Criminal Law Theory

Published in 1963, Theodor W. Adorno’s “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” constituted a timely intervention in the public debate on changing sexual mores in the 1960s. Critiquing repressive bourgeois morality and progressive sexual values alike, the essay suggests that the utopian potential of intimacy is inseparable from the tension sex­u­al­ity… more

The project examines the human rights guarantees of the European Convention on Human Rights, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, and the fundamental rights of the German Grundgesetz as shaped by the respective case law to determine the extent to which they grant victims of crime subjective rights to punishment of the offender. The… more

Can a person be blamed for turning a blind eye to the circumstances of his or her conduct? From a criminal law perspective, the concept of “willful ignorance” (“willful blindness” or “conscious avoidance”) exists – in varying forms and terms – in different jurisdictions. It usually involves individuals deliberately ignoring or avoiding… more

Current Justification and Significance of the Postulate of Non-Judgmental Science more

Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Criminal Liability for Inadvertent Negligence more

Ernst Ferdinand Klein is one of the most prominent figures of the late German Enlightenment. A philosopher, scholar of criminal law, and reformer of the judiciary, he not only played an influential role in shaping academic dis­course in these fields at the end of the 18th century. He also had a lasting impact on forming public opinion on the… more

Max Horkheimer is often overlooked as a legal theorist. Yet his writings contain an original analysis of law, starting from the observation that there is a tension between political power and its legal form. On the one hand, law is a means of domination, instituted for the purpose of reinforcing the rule of some people over others. But on the other… more

What is the relationship between law and morality? Does legal philosophy merely apply general moral principles to particular circumstances that give rise to the need for law and its institutions? Or does law have its own kind of normativity, which cannot be reduced to morality?
In current scholarship, Kant is often cited as holding the latter view… more

The aim of this interdisciplinary research project is to evaluate from today’s per­spective the dispute regarding whether punishment ought to be justified on retrib­u­tive or on preventive grounds – a dispute that has been on­go­ing in Ger­many since the end of the eighteenth century and whose most influential protagonists were Kant, Fichte, and… more

The rise of second-personal or relational conceptions of morality has been one of the most significant devel­op­ments in contemporary ethics in the last 25 years. While many different theories are classified under this label, they generally agree that morality concerns ‘what we owe to each other’ (in Thomas Scanlon’s memorable phrase) and is… more

The aim of the project is to address the issue of rights in criminal law: Who holds and who should hold a right not to be wronged by others? And is it the violation of rights – rather than the causing of harm – that grounds a prima facie reason for criminalization? According to the standard view in criminal law, compliance with criminal-law du­ties… more

In German criminal-law doctrine, deliberate high-risk behavior is strictly di­chot­o­mized as either intentional or neg­li­gent behavior. The border line runs between dolus eventualis (“conditional intent”) and bewusste Fahrlässigkeit (“conscious negligence”), although this is accompanied by problems with regard to proving intent in the trial and… more

For many readers of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s account of punishment is an exemplar of retributivism. However, there have been heterodox voices that associate Hegel’s argument with consequentialist and, more recently, with expressivist justifications of punishment. A growing number of scholars argue that, rather than offering… more

Both the legal and the everyday attribution of responsibility are based on a rationalist, naive psychology that interprets human action as behaviour caused by epistemic and optative states. The different degrees of legal and everyday attributions of responsibility correspond to the possible combinations of different epistemic states (such as… more

Despite the vast literature on rights, duties, responsibility, and punishment, the normative notion of wrong is often dealt with, if at all, as an afterthought. This project aims to challenge the casual attitude towards wrong, wrongs, wronging, wrongfulness, and the like, by looking at the concept through the lens of GWF Hegel’s mature philosophy… more

The criminalization of inadvertent negligence has long been deliberated in Ger­man criminal law scholarship, although the debate seems largely to have come to a standstill in recent dec­ades. Today, most scholars defend the existing crimi­nal­ization by means of a (purely) norm-based allocation of blame. A closer look, however, reveals numerous… more

In German law, mistakes of fact have the effect of excluding intent (Sec. 16 I German Criminal Code, StGB). Thus, if a perpetrator was unaware of a relevant factual circumstance – regardless of whether or not the lack of aware­ness was their own fault – intent cannot be established. This can be unsatisfactory from a criminal policy per­spec­tive… more