National Criminal Law in a Comparative Legal Context.

This publication is part of the International Max Planck Information System for Comparative Criminal Law, a project at the heart of the comparative legal research of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg/Germany. A primary objective of this project is to develop a universal meta-structure of criminal law that can serve as the basis for the organization of material, enable systematic comparisons, and further the development of an international criminal law doctrine. This meta-structure is also a prerequisite for analyzing the various approaches taken around the world to shared criminal law-related problems, identifying general legal principles, and drafting international model codes. A second goal of the project is to provide global access by means of a computer-based expert system to data from the participating legal systems in the form of country reports organized on the basis of the aforementioned universal meta-structure. Towards these ends, a pilot project was carried out to analyze, structure, and present the General Part of the criminal law in twelve legal systems. The results were published in five volumes from 2008 to 2010 (in German). In the meantime, the number of legal systems included in the study has grown considerably, with the help of contributions from researchers at the Max Planck Institute as well as from external research partners. First fruits of this expansion are presented here, with the publication of reports from an additional eleven countries: Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, India, Iran, Japan, Romania, Russia, Switzerland, Uruguay, and the United States of America.