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There has been a transformation in the number and the scope of criminal laws relating to forms of market misconduct. Surprisingly, however, this area of criminal law is not one that has been systematically explored in recent writing about criminalisation. However, concepts such as white-collar crime, or financial crime, which are widely used to describe this area, are poorly defined and offer little analytic clarity. This paper argues that to take market crimes seriously it is necessary to focus on what is distinctive about markets and about market misconduct as a form of wrongdoing. This allows us to see the area as a whole and identify certain common features based on central institutional features of markets and the role that criminal law has played in protecting them – notably ensuring competition, preventing exploitation, and embedding trust. This approach, then, can be a means of raising wider questions about our understanding of the relationship between criminal law and the market in modern society – and the role that criminal law can or should play in regulating those markets.

Criminalisation theory scholars have examined important questions regarding what behaviours should be criminalised and why. More recently, greater attention has been paid to linking normative accounts with empirical and historicised analyses of criminalisation practices. Building on recent work on modalities of criminalisation as a methodological tool for contextual criminalisation research, this article introduces a second analytical approach for better understanding how criminal laws are made: processes of criminalisation. We discuss the findings of a pilot study of 143 criminal law statutes enacted in three Australian jurisdictions (New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria) from 2012–2017. We conclude that a processes approach supports a nuanced appreciation of the conditions under which criminal law statutes are produced, and facilitates scrutiny of whether legislative enactments are evidence-based and a product of meaningful consultation and genuine democratic participation in law-making.

One of the most important and distinctive themes of Lacey’s recent work has been the analysis of penal practices from the perspective of political economy. However, it is arguably the case that ‘political economy’ is primarily viewed as a dimension of the context in which the criminal law develops rather than as a method of legal analysis. In this chapter I explore the meaning and critical potential of the concept of political economy—how it is used by Lacey, the different traditions that she draws on—and what the perspective and theory of political economy contributes to our understanding of criminal law. I seek to deepen the relevance of political economy to the analysis of criminal responsibility by exploring how the development of the modern conception of English criminal law in the early nineteenth century was itself shaped by contemporary understandings of political economy. Most historical work on the development of the modern criminal law has focused on the impact of utilitarianism to show how changes in penal laws and institutions were linked to new efforts to shape individual conduct in society. However, equally important to the intellectual and political culture of the early nineteenth century were understandings of the new ‘science’ of political economy. This chapter explores the ways in which theories of political economy shaped the modern criminal law in this period and thereby to open up new possibilities for exploring connections between criminal law, criminal responsibility, and political economy—and thus for critical criminal law theory.

In this paper I examine the history of the crime of sedition and its use in Scotland between the 1790s and 1840s. The history of the law of sedition in Scotland in this period is significant because the crime was in practical terms created in the trials of the 1790s. These high profile cases meant that there was more overt discussion of the definition and function of the crime than in many other jurisdictions. I relate this development to a broader set of questions about how the scope and nature of class of crimes against the state or political crimes changed over this period, and how this is itself related to the emergence of new spaces and forms of politics, and also a pulling apart of word and deed in the conception of crime. The questions I address concern the changing conceptions of the relationship between thought, conduct and responsibility, and second how the idea of the state or the political was conceptualised in the criminal law as the object of this type of crime.

Introduction: Throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen, that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner’s guilt … If, at the end of and on the whole of the case, there is a reasonable doubt, created by the evidence given by either the prosecution or the prisoner, as to whether the prisoner killed the deceased with a malicious intention, the prosecution has not made out the case and the prisoner is entitled to an acquittal. No matter what the charge, or where the trial, the principle that the prosecution must prove the guilt of the prisoner is part of the common law of England and no attempt to whittle it down can be entertained.

This article asks how criminal law might be understood as a security project. Following Valverde’s lead, it does this not by trying to define the concept of security, but by looking at the operation of the temporal and spatial logics of the criminal law. It looks first at the basic logics of time and space in conceptions of criminal liability and jurisdiction, before reviewing some recent developments which challenge these practices and what these might mean for understanding criminal law as a security project.

