Criminal Law
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
that branch of law which deals with crimes and their punishment and is in use in one shape or another wherever human society exists. The earliest form of penal law seems to have rested on a principle of private vengeance, and to have taken shape in the lex talionis, the law of retaliation formulated in the familiar passage in Exodus which lays down as a fit punishment an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The severity of this doctrine was mitigated when the right of personal vengeance was satisfied by a money payment, a custom which can be traced in the early laws of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, and which is particularly characteristic of early Teutonic systems of penal law. According to these a family is made pecuniarily responsible for the offenses of its members, or accepts a fine as a compensation for the life of a lost kinsman. When a man was killed, a part of this fine was paid to the king or head of the community to compensate the clan's loss of a fighting member; and in the distinction established between injuries done to the individual and injuries done to the community, the foundation of a system of criminal law was laid. The sovereign power in a community or state took up the wrongs of private persons and exercised a right of public vengeance. Legislation upon this principle had for its object the intimidation of the wrongdoer, and was specially characterized by the great variety and severity of its punishments. It was not until the 18th century tury that a more enlightened jurisprudence prevailed. Beccaria's work, "On Crimes and Punishments," published in 1764, has exercised a strong influence on criminal legislation by urging the claims of criminals to humane consideration, and examining the basis in morals upon which criminal law rests. The modern view gains ground that crime is to be looked upon as a disease of the social body, and that the remedy is to be looked for rather in improved education and social well-being than in a repressive system of arbitrary punishments. The criminal law of a particular state is the body of legal rules affecting the commission and prosecution of crimes.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's wrote in 1921 that "the modern view gains ground that crime is to be looked upon as a disease of the social body," to be met by education rather than punishment. That therapeutic confidence peaked mid-century and then broke down: from the 1970s the United States turned to mandatory minimum sentences and a war on drugs, and its prison and jail population rose from well under 200,000 in the 1920s to over two million by the 2000s. The punishments Collier's called notable for their "variety and severity" have meanwhile shrunk in much of the world — Britain abolished hanging for murder in 1965, and most countries have now ended capital punishment in law or in practice. Two things the 1921 account could not imagine are the constitutionalising of criminal procedure (the US Supreme Court's Miranda ruling of 1966 required police to warn suspects of their rights) and criminal law above the state: the Nuremberg trials of 1945–46, the Genocide Convention of 1948, and the permanent International Criminal Court, which opened at The Hague in 2002.
Written for this edition, 2026.