Our purpose in this lecture is to deal with certain basic problems of the recent codification and recodification efforts, indicating particularly some of the major sources of their failures.
The Philosophical and Scientific Underpinning of Criminal Legislation: Both the American and the continental European law proceed either from an obsolete image of man or from a false conception of the impact of a given image on the legal issues at stake, especially those involving the ethical, constitutional demands of our times.
Jurists, lawyers and law professors on both sides of the Atlantic are still formulating criminal law issues in terms of the dichotomy of free will versus determinism. At one time, in Germany, legal insanity was defined in terms of “free determination of the will” and when prominent psychiatrists complained that on the basis of their particular discipline it was impossible for them to answer the question of whether a man did or did not possess such self-determination, legislators accommodated them, formulating the relevant question in terms of “capacity to conform to insight into the wrongfulness (or unlawfulness) of the act”.