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Guided by Ericson’s counter-law analytic, the focus of this paper is how peace bonds erode traditional criminal law principles to govern uncertainty and provide applicants with a “freedom from fear” (Ericson, 2007a). Peace bonds permit the courts to impose a recognizance on anyone likely to cause harm or “personal injury” to a complainant. This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis to answer the question: how and to what extent are peace bonds a form of counter-law? Facilitated by the erosion of traditional criminal law principles and rationalized under a precautionary logic, proving that a complainant is fearful through a peace bond can result in the expansion of the state’s capacity to criminalize and conduct surveillance.

This chapter examines the potential and limitations of criminal law as a policy tool for fighting against the trade in counterfeit goods in Tanzania. It uncovers major challenges involved in tackling the counterfeiting business in Tanzania using criminal law. The chapter shows that counterfeit goods have infiltrated many supply chains in Tanzania. Both law-related and non-law factors drive the counterfeit goods trade. The counterfeiting business affects consumers, traders, the economy and the general society in Tanzania. The counterfeiting business presents serious societal risks during the crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic owing to the possible infiltration of counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the medical supply chain. Criminal law is part of Tanzania's legal embodies for fighting against the counterfeit goods trade. Both law-related and non-law limitations and challenges undermine the efficacy of criminal law in tackling the trade in counterfeit goods in Tanzania. The chapter recommends policy, legal and institutional reforms that will help to augment the efficacy of the anti-counterfeiting legal regime in Tanzania.

Collateral consequences (CCs) of criminal convictions such as disenfranchisement, occupational restrictions, exclusions from public housing, and loss of welfare benefits represent one of the salient yet hidden features of the contemporary American penal state. This chapter explores, from a comparative and historical perspective, the rise of the many indirect “regulatory” sanctions flowing from a conviction and discusses some of the unique challenges they pose for legal and policy reform. US jurisprudence and policies are contrasted with the more stringent approach adopted by European legal systems and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in safeguarding the often blurred line between criminal punishments and formally civil sanctions. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to contribute to a better understanding of the overreliance of the US criminal justice systems on CCs as a device of social exclusion and control, and (2) to put forward constructive and viable reform proposals aimed at reinventing the role and operation of collateral restrictions flowing from criminal convictions.

Criminal law has dramatically expanded since the 1970s. Despite popular and academic attention to overcriminalization in the United States, empirical research on how court actors and, in particular, prosecutors, use the legal tools associated with overcriminalization is scarce. In this chapter, we describe three forms of overcriminalization that, in theory, have created new tools for prosecutors: the criminalization of new behaviors, mandatory minimum sentencing statutes, and the internal expansion of criminal laws. We then use a unique dataset of felony filings and dispositions in Florida from 1995 to 2015 to test a series of hypotheses examining how overcriminalization influences prosecutorial practices given three changes to the political economy during this time: the decline in violent and property crime, the Great Recession, and a growing call for criminal justice reform. We find that prosecutors have been unconstrained by declining crime rates. Yet, rather than rely on new criminal statutes or mandatory minimum sentence laws, they maintained their caseloads by increasing their filing rates for traditional violent, property and drug offenses. At the same time, the data demonstrate nonviolent other offenses are the top charge in almost 20% of the felony caseload between 2005 and 2015. Our findings also suggest that, despite reform rhetoric, filing and conviction rates decreased due to the Recession, not changes in the law. We discuss the implications of these findings for criminal justice reform.

The purpose of the research is to study – on the basis of public relations and law of various countries – the characteristics of violation of law as a variety of social conflict, and to determine соrrelations of material notion “public danger” to notions “conflict” and “legal conflict.” The authors use the philosophical law of integrity and struggle of the oppositions, rather-legal, historical and legal, and formal and legal methods. The authors analyze characteristics of violation of law as a variety of social conflict with the existing values. Absence of similarity of the notions “social value,” “value that is set by the law,” and “value set by the state” is determined, and the possibility of state’s violating the law is considered. Characteristics of crimes, envisages in criminal codes of various countries, are compared, and the feature of public danger, which should ideally reflect the true system of values for a certain organized society, is analyzed. Commonness of the objects of crimes, envisaged by criminal codes of various countries, is shown. Similarity of a lot of objects of crimes, envisages in criminal codes of various countries, is predetermined by the existing values, which are equal for all countries with democracy. Public danger as a criterion of social conflict, due to its evaluation character, which is conducted by authorized subjects, does not influence the acknowledgment of crime – even if criminal law envisages relations that are not values and are alien to this society. From the social aspect, violation of law is a variety of social conflict – with real and formal value, which may not coincide with true public values.

This paper is dedicated to the topic of the emerging challenges of traditional criminal law as posed by the development of modern technology. In certain parts of the world, the automotive industry has already implemented a new generation of autonomous self-driving vehicles. Moreover, there have been incidents where such vehicles have been involved in traffic accidents with deadly consequences. The use of autonomous intelligence is also emerging in other important sectors, such as in medicine and the military.

The issue of the legal liability of autonomous machines has been the subject of numerous philosophical debates and approached from the perspective of tort law. The question of criminal liability, however, has still not been debated more comprehensively. In this text, I will analyze the scope and limits of criminal liability of humans for criminal offenses “committed” by autonomous systems. Firstly, I will describe potential crimes of AI in context of intent and negligence. Secondly, I will propose the new concept of (shared) criminal liability, the concept I will name the Division of Labor theory.

Technology-facilitated violence and abuse including image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) is a phenomenon affecting women and girls around the world. Abusers misuse technology to attack victims and threaten their safety, privacy, and dignity. This abuse is gendered and a form of domestic and sexual violence. In this article, the authors compare criminal law approaches to tackling IBSA in Scotland and Malawi. We critically analyze the legislative landscape in both countries, with a view to assessing the potential for victims to seek and obtain redress for IBSA. We assess the role criminal law has to play in each jurisdiction while acknowledging the limits of criminal law alone in terms of providing redress.

This chapter studies a political rationale by which colonial law forged socially assigned individuals as criminally accused persons. Focussing on archived documents of a preliminary examination that took place in 1883 in the North West Territories (now Alberta), it highlights how an accused person was moulded as a culpable individual. Arranged by a justice of the peace, and member of the North West Mounted Police, the investigation in this case reveals how colonial law unleashed an individualising force that obscured power relations behind the settlement it aimed to further. The unequal ways in which certain distinctions of person were legally recognised and individualised may be traced to long-standing western uses of social hierarchies as ‘masks’ from which law unequally recognised persons. Challenging such approaches to personhood, the analysis works off Naffine’s ‘legalistic’ ideas of persons as fictions, calling for a retelling of the fictions around accused persons. By pointing out the possibility of accusing relational rather than individual constructions, it concludes with a brief insinuation of legal forms directed at ‘collective persons’, interrupting a key political logic of colonial criminal law with allied promises of social justice beyond colonisation.

This chapter examines jury nullification, through which American juries refuse to convict criminal defendants in the face of overwhelming evidence of guilt to express disapproval of specific criminal laws or of their application to particular defendants, through the political theory of Carl Schmitt. It distinguishes liberal components of American jurisprudence, especially the rule of law, from democratic sovereignty, and shows how the two are in deep tension with one another. In light of this tension it argues that jury nullification amounts to democratic sovereignty applied counter to the liberal state in a way that paradoxically upholds individual liberty.