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Glanville Williams was an eminent jurist, specialising in criminal law, the publication of whose Criminal Law: The General Part in 1953 transformed scholarly and professional attitudes to its subject. An introductory textbook for students, Learning the Law, published in 1944, has remained in print through several editions. Williams, who held four Chairs in law, including Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London and the Rouse Ball Professorship of English Law at Cambridge, was elected Fellow of the British Academy at the young age of 46. He gave support to the campaigns for the modification of the criminal law of abortion, drafting Bills in 1952, 1961, 1965 and 1966 and advising on the successful one of 1967. Obituary by P. R. Glazebrook.

Nearly fifty years passed between the reform allowing parties to testify in civil cases and the Criminal Evidence Act of 1898 that allowed defendants to testify in criminal cases. This delay was a byproduct of the reform and experimentation that characterized the Victorian legal system’s approach to the possibility of witness deceit. The Act also marks the triumph of cross-examination as the guarantor of veracity in the courtroom. Several highly publicized in which the respectable defendants were accused of scandalous crimes helped drive the Act’s passage.

In 1871, parliamentary opinion in Britain insisted that the criminal law should be strong enough to ensure that those individuals or groups of individuals who chose not to belong to trade unions or take part in strikes would be protected from being coerced, by physical acts, abuse, or personal harassment, into doing so. As a concession to the unions who demanded for the repeal of the law, the government hived off the criminal provisions into a separate bill, enacted in June 1871 as the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA). Such a gesture, however, did not appease the unions, with the rhetoric of the labour laws agitation depicting the CLAA as an oppressive law directed against them. The Home Office sought to remove any criminality that might attach to strikes, or threats of strikes, as a result of extended applications of the law of conspiracy. The most controversial practical aspect of the CLAA concerned its effect upon picketing.

This chapter examines the ruling issued by Sir William Brett in R v Bunn and Others (the gas stokers' case) and its implications for Britain's trade unions and their freedom to strike. Whatever its basis, Brett's ruling has been described as one of the most momentous English court decisions of the nineteenth century. Strikers, whether trade unionists or not, found that a completely unexpected judicial intervention had ‘turned the whole flank of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) of 1871’. A number of new issues were raised by the case: the judge's handling of the trial and his sentence on the gas stokers; the revival of the law of conspiracy in labour cases; the limits of the freedom to strike where the safety of the public was endangered; and the inequality of the Master and Servant Act, whose alteration was now added to repeal of the CLAA in the Trades Union Congress's programme, agreed at Leeds in January 1873.

Robert Lowe, who became secretary of the Home Office of Britain in August 1873, prepared a comprehensive settlement of the Trades Union Congress's (TUC) grievances during his brief tenure by drafting a bill reforming the labour laws. First to be subjected to Lowe's scrutiny was the law of conspiracy; he wanted to confine the offence of conspiracy to its principal useful function, ‘the power to punish a crime where the proof of its commission is defective’. Lowe's approach to the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) was equally sweeping. Lowe's solution was to make the offences enumerated in the CLAA apply generally, rather than only to the circumstance of trade unions and strikes. He also proposed the total repeal of the criminal clauses of the Master and Servant Act.

China’s anti-corruption legislation prohibits both official corruption and commercial bribery. China is a civil law country. It does not have a uniform national anti-corruption law yet, and the relevant anti-corruption legal provisions are mainly in the PRC Criminal Law and the PRC Anti-Unfair Competition Law. In addition to these two key legislations, there are also regulations and judicial interpretations issued by relevant government agencies and Supreme People’s Court to address implementation issues under the law. Since China’s president, Jinping Xi, came to power in 2012, China has launched an anti-corruption campaign. The 19th CCP Congress in 2017 continues to send strong signals to fight against corruption.

This chapter deals with key aspects of the criminal law relating to sexual offences against children. It sets out the legal regime governing statutory rape under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1935; considers the effect of the decision of the Supreme Court in CC v Ireland and analyses the reasoning in that case; presents a description and assessment of the legislative response to CC; and draws conclusions and makes recommendations as to how the law in this area might be improved. The principal conclusion of the chapter is that strict liability should be reinstated as the cornerstone of the criminal law governing statutory rape. It recommends that the Irish Constitution be amended to permit this to happen; but that a legal regime built on the principle of strict liability should be structured so that experimental sexual behaviour between children of comparable age should be excluded from the ambit of a newly configured offence of statutory rape.

