Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Explanatory Note on Spelling
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Legality in Criminal Law, Its Purposes, and Its Competitors
- 2 A Partial History to World War II
- 3 Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Other Postwar Cases
- 4 Modern Development of International Human Rights Law: Practice Involving Multilateral Treaties and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- 5 Modern Comparative Law Development: National Provisions Concerning Legality
- 6 Legality in the Modern International and Internationalized Criminal Courts and in the UN Trust Territories
- 7 Legality in Customary International Law Today
- Conclusion: The Endurance of Legality in National and International Criminal Law
- Appendix A Chart of Non-retroactivity Provisions in Criminal Law by Nations
- Appendix B Legality and Non-retroactivity Provisions as of 1946–47
- Appendix C Constitutional and Other National Provisions Implementing the Principle of Legality Today
- Bibliography
- Table of Authorities
- Index
- Afterword and Update
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW
- References
2 - A Partial History to World War II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Explanatory Note on Spelling
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Legality in Criminal Law, Its Purposes, and Its Competitors
- 2 A Partial History to World War II
- 3 Nuremberg, Tokyo, and Other Postwar Cases
- 4 Modern Development of International Human Rights Law: Practice Involving Multilateral Treaties and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- 5 Modern Comparative Law Development: National Provisions Concerning Legality
- 6 Legality in the Modern International and Internationalized Criminal Courts and in the UN Trust Territories
- 7 Legality in Customary International Law Today
- Conclusion: The Endurance of Legality in National and International Criminal Law
- Appendix A Chart of Non-retroactivity Provisions in Criminal Law by Nations
- Appendix B Legality and Non-retroactivity Provisions as of 1946–47
- Appendix C Constitutional and Other National Provisions Implementing the Principle of Legality Today
- Bibliography
- Table of Authorities
- Index
- Afterword and Update
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW
- References
Summary
The principle of legality has a long and checkered history in Western and other systems of jurisprudence. It appears in some form in many legal systems but also was subject to many exceptions and violations in those systems. For example, various implementations of legality, in both the criminal and non-criminal law, appeared in Justinian's compilations of laws. One of the most famous sections of the Magna Carta guarantees that no free man should be deprived of liberty, property, protection of the laws, or life, except according to law. This has been read by moderns as an embodiment of the principle of legality, in the sense of prohibiting retroactive criminalization or punishment. However, it is unclear whether it would have been understood to mean that the substantive law must have been proclaimed in advance of the criminal act or merely that the procedural law must be obeyed, or something of both. Indeed, as with many provisions of documents or statements of general principle from many ages that we moderns would call “open texture[d],” it is not clear that there would have been consensus at the time, if anyone had asked the question.
OVERVIEW
Civil Law and Common Law
Conventional wisdom, which is often conventional because it has a great deal of support in the evidence, credits the Enlightenment and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century positivism for the growth and spread of the principle of legality into a fundamental element of criminal law in many nations worldwide.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
References
, Per Iudicium Parium vel per Legem Terrae, in Magna Carta Commemoration Essays 96, 103 (The Lawbook Exchange 2005) ( ed., Royal Historical Society 1917) (“phrase ‘lex terrae’ suggests…many varieties of law and procedure”)Google Scholar
, Interpretation of the Charter in the Political Organs of the United Nations, in Law, State, and International Legal Order: Essays in Honor of Hans Kelsen 270, 274 ( ed., Univ. of Tennessee Press 1964)Google Scholar
, No Establishment of Religion: The Original Understanding, in Judgments: Essays on American Constitutional History 169 (Quadrangle Books 1972).Google Scholar
, Crimes Against Humanity in International Criminal Law 127 (2d rev. ed., Kluwer Law Int'l 1999).Google Scholar
, L'Espirit des Lois (1748)
, On Crimes and Punishments (Dei Delitti e delle Pene)13–20 ( trans., Macmillan Publishing 1963) (1764) (chaps. 3–4)Google Scholar
, Commentaries *46 (1765)
, Lehrbuch des gemeinen in Deutschland geltenden Peinlichen Rechts, ¶ 24, p. 20 (Georg Friedrich Heyer 1801).Google Scholar
, Extraterritorial Jurisdiction, in 2 International Criminal Law 33, 93 n.328 (, ed., 2d ed., Transnational Publishers 1999)Google Scholar
, The Law of Nations: Or the Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (Pomeroy trans., 1805)Google Scholar
, La méthode d'interpretation en droit international pénal, 9 Revista Italiana di Diritto e Procedura Penale 757, 762–64 (1966).Google Scholar
Documents of American History 107, 109 (, ed., 4th ed., Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948).