The nature of jurisdiction and its relation to the criminal law is either poorly understood or neglected altogether. Jurisdiction is often viewed either as a purely technical matter – a procedural hurdle to be crossed before a court can hear a particular case – or as something linked pragmatically to the limits of enforcement of the law. This is particularly true in relation to territorial jurisdiction, where the idea of territory is treated as though it were natural and self-evident, without acknowledgement of the way that it is shaped by particular legal and political institutions. The present article has two aims. First it identifies and analyses the principal features of the paradigm of territorial jurisdiction as this has developed in English law, looking in particular at the way the idea of ‘territory’ has shaped and been shaped by the development of the criminal law. It then goes on to explore the relationship between jurisdiction and criminalization by showing how the development of the paradigm of territorial jurisdiction was linked, not only to the emergence and form of certain laws, but more generally to the idea of a criminal law as a body of norms applied consistently and seamlessly within a given legal space.

Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept Reiner Robert , Crime: The Mystery of the Common Sense Concept, Polity: Cambridge, 2016; 272 pp.: 9780745660301, £50.00 (hbk).

Recent years have seen developments that challenge how we think about the scale, scope and operation of the criminal law and of the conceptions of citizenship that are implicit in the doctrines and theory of criminal law. These challenge us to examine the conceptions of space and time that are fundamental to the categories and concepts of the modern criminal law. This paper analyzes different conceptions of space and time in the contemporary criminal law and how these are linked to different forms of criminalization. It then goes on to map the trajectories of development of two crimes, theft and assault, to look at how the ideas of time and space that are presupposed by existing categories of criminal law are linked to, and shaped by, social and technological change. Finally it looks at how these concepts are being challenged by contemporary social developments in practices of criminalization and theories of citizenship.

Students received a personalized or nonpersonalized version of a narrated animation explaining how the human respiratory system works. The narration for the nonpersonalized version was in formal style, whereas the narration for the personalized version was in conversational style in which “the” was changed to “your” in 12 places. In 3 experiments, students who received the personalized version scored significantly higher on transfer tests but not on retention tests than did students who received the nonpersonalized version. The results are consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning in which personalization causes students to actively process the incoming material. Suppose you are sitting at your computer, exploring a Web site on health information. You click on a link about how the human respiratory system works, and you see a short presentation on the screen. The presentation consists of an animation depicting the processes of inhaling air into the lungs, exchanging oxygen from the lungs into the bloodstream and carbon dioxide from the bloodstream into the lungs, and exhaling air out of the body. The presentation also consists of a corresponding narration spoken in a human voice describing the processes being shown in the animation. Figure 1 shows frames from the animation along with the corresponding narration. This is an example of a multimedia learning situation because the instructional message consists of words—in the form of narration—and pictures—in the form of animation (Mayer, 2001). During the past decade, researchers increasingly have been exploring ways of fostering meaningful learning in computer-based multimedia learning environments (Mayer, 2001; Rouet, Levonen, & Biardeau, 2001; Sweller, 1999). The two most important paths toward fostering meaningful learning are (a) to design multimedia instructional messages in ways that reduce cognitive load (Mayer & Moreno, 2003; Paas, Renkl, & Sweller, 2003; Van Merrienboer, Kirschner, & Kester, 2003), thus making more capacity available for deep cognitive processing during learning, and (b) to increase the learner’s interest (Harp & Mayer, 1998; Mayer, Sobko, & Mautone, 2003; Moreno & Mayer, 2000; Renninger, Hidi, & Krapp, 1992), thus causing the learner to use the available capacity for deep processing during learning. Examples of techniques to reduce cognitive load in computerbased multimedia presentations include eliminating extraneous words, sounds, and pictures (coherence principle), presenting words as narration rather than as on-screen text (modality principle), placing on-screen text near rather than far from corresponding pictures (spatial contiguity principle), and presenting narrative simultaneously with corresponding animation rather than successively (temporal contiguity principle). Overall, design principles aimed at reducing cognitive load succeed when they free up limited cognitive capacity that was being used for extraneous processing and make it available for deep cognitive processing during learning. Design principles that reduce cognitive load in multimedia learning are based on a large and growing research base. Examples of techniques to increase learner interest in computerbased multimedia presentations include using a human voice rather than a machine voice (voice principle) and using words in a conversational style rather than a formal style (personalization principle). Overall, design principles based on increasing interest succeed when they encourage learners to use their available cognitive capacity for active cognitive processing during learning— that is, to organize the presented material into coherent representations and integrate the pictorial and verbal representations with each other and with prior knowledge. In contrast to research on cognitive load, there is not yet a large research base concerning design principles that increase the learner’s interest in multimedia learning.

