The Doctrine of the Formal Components of a Crime in P. Feuerbach’s Pragmatic Concept of Criminal Law

Abstract

The focus of the article is on the interdisciplinary links between criminal law institute of establishing criminal liability and criminal procedure institute of criminal prosecution and subject of proof, developed in the works of the founder of the classical science of criminal law – Paul Feuerbach.

The aim of the study is to examine the peculiarities of the development of the notion «the formal components of a crime» by P. Feuerbach in comparison with its historical procedural prototype that emerged in the XVI century («corpus delicti»), as well as the position of the doctrine of the formal components of a crime in the pragmatic concept of criminal law suggested by P. Feuerbach that includes criminal records management as its component part.

 The research has included studying of the original works by P. Feuerbach (the eleventh edition of the textbook on criminal law, issued in Giessen in 1832), the first translations made on his works that were published in St. Petersburg in 1810, 1811 and 1827, the work by G. Feldstein on the significance of P. Feuerbach’s teachings for the history of domestic science of criminal law and other theoretical sources of information. Historical and interdisciplinary methods of comparison and analysis, linguistic analysis of original scientific texts have been applied in this research.

As a result, the study makes it clear that the system of the science of criminal law suggested by P. Feuerbach naturally includes three parts: General, Special and “Pragmatic” (legal proceedings). The notion of the formal components of a crime takes a special position in this system as it was created as a substantive-procedural structure for the criminal procedural cognition of relevant facts, preparing actual conditions for the guilty imputation and viewed on as the beginning of initiating non-personalized criminal prosecution.