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The Historical Analysis of Criminal Codes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Markus Dirk Dubber
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Extract

Students of Anglo-American criminal law, historians included, have traditionally had very little to say about criminal codes. This omission is startling in the face of ongoing efforts to codify criminal law since the late eighteenth century, not only in England and the United States, but also in Canada and India. The only historical study of criminal codification in the United States is a survey article that is, strictly speaking, not about codification at all, but about the great men who made codification possible, in particular the forefathers of Herbert Wechsler, the main drafter of the Model Penal Code. The Model Penal Code itself gave no clues as to its historical antecedents, if any. It is regarded, and portrayed itself, as having invented the wheel by starting from scratch, the raw material of the common law.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Summer 2000 , pp. 433 - 440
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2000

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References

1. Kadish, Sanford H., “Codifiers of the Criminal Law: Wechsler's Predecessors,” Columbia Law Review 78 (1978): 1098.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. See, e.g., Smith, K. J. M., Lawyers, Legislators, and Theorists: Developments in English Criminal Jurisprudence, 1800–1957 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Farmer, Lindsay, “Reconstructing the English Codification Debate: The Criminal Law Commissioners, 1833–1845,” Law and History Review 18 (2000): 397–425, 399.Google Scholar

4. I read Farmer's essay as an example of what I have called the historical analysis of law. See Dubber, Markus Dirk, “Historical Analysis of Law,” Law and History Review 16 (1998): 159–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Farmer uses the term “historical jurisprudence,” which may suggest unwelcome and unintended connections to Savigny (“Reconstructing the English Codification Debate,” 401).

5. Farmer, “Reconstructing the English Codification Debate,” 400.

6. For a provocative exploration of this issue in German criminal law, see Naucke, Wolfgang, “Vom Vordringen des Polizeigedankens im Recht, d.i.: vom Ende der Metaphysik im Recht,” in Recht, Gericht, Genossenschaft und Policey: Studien zu Gundbegriffen der germanistischen Rechtshistorie, ed. Dilcher, Gerhard and Diestelkamp, Bernhard (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1986), 177–87.Google Scholar

7. Farmer, “Reconstructing the English Codification Debate,” 425.

8. Ibid., 423–24.

9. Ibid., 409.

10. Ibid., 410.

11. Ibid., 411.

12. Ibid., 410.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 423.

15. See, generally, Binding, Karl, Die Normen und ihre Übertretung, 4th ed. (1872; Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1922), vol. 1Google Scholar; on Binding's views on retroactivity, see Schreiber, Hans-Ludwig, Gesetz und Richter: Zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Satzes nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (Frankfurt a.M.: Alfred Metzner, 1976), 169 and following.Google Scholar

16. Farmer, “Reconstructing the English Codification Debate,” 410.

17. See Dicey, A. V., Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 10th ed. (1885; London: Macmillan, 1965), chap. 12Google Scholar (“Rule of Law Compared with droit administratif”).

18. For recent discussions of this topic in the U.S. and in Germany, see Dan-Cohen, Meir, “Decision Rules and Conduct Rules: On Acoustic Separation in Criminal Law,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1984): 625CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schmidhäuser, Eberhard, Form und Gehalt der Strafgesetze (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988)Google Scholar; Herster, Norbert, “Das Adressatenproblem im Strafrecht und die Sozialmoral,” Juristenzeitung (1989): 10.Google Scholar

19. The German experiment with the jury was abandoned in 1924. Today, lay participation on German mixed courts is a (disappearing) practice in search of a rationale. See Dubber, Markus Dirk, “The German Jury and the Metaphysical Volk: From Romantic Idealism to Nazi Ideology,” American Journal of Comparative Law 43 (1995): 227–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar