Science and Reform in Criminal Law

Even a casual glance at legal controls reveals the paramount role of criminal law.For nothing less than liberty and life are at stake as well as basic attitudes which determine whether decency and respect for human beings are realities or mere pretensions.And it may not be superfluous to note, in view of the insensitivity-of leading members of the Bar to the importance of this field, that the criminal law affects all of us, sometimes in ominous ways that disturb and challenge.In the international sphere, the prospect of personal penal liability raises interesting questions, and even more significant are foreign political movements in which criminal law is recast and used as the principal instrument of domination.If we wish to understand what is happening in the world, we must study the criminal law of those countries.In the settled areas of foreign affairs the uniformity of criminal law has long attracted scholarly attention, although we continue to ignore it.Nor do our current studies of foreign and international law draw upon the resources of specialists in criminal lawso departmentalized has modern scholarship become.Yet, as one probes the problems of local, national, foreign, and international criminal law, it becomes clear that common ideas permeate all of these artificially separated branches of a single discipline.Accordingly, for the various reasons indicated above, almost any problem of criminal law is worthy of serious study.But there are times and tides in the development of a discipline which bring certain questions into greater relevancy than others.They are not neces-