Criminal Codification: Between ‘Justice’ and ‘Good Government’

Legal codification has been generally treated as a historical process that, despite having older intellectual and institutional roots, began in the mid-eighteenth century and extended over the first few decades of the nineteenth century. It is not possible, nor particularly useful here, to enter into an analysis of the many subtleties of a process embracing a great many countries in Europe and America, a considerable variety of religious and philosophical backgrounds and just as many political, institutional and social settings. Nonetheless, it is important to summarize some of the crucial aspects of criminal codification as a historical process. First of all, legal codes, in the sense of ensembles of unitary and systematic norms exhausting all the juridical relations considered to form a given juridical field, are a historical novelty of the nineteenth century and can be distinguished from other types of law compilations. Codification had thus, from its very onset, a properly formal, or technical, side: it pursued an ideal of systematic unity and coherence. It implied the formulation of economic criteria in the organization of the law, a labour that had its theoreticians and supporters in England and in a few countries of Continental Europe. In sum, the form of the code must be understood within a simultaneously scientific and political enterprise.