Rights in Criminal Law

This open access book is the first volume to provide an in-depth exploration of the potential of a rights-based approach to criminal law. The book presents a comprehensive treatment of the role of rights in criminal law, ranging from conceptual analysis to questions of justified criminalisation, to specific legal implications for substantive criminal law and criminal procedure. While it is often the case that legal philosophy and doctrinal research in law take place largely in isolated discourses, this book brings them together. The collection addresses the academic and practical questions that are related to individual entitlements protected by criminal law, including: - Who currently holds and who should hold a right not to be wronged by others? - Is it a violation of individual rights, rather than the infliction of harm, that constitutes a reason for criminalisation. - Does the idea of interpersonal legal relations contradict the public character of criminal law? The book provides a theoretical framework for the study of consent and sexual offences, investigates the background of ideas of restorative justice, and explores both the victims and the offenders rights in prosecution and trial. In this way, it sheds new light on the theory of criminal law in the broader sense and makes a lasting contribution to the philosophy of law in general. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.