This book intends to contribute to the consolidation of the new approach to lawmaking that has taken place in the last 20 years in legal philosophy and legal theory, spreading to other legal fields, especially criminal law. This new legislation science focusing on criminal problems has triggered a growing interest in the field, a dynamic which has led to a long-needed convergence of disciplines such as administrative law, criminal law, criminology, political science, sociology and, of course, legal philosophy to contribute to a more rational decision-making process for the construct of criminal laws. With the intention to continue on with the building of a solid “Criminal Legislation Science”, this work presents scholars, lawmakers and students various emblematic approaches to enrich the discussion about different and promising tools and theoretical frameworks.

In Judges and the Making of International Criminal Law Joseph Powderly explores the role of judicial creativity in the progressive development of international criminal law. This wide-ranging work unpacks the nature and contours of the international criminal judicial function.

This book shows how to reduce out-of-control criminal justice and create greater public safety, justice, and accountability at less cost.

" . . . a distinct, broad, but compelling framework for examining a variety of laws and social policies." —Legal Studies Forum " . . . a very rich volume that has something to offer to many different tastes . . . an excellent companion to the main textbook in a large undergraduate law-and-society course." —Contemporary Sociology No issue has captured the imagination of social scientists and legal scholars more consistently than the creation of laws. The political implications of the study of law and society often create ideological diatribes with little attention to empirical detail. In this book, legal scholars, sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists join in an attempt to develop and refine a structural theory of law.

Making Crime Pay is an invaluable reference to criminal law, evidence, and procedure and the potential it holds for breathtaking plots and dramatic storytelling. Readers will learn in detail how criminal law has evolved historically, discover the differences between crimes and how they are judged in the eyes of the law, and understand law's mechanisms and loopholes from the first thought of a crime to the offender's arrest and trial.

The United States today suffers from too much criminal law and too much punishment. Husak describes the phenomena in some detail and explores their relation, and why these trends produce massive injustice. His primary goal is to defend a set of constraints that limit the authority of states to enact and enforce penal offenses. The book urges the weight and relevance of this topic in the real world, and notes that most Anglo-American legal philosophers have neglected it. Husak's secondary goal is to situate this endeavor in criminal theory as traditionally construed. He argues that many of the resources to reduce the size and scope of the criminal law can be derived from within the criminal law itself-even though these resources have not been used explicitly for this purpose. Additional constraints emerge from a political view about the conditions under which important rights such as the right implicated by punishment-may be infringed. When conjoined, these constraints produce what Husak calls a minimalist theory of criminal liability. Husak applies these constraints to a handful of examples-most notably, to the justifiability of drug proscriptions.