Treatise on Comparative Criminal Law. Toward a Post-National Criminal Law?

Commentary

This text runs counter to a teaching tradition that still presents criminal law as a finished national edifice. It starts from the major schools of penal thought to show that territoriality, the pillar of modern criminal law, is no longer enough when crime plays out across several continents and in digital space.

Key takeaways

1. A preliminary part on the major schools of penal thought, with one lesson: be wary of systems that claim to explain everything.
2. A diagnosis: the structural crisis of a criminal law built on territorial sovereignty.
3. A journey through comparative positive law and the European criminal law area, backed by ECtHR case law.
4. A thesis: post-national criminal law is not criminal law without the state, but a law in which the state becomes one actor among others within a multi-level framework.

Who this text is for

Students and researchers in criminal law and criminal sciences, judges, lawyers and judicial cooperation practitioners.

Abstract

This treatise departs from a candour rarely found in academic writing: the criminal law we have taught, applied, and relentlessly reformed for two centuries is profoundly ill-adapted to the world we actually inhabit. Built around state territorial sovereignty, it confronts forms of criminality that ignore borders, exploit gaps in international cooperation, and colonise digital space with an agility the law has yet to match. This work is an attempt to think criminal law equal to these transformations — moving from the philosophical foundations of the major penal schools, through comparative positive law and European jurisprudence, toward a thesis: the necessary emergence of a post-national paradigm, grounded not in the disappearance of the state but in the recomposition of its penal sovereignty within a multi-level framework.