George P Fletcher, THE GRAMMAR OF CRIMINAL LAW: AMERICAN, COMPARATIVE, AND INTERNATIONAL. VOLUME ONE: FOUNDATIONS Oxford: Oxford University Press (www.oup.co.uk), 2007. xxv + 366 pp. ISBN 9780195103106. £47.
| Pages | 363-365 |
| Author | James Chalmers |
| Published date | 01 May 2009 |
| Date | 01 May 2009 |
| DOI | 10.3366/E1364980909001681 |
George Fletcher's earlier book,
Representing the fruits of a lifetime's labour by one of the leading scholars of criminal law, the three-volume work will rightly be influential, but its full import will not become clear until the remaining two volumes (for which no anticipated publication date was available at the time this review was written) are published. In this foundational volume, Fletcher says relatively little about substantive criminal law, focusing primarily on underpinning political and moral theory, as well as issues of sources and method. This does not, however, prevent Fletcher from offering a view as to the future of criminal law, and the claims – perhaps predictions – which are made are at times surprising. Much emphasis is given to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), with Fletcher arguing that the future of criminal law “lies in a dialectic tension between the law adhering to the Rome Statute as a model of criminal justice and a comparative synthesis that derives from a comparative study of the legal systems of the world” (340).
To predict that the Rome Statute will have such influence is bold: the court's jurisdiction encompasses only genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression (and the last only theoretically, as no definition of that crime has yet been agreed) – crimes which have had little influence on the generality of criminal law in...
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