Abstract

In modern criminal law, the emphasis on human behaviour implies that only natural persons are punished and not aggregates of persons or goods, irrespective of whether these have a legal personality or not. The punishment of communities was controversial in the Ancien Regime criminal doctrine. The criminal law of the Ancien Regime did not only treat acts of commission and acts of omission. It also devoted a lot of attention to a number of criminal acts which called acts of commission by omission. Under the influence of Christian moral theory, criminal law has, since the late Middle Ages, mainly been based on the concept of guilt, which means that Belgian criminal law only imposes a punishment when the offender is guilty and that this punishment depends first and foremost on the degree of guilt. When dealing with completed attempts, modern legal doctrine differentiates between failed offences and impossible offences.Keywords: Ancien Regime criminal doctrine; Belgian criminal law; Christian moral theory; legal personality; modern criminal law; modern legal doctrine

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