Law 3101A/B Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Methadone, Puritans, Drug Culture
Document Summary
Relation between social structure and change in substantive criminal law. What is the condition for a successful decriminalization process? from a functional perspective, the norms of society can be seen as a subsystem incorporating basic expectations of that society and its members. A legal system can adapt to such challenge in 2 ways. This requires the system to adjust its moral boundaries to incorporate the deviant behavior into the realm of normality, while the behavior itself remains unchanged, at least as far as formal sanctions are concerned. Criminalization: the creation of new moral boundaries within a social system or the affirmation of existing ones, in an attempt to assimilate normative challenges. It has been reported that german courts like to give though sentences to dutch citizens reasoning that they must aid the dutch people since their authorities were unable to meet the obligation of the state to do so. Not much progress towards a general theory of criminal law.