linked to more recent trends in the academic study of the law. The sociological study of civil and criminal justice has been concerned with processes of plea bargaining and settlement, and with other means of diverting cases from the formal institutions of law, in seeking to argue that in practice the trial is not central to the operation of law. And while the critical legal studies movement has criticized the formalism and abstraction of legal scholarship, it has not sought to anchor the study of law in the concrete practices of legal institutions such as the trial, but instead in the social and political forces that shape law making-a position that has largely accepted the formalist account of the trial as a forum of rule application. We thus have two significant schools, one pulling toward the abstraction of rules from the context of their application, the other pulling towards the context in which rules are used or created, and the trial has been left somewhere in the middle.

The Criminalization series arose from an interdisciplinary investigation into criminalization, focussing on the principles that might guide decisions about what kinds of conduct should be criminalized, and the forms that criminalization should take. Developing a normative theory of criminalization, the series tackles the key questions at the heart of the issue: what principles and goals should guide legislators in deciding what to criminalize? How should criminal wrongs be classified and differentiated? How should law enforcement officials apply the law's specifications of offences? The fourth book in the series examines the political morality of the criminal law, exploring general principles and theories of criminalization. Chapters provide accounts of the criminal law in the light of ambitious theories about moral and political philosophy - republicanism and contractarianism, or reflect upon on the success of important theories of criminalization by viewing them in a novel light. Ideas that are fundamental to any complete theory of the criminal law - liberty, harm, and the effect on victims - are investigated in depth. Sociological investigation of the criminal law grounds a critical investigation into the principles of criminalization, both as a legislative matter, and with respect to criminalization practices, in contemporary and historical contexts. The volume broadens our conceptions of the theory of criminalization, and clarifies the role of the series in the development of this theory. It is essential reading for all interested in legal, political, and social theories of criminalization.

The words of Henry Bellenden Ker, Law Commissioner, quoted as the title of this response, were truer than he knew. In protesting that the commissioners' project was less radical than was alleged by the opponents of codification, he sought principally to gain parliamentary time and space for consideration of the commissioners' work. However, his words contain a deeper vein of truth. The work of the law commissioners has been praised and criticized, celebrated and ignored, over the past one hundred and fifty years, but never yet properly understood. Even as the commissioners' reports have been plundered by successive generations of legal scholars in search of doctrinal and theoretical support for their own very contemporary concerns, there has been a continuing neglect of the commissioners' overall project and little attempt to link it to the significant transformations in punishment and the administration of criminal justice that were occurring in the same period. Accordingly, any reassessment of the commissioners' work should address these two issues: understanding their project as a whole and placing codification within the general historical context of the modernizing of the state and institutions of criminal justice. It is these two concerns that the commentators address in their responses.

Sir Henry Maine, the eminent Victorian jurist, once remarked, in frustration at being unable to secure his desired reforms of the Indian criminal law, that no one cared about the penal code except theorists and habitual criminals. This has been the recurrent lament of the English criminal lawyer. Repeated initiatives in the field of codification over the last 150 years have enjoyed little popular support or understanding, and as the most recent project stumbles forward into its fourth decade, an air of fatalism surrounds the entire question of the code. There are calls for a new political initiative to revive the project, and there have been more modest appeals for a reexamination of the principles of existing penal legislation, though neither seems likely to provoke much response. Yet, for all of the recent discussion of codes and codification, the question of the significance of codification to the modern law remains something of an enigma.