Scope Of Criminal Law Research Articles

Drugs, Dignity and Danger: Human Dignity as a Constitutional Constraint to Limit Overcriminalization

The American criminal justice system is under tremendous pressures, increasingly collapsing under its heavy weight, thus requiring inevitable change. One notable feature responsible for this broken system is over-criminalization: the scope of criminal law is constantly expanding, making individuals liable to conviction and punishment for an ever-wider range of behaviors. One area where over-criminalization is most notable concerns victimless crimes, namely, individuals who engage in consensual conducts which inflict only harm on themselves but not on third parties, such as prostitution, pornography, sadomasochism, gambling, and most notably, drug crimes. Despite increasing scholarly critique of the continued criminalization of these behaviors, particularly drug offenses, significant limits on the scope of victimless crimes have not yet been adopted. Two features characterizing criminal law account for this: first, in contrast with criminal procedure, constitutional law has not placed any significant limits on substantive criminal law, and second, there is no coherent theory of criminalization that sets clear boundaries between criminal and non-criminal behaviors. This article proposes a constitutional constraint to limit criminalization of victimless crimes, and particularly to alleviate the pressures on the criminal justice system emanating from its continuous “war on drugs. To accomplish this goal, the article explores the concept of human dignity, a fundamental right yet to be invoked in the context of substantive criminal law. The U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence invokes conflicting accounts of human dignity: liberty as dignity, on the one hand, and communitarian virtue as dignity on the other. However, the Court has not yet developed a workable mechanism to reconcile these competing concepts in cases where they directly clash. The article proposes guidelines for balancing these contrasting interests and then applies them to drug crimes, illustrating that adopting such guidelines would result in constraining the scope of substantive criminal law.

Criminal Law Between Public and Private Law

To criminalize something (not someone, ordinarily) means to bring it within the scope of criminal law; in this sense, crime is a legal phenomenon, as is punishment. This means that an account of criminalization needs an account not of crime simpliciter, but of law in general, and of criminal law within it. In this paper, I approach this task equipped with two distinctions, one - between law and police - designed to illuminate the concept of law, and the other - between public and private law - meant to clarify that of criminal law.

The Scope of Criminal Law and Criminal Sanctions: An Economic View and Policy Implications

This paper considers why some harm‐generating activities are controlled by criminal law and criminal sanctions while others are subject to some other mechanism such as civil law, administrative law, regulation or the tax system. It looks at the question from the perspective of the law and economics approach. We seek to identify the comparative benefits of using the criminal law relative to other enforcement mechanisms and – more broadly – why certain specific behaviours are criminalized. The paper argues that an economic approach emphasizing the relative merits of alternative legal instruments for bringing about harm reduction can provide an explanation for a number of recent legal developments. It argues also that the willingness of legislators to combine the use of sanctions traditionally used in one area of the law with sanctions from other areas is more readily explicable in economic terms than in other terms.

The Military and the Criminal Law in Nigeria

Nigeria was under military rule from 1966 to 1979, and from December 1983 to date; it had a short civilian interregnum from 1979 to 1983 during the era of President Shehu Shagari.This rather long period of military administration in Nigeria brought along with it changes in the scope of substantive criminal law as well as procedural changes. This can be partly explained on the ground that the criminal law must react and adjust to societal changes and formulate its own rules to combat them. However, an assessment of the attitude of the military to criminal law might suggest that certain fundamental rules have been sacrificed for despatch.This article is an attempt to highlight the contribution of the military administrations to the development and scope of criminal law in Nigeria. The approach is to examine the various important criminal law enactments of the military era with a view to see their impact, if any, on the hitherto existing rules and system of criminal law.

State punishment: political principles and community values

Nicola Lacey presents a new approach to the question of the moral justification of punishment by the State. She focuses on the theory of punishments in context of other political questions, such as the nature of political obligation and the function and scope of criminal law. Arguing that no convincing set of justifying reasons has so far been produced, she puts forward a theory of punishments which places the values of the community at its centre.