What Counts as Progress in Criminal Law Scholarship?

Abstract

The article discusses what should be considered as ‘progress’ in criminal law scholarship, as a legal scholarly discipline. What is considered progress depends on one’s ideas about the aim(s) of a scholarly discipline and how it should develop to better achieve that aim. Criminal law scholarship is, for its part, characterized by its study of positive criminal law from a knowledge point of view, one that puts criminal law scholarship in close contact with the philosophy of criminal law. At the same time, positive criminal law must be subjected to this perspective. As such, while criminal law scholarship may progress in many ways, the article claims particular importance to what is called ‘theoretical integration’. This refers to the operation of bringing aspects of positive law into the knowledge perspective of criminal law scholarship, to subject it to study. The article exemplifies the value of doing so by three works from contemporary criminal law scholarship.