Toward a Rational System of Criminal Law

Abstract

The history of legal development from primitive law to mature, civilized law and from the letter to skeptical law is marked by a progress from ritualistic or sense-perceived law to conceptualized law and by a subsequent breakdown of the thus envolved concepts. The present stage may be characterized as one of a new conceptualization – namely, formulation of new systems of concepts, perhaps best represented by the system of Kelsenian jurisprudence, on the one hand, and that of American legel neo-realism of the Lasswell-McDougal school, on the other hand.