Principles of German Criminal Law (Studies in International and Comparative Criminal Law)

Description

German criminal law doctrine — as one of the more influential over time and on a global scale — takes rather different approaches to many of the problems of substantive law when compared with those of the common law family of countries like the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, etc. German criminal law doctrine also differs markedly from the system which is most often used in Anglophone writing as a civil law comparison — the French law. German criminal law is a code-based model and has been for centuries. The influence of academic writing on its development has been far greater than in the judge-oriented common law models. This book will serve as a useful aid to debates about codification efforts in countries that are mostly based on a case law system, but wish to re-structure their law in one or several criminal codes. The comparison will show that similar problems occur in all legal systems regardless of their provenance, and the attempts of individual systems at solving them — their successes and their failures — can provide a rich experience from which other countries can draw and build upon. The book provides an outline of the principles of German criminal law, mainly the so-called 'General Part' (e.g. actus reus, mens rea, defenses, participation) and the core offense categories (e.g. homicide, offenses against property, sexual offenses). It sets out the principles and their development under the influence of academic writing and judicial decisions. Wherever it is apt and feasible, comparison is offered to the approaches of English criminal law and the legal systems of other common and civil law countries in order to allow common lawyers to draw the pertinent parallels to their own jurisdictions.