Aix Marseille Université has published a new book by John Spencer and Akila Taleb-Karlsson, Le système de justice pénale de l’Angleterre et du Pays de Galles (The Criminal Justice System of England and Wales).
English criminal procedure, in force in England and Wales, is the origin of all common law criminal procedures. Understanding its organization, its functioning and its evolution thus sheds light on the construction of other criminal laws of the Anglo-Saxon tradition but also criminal laws of the Romano-Germanic tradition such as French procedural law. Indeed, despite Brexit, the importance of the influence of European Convention law makes the comparison of English law to other European or North American laws relevant, especially since the study of the history of English criminal procedure reveals borrowings from other systems.
Furthermore, the reflections on the construction and evolution of the English penal system, still little studied in the context of an academic work in French, present a certain interest in a context constantly renewed by the intervention in a double level – national and European – of legislators, institutions and courts. Therefore, for the sake of completeness, this work offers a study that is both static (the supervision of the procedure) and dynamic (the progress of the procedure) to understand all the issues of the English judicial process in an approach which is also intended to be prospective at a time when many systems are revising or considering revising, sometimes in depth, their criminal justice system.
For information about other publications by Professor Spencer, please refer to his Faculty profile.