Criminal Law

The professors and research assistants in the Criminal Law Department teach and research German criminal law and criminal procedure law as well as European and international criminal law. They focus on the law of international legal assistance in criminal matters, economic criminal law, international criminal law and fundamental issues of criminal law doctrine.

Criminal law reflects the state and self-image of a society to a particularly high degree. In view of the weight of the social disturbances to which it reacts and the severity of the sanctions it imposes, it forces the legal community to show its colours: In its offences, it defines the basic set of behavioural norms that are considered the ‘ethical minimum’ of social coexistence; the threatened sanctions provide information about the value and value shifts of protected goods.

In all of this, criminal law is particularly closely linked to the major questions of legal philosophy (such as the justification of (punitive) state power or the autonomy of the individual as the basis of (criminal) responsibility) and is at the same time dependent on the latest findings of empirical social research, with which it must therefore be in close dialogue. Criminal law research and teaching at Leuphana particularly endeavours to focus on the quality of criminal law as a mirror of social development and to incorporate its diverse references to the empirical social sciences and the philosophy of law.