<p>Canada is renowned for producing exceptionally mature criminal law scholarship. This collection of 15 essays – emerging from a conference held in Osgoode Hall Law School in September 2010 – demonstrates why this reputation is deserved. The contributions in this book, which are consistently of the highest quality, cover an expansive range of subjects. There is something here for all those (whether Canadian or not) interested in substantive criminal law (including international criminal law (ICL)), criminal law theory, and criminal procedure and evidence.</p>
<p>The editors have split the book into three main parts, and this review can only summarise the ground covered by each chapter and highlight particularly important contributions. The first eight chapters (the majority of the book) deal with substantive Canadian criminal law, and are split into two subsections. The first subsection, chapters one to four, deals with questions concerning the scope of the criminal law and the methodology of criminal law theory. All of these accounts are interesting, but are not – in this reviewer's opinion – linked terribly well. The discussion goes from equality before the law (chapter 1), to emergencies and the rule of law (chapter 2), to dignity and criminalisation (chapter 3), to the problems posed for obscenity laws by the rise of internet pornography (chapter 4). The difficulty with these quite large jumps between topics is that the first part of the book feels fragmented. This is unfortunate, as the chapters are all interesting and engaging. Leslie Green's treatment of the law's attitude towards obscenity is particularly relevant for the UK audience (Green discusses the English legislation on this topic; fruitful critiques of the equivalent Scottish laws could be based on his insights).</p>
<p>The second subsection, chapters five to eight, deals with grounds of exculpation, and the links between these contributions are stronger. The authors address questions which have troubled criminal law theorists in Canada, and elsewhere in the Common Law world, for generations: What does it mean, in law, for a person to act involuntarily (chapter 5)? How should the law deal with those who – despite not being clearly mentally ill (i.e. legally “insane”) – suffer from some defect of reasoning, which makes them seem inappropriate candidates for criminal responsibility and liability (chapter 6)? Under which circumstances should the criminal law's excusatory defences be available (chapter 8)...</p>