This chapter considers the enactment and the implementation of the Prisoners' Counsel Act. The first two sections of this chapter outline the course of the debate and introduce the Criminal Law Commissioners, who produced an important report on full defence by counsel in 1836. The third section considers the main argument of the reformers, which was that full defence by counsel was more conducive to the discovery of the truth than the existing procedure. The final section examines the contribution of the campaign for the amelioration of capital punishment to the success of the Prisoners' Counsel Act and, more generally, the Act's place in the transformation of the criminal law which occurred at this time.

Chapter 9 covers criminal justice in the first two decades after Mao’s death (1977–1996), when Deng Xiaoping was the top leader. With a brief summary of political developments, it outlines the post-Mao legal-judicial reforms as part of the reform and opening policies launched by Deng, including the enactment of the first Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedural Law of the PRC. While the Criminal Code retained Maoist language and influence, such as placing certain offenses in a category of “counterrevolutionary crimes,” the Criminal Procedural Law offered the beginning steps leading to procedural justice. The reforms included construction of a court system, professionalization of judges, and restoration of the legal profession. The chapter also looks at legal responses to reemerging crimes such as prostitution, human trafficking, narcotics trafficking, and pornography.

The book’s final chapter accounts for a 2006 Indian law banning child marriage as well as contemporary feminist dilemmas about lowering the age of sexual consent. This chapter tracks the efforts to reform the law on child marriage to make it easier to enforce. The context of legal changes following the 2012 gang rape of Jyoti Pandey is also explained. The chapter shows how feminists are calling for lowering, rather than raising, the age of consent, out of a recognition that the higher age of consent facilitates social control. The chapter uses the history offered in previous chapters to dissect the complexities of recent laws prohibiting child marriage and altering the age of consent. Ultimately, chapter 7 exposes how presumptions about the vulnerability of the adolescent girl can backfire when too much power is vested in parental hands.

At the Paris Peace Conference, liberal internationalists maintained that the international system could be regulated by a new League of Nations and an international court to settle political disputes. This was not an international criminal court, however. Later, different European jurists adopted that project for liberal and conservative purposes. In 1920 Baron Edouard Descamps proposed a non-permanent international criminal court with jurisdiction over aggressive war and war crimes, but also over “crimes against the international order,” meaning socialist revolution. Romanian jurist Vespasien V. Pella wanted to create an international criminal court to prevent wars of aggression, as well as create a new tool that would allow states to protect themselves against transnational crime, revolutionary socialism, and terrorism. The movement to build the new field of international criminal law in the 1920s had very little success because it was out of step with other legal and political developments in the League and could not resolve jurisdictional conflicts among states. By 1929, criminological jurists had helped write an anti-counterfeiting convention, but they needed a new project that would attract state officials to their grand vision of creating an international legal system based on criminal laws. The rise of new forms of terrorism provided that opportunity.

Chapter 10 continues the survey of criminal justice in 1997–2018. It notes important changes in the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedural Law, including the abolition of class struggle as the guide to criminal justice and “counterrevolutionary” as a criminal category, and the introduction of “harming national security” as a criminal category in the 1997 Criminal Code. Other changes include a series of amendments in recent years to the 1997 Criminal Code and the 1996 Criminal Procedural Law, providing more safeguards of the rights of the accused and reducing the number of capital offenses, and the abolition of the “reeducation through labor” (laojiao) system in 2013. Another area of legal responses to societal changes in the period is prosecution of corrupt party-state officials at high levels. A law-enforcement program called Heavenly Net was launched in early 2015 to capture corrupt officials and white-collar criminals who fled to other countries.

Mass incarceration exists in America on a scale unmatched in global history. America is also the only Western democracy that has not abolished the death penalty; and one of the nations that execute the most prisoners alongside abusive dictatorships like China, North Korea, and Iran. American justice is further characterized by pervasive racial discrimination, the peculiar “War on Drugs,” the dehumanizing treatment of juveniles, and routine use of harmful solitary confinement. Modern America has thus become a systematic human rights violator in criminal law and punishment. It was not always so, as foreigners once saw American justice as enlightened. Harsh justice has not made America particularly safe. It has the highest murder rate and the most gun violence in the West due to extraordinarily lax gun control shaped by die-hard partisans of the Second Amendment and lobbying by the NRA. Criminal justice reform gained more attention after shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and beyond led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, historical root causes behind this dimension of American exceptionalism have been widely overlooked, including systemic racism, populism, anti-intellectualism, market fundamentalism, and religious fundamentalism.

