Criminal law and criminal justice are becoming increasingly globalised. In open societies, the era in which individual jurisdictions developed their own codes, statutes and systems of justice with no regard to other systems and countries is long over. There is a growing desire to develop common approaches to common problems and to learn from the diversity of current practice in different countries. This development has been reinforced by the internationalisation of criminal justice in international and mixed criminal tribunals. However, attempts at trans-jurisdictional discourse are often hampered by mutual misunderstandings. Some problems are linguistic: although English is the new lingua franca of international and comparative criminal law, not all foundational concepts of criminal law and justice originate in the English-speaking world; some of them are rooted in civil law jurisdictions, such as France, Germany and Italy. The translation of these concepts into English is subject to ambiguity and potential error: the same term may assume different meanings in different legal contexts.

Criminal laws typically contain a wide variety of offences that target dangerous behaviour. Our goal in this chapter is to compare the ways in which German and English criminal law deal with these kinds of offence; to clarify some distinctions that need to be drawn (and that can be discerned, more or less explicitly, in existing laws) if we are to understand the logic and rationale of such offences; and to note some of the normative issues that such offences raise. To that end, we begin (in section II) by distinguishing endangerment offences in a narrower sense from another important category of dangerous conduct without harmful outcome, that is, attempts. If one speaks of endangerment in a wider sense, attempts would fall into this category, but we will limit our analysis to endangerment offences in the narrower sense.

Criminal law and criminal justice are becoming increasingly globalised. In open societies, the era in which individual jurisdictions developed their own codes, statutes and systems of justice with no regard to other systems and countries is long over. There is a growing desire to develop common approaches to common problems and to learn from the diversity of current practice in different countries. This development has been reinforced by the internationalisation of criminal justice in international and mixed criminal tribunals. However, attempts at trans-jurisdictional discourse are often hampered by mutual misunderstanding. Some problems are linguistic: although English is the new lingua franca in international and comparative criminal law, not all foundational concepts of criminal law and justice originate in the English-speaking world; some of them are rooted in civil law jurisdictions, such as France, Germany and Italy. The translation of these concepts into English is thus subject to ambiguity and potential error: the same term may have different meanings in different legal contexts. As a consequence, critical and theoretical discussions too often take place within the different legal traditions rather than between them: Anglo-American scholars talk to each other, as do those taught in Continental European criminal law traditions; too rarely do they engage seriously with each other across these jurisdictional borders.