation to more efficient crime control and prevention.
Additional Topics
The radical intellectual renewal in eighteenth-century Europe known as the Enlightenment provided the cause of legal reform with its essential political and philosophical principles: the rule of law, reason, liberty, and humanitarianism. In France, Montesquieu advocated the separation of powers in order to preserve judicial independence from the executive; punishment was to correspond to the gravi…
Several European countries have reformed their criminal laws since the 1970s. Many of the recently enacted codes, most notably those of Austria, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, share certain tendencies: in the general part, they tend to introduce differentiated rules on criminal responsibility (e.g., distinction among various forms of perpetratorship and accessorial liability, recogn…
The process of European unification, which started after World War II and reached new dimensions after the end of the political partition of the continent in the 1990s, has extended to criminal law, though not as extensively as to private law. The Council of Europe, of which almost all European states are members, has played an important role in setting common standards for
criminal justice and…
American Friends Service Committee. Struggle for Justice: A Report on Crime and Punishment in America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1971. Association of American Law Schools. "Symposium: The New German Penal Code." Foreword by J. Hall and W. J. Wagner. American Journal of Comparative Law 24 (1976): 589–778. Schweizer Kriminalistische Gesellschaft. "Vernehmlassung zur Totalr…
Citing this material
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments
about 5 years ago
An examination of exonerations of innocent defendants falsely convicted in North America and England finds a preponderance of cases involving police\prosecution misconduct. Theory predicts that the adversarial system should produce more such "win at any cost" behavior. Is there any data of exonerations of the innocent from continental Europe?