This introductory chapter first outlines the aims and history of the international project on Core Concepts in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice. The aims have been inspired by the increasing globalisation of criminal law and criminal justice, which has led to a growing desire to develop common approaches to common problems and to learn from the diversity of current practice in different countries. This has been reinforced by the internationalisation of criminal justice in international and mixed criminal tribunals. There is now a need to engage in a multi-jurisdictional and comparative conceptual analysis not provided by previous comparative projects, which typically focus on specific topics or issues. The chapter then provides an overview of the chapters in the volume, each of which aims to uncover underlying commonalities and differences, and to explore the scope for constructive assimilation or reform. Finally, the chapter comments on plans for the future.

Psychology and law, by their nature, are deeply entwined. Both are about human behavior – understanding it, modifying it, regulating it. Psychology’s research engagement with legal topics enjoys a long history, but until recently has been largely limited to clinical assessment (e.g., capacity, insanity) and police and trial evidence and procedures (e.g., eyewitnesses, jury instructions). The traditional canon of “Psychology & Law” research gained prominence when DNA evidence revealed that many wrongful convictions involved problems foreseen by psychologists. Also, the emergence of “Behavioral Law & Economics” likely provided more legitimacy to law’s engagement with empirical psychology topics and methods, spurring “Law & Psychology” teaching and research in law schools. The expanded range of research can be found across the US law curriculum as illustrated in four main first-year courses – Criminal Law, Torts, Contracts, and Property – and two commonly taken or required courses – Evidence and Professional Responsibility. The current experimental jurisprudence boom has added to the topics and methods used in this research and amplifies the existing trend in which psychology engages more closely with the content and values of law.

Legal rights, obligations, and liabilities bind together entities, including people, real and moveable property, and abstract objects, across time. Determining whether these rights, obligations, and liabilities exist at any particular time therefore requires the law to embed within it a theory of persistence – that is, a theory of how entities persist over time. The philosophical and psychological literature has identified multiple different theories of how objects persist over time, some of which are identity relations and some of which are not. Research in experimental jurisprudence has shown both that ordinary people’s judgments about the law often match the content of the law itself and that ordinary people’s judgments appear sensitive to multiple different persistence relations. These findings provide reason to think that the law, to the extent it reflects the judgments of ordinary people, also reflects multiple different theories of persistence – contrary to recent arguments that legal rights depend solely on numerical identity.

How may experimental jurisprudence contribute to legal questions or advance legal scholarship? This chapter provides a preliminary perspective from German criminal law with a focus on the specific legal practice of doctrinal reasoning (Rechtsdogmatik). It has not been in the focus of experimental jurisprudence, which is understood broadly as empirical studies with laypersons and experts about various legal questions. It overlaps with the classic field of psychology and law, but it is primarily interested in addressing normative aspects. German law is one of the main civil law systems, with firm roots in Roman law. German criminal law has noticeable influence on numerous legal systems throughout the world, from South America to Japan. The following thus hopes to promote the dialogue between these systems and between them and the common law jurisdictions.

The chapter analyzes the nature and evolution of the administration of criminal justice in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Although current Iranian law incorporates a range of provisions intended to protect the rights of the accused in criminal prosecutions, in practice these provisions are routinely violated. It is argued that the violations of due process in the Islamic Republic of Iran are the result of several factors. First, the criminal justice system has been configured to deal with political opposition as an existential threat to the state, resulting in frequent executive interference in the judicial process and arbitrary trials in revolutionary courts. Second, the structural subordination of the judiciary to the effective power of the Supreme Leader and specific executive agencies has eroded the rule of law. Third, the ideological imperative to Islamize the judicial system after the 1979 Revolution has led to the adoption of judicial procedures that have given judges very wide discretion in the conduct and outcome of cases, notably in criminal law.

This chapter of the handbook examines the sanctioning doctrines within Anglo-American criminal law and explores similarities and differences between criminal blame and ordinary social blame. The chapter explores the legal notion of actus reus in the context of intended but incomplete transgressive conduct, the distinction between intended and unintended outcomes, as well as questions of recklessness and the role of a transgressor’s character in ordinary and legal blame. It also explores the possibility that a fundamental human motivation to punish those with bad character can influence perceptions of legal questions such as consciousness of risk. Intuitions about the role of moral character in legal blame have produced legal rules restricting the consideration of prior misdeeds. At the same time, these rules and their interpretation ultimately rest on political and moral judgments, rather than psychological insights. The chapter concludes by briefly exploring some remaining questions of criminal law and intuitive blame, such as the role of cultural commitments on motivations to impose legal blame.

Chapter 1 provides a broader picture of electronic evidence and digitalisation. After an overview of the latest EU digital and security strategies and their basic principles, it analyses specific far-reaching legislative instruments based on new ideas of EU criminal law prevention, reaction and cooperation in the digital age. It then analyses the main right affected by the new approach and instruments – the right to privacy – from a historical perspective and a modern understanding through concepts developed initially by the case law of the US Supreme Court. It addresses the question of what legal boundaries are necessary in the digital age for such a right to still be an effective one. Last, the chapter looks at the aspects of digitalisation in the EU criminal law justice area that pose the most questions when comparing digital cross-border cooperation with classical cross-border cooperation based on mutual recognition. It considers judicial (court) authorisation and its meaning, oversight and extraterritorial application of legislation in that regard.

Chapter 19 provides an overview of Turkish law on the collection of digital evidence stored in and outside Turkey. It explains that while cybercrime offence definitions under Turkish law are generally in line with the Cybercrime Convention, Turkey has largely not transposed the criminal procedure and international cooperation sections of the Convention into its domestic law. It delves into the legal framework for collection of digital evidence in Turkey, including investigative measures, mandatory or voluntary cooperation of internet service providers, and administrative search and seizure methods. It analyses the judicial cooperation between Turkish LEAs and their foreign counterparts, and notes the challenges Turkish authorities face in obtaining e-evidence stored in foreign jurisdictions through mutual legal assistance requests. Noting efforts to overcome such challenges, in part through expanding the powers of the Information and Communication Technologies Authority, the chapter calls for a reform of Turkish criminal procedure and international cooperation law with the relevance of Turkey’s human rights obligations and e-evidence in mind.

Chapter 3 covers national criminal law on terrorism worldwide. A total of 188 States (of the total of 197 recognized by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in his capacity as treaty depositary) have domestic legislation in place specifically criminalizing acts of terrorism. Despite certain commonalities, the definitions of these crimes are unique to each individual State. At the time of writing, only one State, Micronesia, had no dedicated legislative provisions on terrorism of any form in its domestic law. A further seven States – the Republic of Congo, Dominica, Eritrea, Kuwait, Sierra Leone, Suriname, and Yemen – repress the financing of terrorism with criminal sanction but do not also establish the perpetration of an act of terrorism as a distinct criminal offence.

Chapters Three concludes the study of this political and constitutional transition by exploring the most important legal reform of this time: the Indian Penal Code (1860). Codification represented a highly political exercise that established the terms of the relationship between the subject and sovereign in India, while also further entrenching ideas of colonial difference into the everyday administration of criminal justice. In this chapter, I first examine how the crisis of 1857 shaped the final design of the IPC. I then pay close attention to the figure of the judge and the institution of the jury. I argue that colonial ideas of caste, culture, race, and gender informed the distribution of discretionary authority across the code in ways that would prove consequential for the administration of colonial justice.