The History of Criminal Law, Crime and Criminal Justice
Research Field
This Special Research Field includes issues and questions concerning the history of criminal law and approaches to the historical research of criminality. The development of penal law and the attendant juristic discourse is a central topic, and it is explored from the perspectives of conflict management, multinormativity, the representation of crime and justice in popular media and the delineation of expert knowledge in criminology and criminalistics.
Legal practice is the primary research interest, which ranges from case studies on deviance and crime as well as analyses of particular criminal proceedings to decision-making and punitive practices, especially the purposes of criminal justice and conflict management. This also implies that infra-judicial contexts and extra-judicial means of dispute resolution are integrated.
Thematically, the individual research projects focus on the history of political crime and the responses of legal systems, the formation of transnational criminal law regimes in the 18th and 19th centuries and the development of criminal justice during the transition from European ius commune to national criminal law. The regulation of political conflict and political crime during the transitional period from 1750 to 1850 is an overarching theme.
A summary, general introduction to the methods of the field of research is given by the volume:
Karl Härter, Strafrechts- und Kriminalitätsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit
Research perspectives are developed in:
