Relocating Criminal Law

this title was first published in 2000: Criminal law is a continually evolving and reactive element in modern legal systems. Until relatively recently it was not an offence to launder money or to deal in shares as an outsider with privileged information. Now very severe sentences are imposed for laundering alone, with no suspicion of active complicity in the offence generating the money. Forty years ago drugs formed a trivial proportion of the activity at every level of the criminal justice system. Now they are absolutely central. Traditional criminal law scholarship, with its search for the general has lagged behind these developments. It focus has continued to be upon the rules governing, complicity general inchoate offences, offences against the person and theft. Drawing eclectically upon a range of approaches beyond the textual, this book brings a new range of issues into the spotlight. How is the criminal law used to set limits to what can and cannot be sold, or to the relationship between criminal law and human rights in the area of privacy? How is the growing internationalization of criminal law to be understood and theorized, and to what significance? This book answers these questions in a far-reaching enquiry into how areas not hitherto regarded as central to criminal law theory are best contextualized and understood.