, Understanding Criminal Law591–614 (4th ed., LexisNexis 2006) (discussing common law and statutory development of larceny and related doctrines).Google Scholar
, Pains and Penalties Procedure: How the House of Lords ‘Tried’ Queen Caroline, in 2 Domestic and international trials, 1700–2000: The Trial in History, volume II 54, 57 (Manchester Univ. Press 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae 22 (, ed.; reprint, trans., Harvard Univ. Press 1968)Google Scholar
, The Boundaries of Meaning and the Formation of Law: Legal Concepts and Reasoning in the English, Arabic, and Chinese Traditions124–25 (McGill-Queen's Univ. Press 2006).Google Scholar
, Will the Judgment in the Nuremberg Trial Constitute a Precedent in International Law?, 1 Int'l L.Q. 153, 164–65 (1947)Google Scholar
, The Legality Principle of Crimes and Punishments in the Iranian Legal System, 5 Global Jurist Topics 9 (2005)Google Scholar
, The Principle of Legality and Its Application in Islamic Criminal Justice, in The Islamic Criminal Justice System 149, 158–59 ( ed., Oceana Publications 1982)Google Scholar
, On Islamic Punishment, in Understanding Islamic Law: From Classical to Contemporary 43, 51 (AltaMira Press 2006) (footnote omitted)Google Scholar
, The Muezzin's Call and the Dow Jones Bell: On the Necessity of Realism in the Study of Islamic Law, 56:2Am. J. Comp. L. (forthcoming)
The Great Qing Code art. 44, p. 74 ( trans., Clarendon Press 1994)
, An International Criminal Court: A Step towards World Peace: A Documentary History and Analysis (Half a Century of Hope) 36–65 (Oceana 1980)Google Scholar
, & , War Crimes and War Crime Trials: From Leipzig to the ICC and Beyond: Cases, Materials and Comments 37 (Carolina Academic Press 2006).Google Scholar
, Jurisdiction to Adjudicate and Jurisdiction to Prescribe in International Criminal Courts, 48 Villanova L. Rev. 763, 774–75 (2003)Google Scholar
, Le procès de Nuremberg devant les principes modernes du droit pénal international, 70(I) Recueil des Cours 477, 574 (1947).Google Scholar
, Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide: The Twentieth-Century Experience 22 (Univ. Press of Kansas 1999).Google Scholar
, Genocide, Crimes against Humanity, War Crimes: Nullum Crimen Sine Lege and the Subject Matter Jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court ¶ 76, p. 86 (Intersentia 2002).Google Scholar
& , The Soviet Legal System: Post-Stalin Documentation and Historical Commentary, I–4 & n.3 (Oceana Publications 1962)Google Scholar
, Gesetz und Richter: Zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Satzes “nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege” 198 (Metzner 1976).Google Scholar
, International Legal Argument in the Permanent Court of International Justice: The Rise of the International Judiciary 360 (Cambridge Univ. Press 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Courts, Lawyers and Trials under the Last Three Tsars 36 (Greenwood Press 1974) (Frederick A. Praeger 1953)Google Scholar
, The Impact of the Penal Law of Imperial Russia on Soviet Penal Law, 12 Am. Slavic & E. European Rev. 441 (1953).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Law, in Selected Writings on Soviet Law and Marxism 143, 153 (, & trans. & eds., M. E. Sharpe 1988).Google Scholar