In the third case of “back from the dead,” Zhao Zuohai was arrested for murdering a villager in1998 and convicted in 2002. In 2010, after the “victim” came back alive to the village, a retrial commission organized by the High Court overruled the conviction against Zuohai and released him. Influenced by this wrongful conviction, the “Two Provisions on Criminal Evidence” were issued in June 2010. Against the background of this story, and drawing on the results of a survey of judges, the author discusses issues relating to illegally obtained evidence and calls for a higher standard for evidence collection, examination, and evaluation.

This article takes up the issue of governmental subsidies of the arts, an issue that parallels an examination of governmental restraints on liberty in The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. In the present article, after considering the limited support offered by considerations like rotational justice, it is argued that supporting the arts in part through government funds derived from mandatory taxation is justified on the grounds that it is good to create, maintain, and preserve things of high intrinsic value even when they do not generate benefits. This position is based upon a rejection of the ancient claim that all worthwhile things produce benefits either directly or indirectly for everyone.

This chapter presents an authoritative overview of the political economy of criminal law and procedure, with particular emphasis on Bill Stuntz's critique of the modern American criminal justice system in his paper The Pathological Politics of Criminal Law. It begins with a discussion of Stuntz's views about the political economy of overcriminalization, the pathology of overbroad and “overdeep” criminal laws, and how to return to the rule of law. It then examines the principal-agent problem in criminal law and asks whether more constitutional law is better. The chapter includes comments by some of the nation's top legal scholars from the field of criminal law, tackling topics such as criminal codes, the role of history and sociology in punitive pathology, the political economy of prosecutorial indiscretion, and prosecutor elections and overdepth in criminal codes.

The past three decades have witnessed the gradual evolution of a supranational system of criminal law by the European Union. This is a striking development, since criminal law is an area of great significance for state sovereignty and national identity, whereby EU Member States have developed divergent legal traditions and understandings. Although the Treaty of Rome did not confer any express power on the then European Community (EC) in the field of criminal justice, the European integration process proved that it was difficult to disassociate Community action in the main areas of EC competence, including free movement and the completion of the internal market, from criminal justice policy. Thus, the Maastricht Treaty established a Union competence in the field of Justice and Home Affairs, under the (former) Third Pillar, including judicial and police cooperation in criminal matters. However, decision-making in relation to this took place on the basis of unanimity within the Council, with mere consultation of the European Parliament. With the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, the ‘policy core’ of EU criminal law became more firmly defined, resulting in the adoption of a wide range of framework decisions (e.g. on terrorism, trafficking in human beings, corruption). Importantly,

This chapter, by examining both parliamentary and local elections between 1868 and 1876, demonstrates how working-class candidates could adapt their attitude towards local Liberalism depending on the electoral and organisational context. The ways in which labour used language during these elections, both in the press and when would-be politicians spoke directly to the electorate, to construct its identity in relation to the Liberal party are analysed. The extent to which the failure of working-class candidatesstanding for the Reform League at the 1868 general election prompted labour leaders to reassess their identity in relation to official Liberalism is considered, paying particular attention to the formation of the Labour Representation League. The League's response to the Criminal Law Amendment Act and its strategy at the 1874 general election are analysed in detail, along with a consideration of the ways in which local Liberal associations disabled their candidatures. Key labour figures considered include George Howell and George Odger. The final part of the chapter examines how labour and organised Liberalism interacted during municipal and school board elections.

This chapter explores the contributions of Gary Becker to criminal law and points out its limitations. In Becker’s view, crime ought to be understood as a rational behavior on the part of criminals which is triggered by calculating costs and benefits. Criminal law is a method for crime control; it is a service provided by the government and its provision ought to be efficient. Efficiency dictates that criminal law and criminal law enforcement policy ought to minimize the social costs of crime. The chapter explores the intellectual development of the economic paradigm represented by Becker, presents his main claims, and, last, examines some of the critiques directed against it. The chapter concludes by identifying the reasons for the failure of the economic approach to criminal law to influence the doctrine of criminal law. It establishes that some of the economic premises conflict sharply with the traditional ethos of criminal law.

This chapter explores the debate on unregistered religious marriages. It will fall into three sections. The first part will outline how the unregistered religious marriage issue has arisen in public debate looking at the empirical studies that highlighted the issue and the numerous reviews that have taken place which have highlighted it as a problem and sought to solve it. The second part will then examine and critique a particular reform proposal that has come to the fore: a new criminal offence penalising celebrants. The chapter will conclude with discussion of a high-profile case - the Family Court and Court of Appeal decisions in Akhter v Khan - which highlighted the problem of problem and the lack of legal relief for those in unregistered religious marriage and the need for legislative rather than judicial reform.