Abstract
The Model Criminal Code (MCC) was intended to be a Code for all Australian jurisdictions. It represents a high point of faith in the value and possibility of systematising, rationalising and modernising criminal law. The core of the MCC is Chapter 2, the ‘general principles of criminal responsibility’, which outlines the ‘physical’ and ‘fault’ elements of criminal offences, and defines concepts such as recklessness. This paper assesses the MCC as a criminal law reform project and explores questions of how the MCC came into being, and why it took shape in certain ways at a particular point in time. The paper tackles these questions from two different perspectives—‘external’ and ‘internal’ (looking at the MCC from the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’). I make two main arguments. First, I argue that, driven by a ‘top down’ law reform process, the MCC came into being at a time when changes in crime and criminal justice were occurring, and that it may be understood as an attempt to achieve stability in a time of change. Second, I argue that the significance of the principles of criminal responsibility, which formed the central pivot of the MCC, lies on the conceptual level—in relation to the language through which the criminal law is thought about, organised and reformed.
Highlights
The Commonwealth Model Criminal Code (MCC) (Parliamentary Counsel’s Committee 2009), which was developed in the early 1990s, signalled a particular ‘moment’ in the history of Australian criminal law
I argue that the significance of the principles of criminal responsibility, which formed the central pivot of the MCC, lies in the coherence these principles provided on a conceptual level, in relation to the language through which the criminal law is thought about, organised and reformed
The MCC—the content of which had been so thoroughly discussed at state and Commonwealth level in the drafting process that the Bill was considered ‘remarkably uncontentious’ (Williams 1995: 1348)—facilitated cooperation between the states and territories and the Commonwealth
Summary
The Commonwealth Model Criminal Code (MCC) (Parliamentary Counsel’s Committee 2009), which was developed in the early 1990s, signalled a particular ‘moment’ in the history of Australian criminal law. By modelling ‘best practice’ in criminal law (Goode 2004: 234), the MCC aimed to bring Australia’s nine criminal jurisdictions—six state governments, two territory governments and the federal government—into some sort of alignment. As I argue in this paper, the significance of the MCC as a law reform project lies on the conceptual level, in the language through which the criminal law is understood. This paper assesses the MCC as a criminal law reform project and explores questions of how the MCC came into being, and why it took shape in certain ways at a particular time. I argue that the significance of the principles of criminal responsibility, which formed the central pivot of the MCC, lies in the coherence these principles provided on a conceptual level, in relation to the language through which the criminal law is thought about, organised and reformed. I conclude with a brief discussion of developments in relation to the MCC post‐enactment, in 1995, as The Commonwealth Criminal Code
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