Genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing are terms which in recent years have entered common usage. The worst cases of these crimes seen in the Yugoslav secession conflict and the Rwandan slaughter resulted in attempts by the international legal community to initiate an international mechanism for establishing criminal accountability. In 1998, after many States signed the Rome Statute, it was expected that justice would prevail over state power and impunity be eliminated. However there is a serious question mark over the effectiveness of this process. That is the...

This book provides a leading point of reference in the field of partial defences to murder and with respect to the mental condition defences of loss of control and diminished responsibility in general. The work includes contributions from leading specialists from different jurisdictions. Divided into two parts, the first provides an analysis from the perspective of the UK, looking at particular concerns such as domestic violence, revenge and mixed motive killings, mistaken beliefs. The second part presents a comparative and international view to provide a wider background of how alternative...

Following on from the earlier edited collection, Loss of Control and Diminished Responbility, this book is the first volume in the Substantive Issues in Criminal Law series. It serves as a leading point of reference in the area relating to participation in crime and identifies the need for a consistent approach to the doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of complicity liability. With a section on the UK analysing points of current interest, the book also has a large comparative section dealing with foreign jurisdictions and examines on the basis of a unified research grid how different...

This volume contributes to the codification debate by bringing together research articles which compare and contrast the experience of countries which have a criminal code with those operating a case law system. The articles consider the criticisms that are often made of criminal code systems such as: the implicit restrictions on judicial discretion; the tendency towards inflexibility; the discrepancy that can develop between the theory and the development of the law in practice; and the potential difficulty of a criminal code fitting into a country's domestic socio-legal culture. The...

The law relating to general defences is one of the most important areas in the criminal law, yet the current state of the law in the United Kingdom reveals significant problems in the adoption of a consistent approach to their doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings, as exemplified by a number of recent developments in legislation and case law. A coherent and joined-up approach is still missing. This volume provides an analysis of the main contentious areas in British law, and proposes ways forward for reform. The collection includes contributions from leading experts across various...

In Visions of Sharīʿa Bhojani, De Rooij and Bohlander present the first broad examination of ways in which legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh) within Twelver Shīʿī thought continues to be a forum for vibrant debates regarding the assumptions, epistemology and hermeneutics of Sharīʿa in contemporary Shīʿī thought. Bringing together authoritative voices and emerging scholars, from both ‘traditional’ seminaries and ‘Western’ academies, the distinct critical insider and emic accounts provided develop a novel avenue in Islamic legal studies. Contextualised through reference to the...