A new international network for criminal justice scholars and practitioners
At the start of a new journey: some brief words of introduction to Criminal Justice Network
One of the most exciting things that can happen in the professional life of an academic is the opportunity to share his or her thoughts with colleagues and friends throughout the world. I experienced several times this extraordinary opportunity, being often invited to give lectures or take part in seminars in many countries, and especially in Spain and Latin America – where I still shamelessly express myself in a mixture of Italian and Spanish (sometimes called itañol by my local counterparts), which I developed during my years as a PhD student in Munich in an effort to communicate with the many Spanish speaking young colleagues I had the chance to meet then.
In recent years, I have often thought how nice it would be to have more opportunities, after our international meetings, to further develop our wonderful discussions. There are, indeed, plenty of prestigious legal journals where each of us publishes his or her own papers; but every academic, I am afraid, feels the difficulty of keeping up to date with what is published abroad, even by their closest friends. Our universities often do not have the necessary resources to purchase even the most important legal journals edited in the world – and our lives are, anyway, too busy for us to stay in touch with what is being published, say, in Germany, in Spain, in the US or in Chile, just to mention a few of the countries where the colleagues I most admire publish their works.
From these thoughts gradually arose the idea to create a website that could work as a common space for debates among criminal law scholars around the world, and at the same time as a medium to enhance the dissemination of our researches. This idea was initially shared with the small group of Italian colleagues and friends – Gian Luigi Gatta of the Università degli Studi, Milan; Luca Luparia of the Università di Roma Tre; Guglielmo Leo, deputy director of the High School of the Judiciary –, who had been worked for a long time on another on-line journal, Diritto penale contemporaneo, which I founded in 2010 together with Luca Santa Maria. That experience had been, by the way, surprisingly successful: the webpage, essentially directed to the national audience of criminal law academics and practitioners, is recording now around 150,000 visits per month. We just had to create something similar for an international audience, we thought.
Two other Italian colleagues – Francesco Mucciarelli of the Bocconi University, where I myself was serving as a professor before my recent appointment as a constitutional judge, and Antonio Gullo of the Luiss University, Rome – together with some professors of the Universitat de Barcelona – Joan Queralt, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, Sergi Cardenal, David Carpio – and the Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile – Jaime Couso, Héctor Hernández, Mauricio Duce, Fernando Londoño – enthusiastically joined our project, which our respective universities and institutions accepted to support.
One of the first questions that our little group of founding members had to address was which language we should choose for our initiative. To an international website, English would obviously have been the default option. However, we immediately agreed that it would have been a pity to renounce a priori to use our mother tongues, in which each of us is most at ease when dealing with legal issues. Furthermore, we considered that most academics can at least read texts in a number of foreign languages. This is particularly true in the vast part of the globe that goes from Italy to the Iberian Peninsula, and from there to Latin America – an immense territory indeed, where the languages are so close to each other, as to make Italian professors easily understood in Guatemala or Brazil, even if they have never taken, like myself, a single lesson of Spanish or Portuguese in their lives.
We resolved, therefore, to think of our project as a multilingual forum, where anyone should have the opportunity to express him- or herself, in principle, in one of the languages that are most familiar to criminal law professors all over the world. We structured then our website in three different versions – in English, the contemporary koiné for academics worldwide, but also in Italian and in Spanish, the mother tongues of the founding members of our project –, keeping our doors open to contributions in other important languages in the international discussion, such as French, German, Portuguese.
During the preparation of the webpage, we have been delighted to include in our project quite a remarkable number of distinguished law professors from various different countries (Italy, Spain and Chile, but also Germany, France, Argentina, USA, Peru, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, UK, Uruguay), who have themselves strong international connections, and with whom we have been working together for a long time.
Eventually, our Criminal Justice Network came to light, and can now start to work.
Any topic that might be of interest for an international audience of criminal justice experts should be discussed in our network. Just to mention here some examples, we could debate on how to reconcile the need to effectively fight crime whilst observing national constitutional principles and international standards on the protection of human rights; on how to shape criminal liability of legal persons taking into account both individual and corporate responsibility; on how to successfully tackle corruption and corporate crime through ‘traditional’ law enforcement methods, preventative strategies and the recovery of assets; on how to regulate criminal investigation techniques in the light of a technical and scientific evolution that offers new and extraordinary possibilities for establishing facts, but at the same time risks compromising fundamental rights; on how to uphold the general principles and rights of the criminal process relating to negotiated justice; on how to ensure, even in times of “penal populism”, that custodial sentences use rehabilitation methods that respect the human dignity of the detainee. But, hopefully, many other topics will be added to this list in the coming months.
To discuss all these questions, we created in our very home page a blog dedicated, in principle, to short and informal posts commenting at first glance a judgment or a new law, or simply putting on the table a new idea to be discussed. Other kinds of contributions, however, will be welcomed there, such as working papers or texts of conferences that their respective authors would like to share with a wider audience, and that might later be transformed into “formal” papers, taking into account the comments and criticism received in the blog. All these materials will not be submitted to any peer review process, but will simply be examined by our board of managing directors in order to assess their potential interest for our readers.
On the other hand, we decided to incorporate into our project, in a special area of our website, the already existing Italian e-journal Diritto penale contemporaneo – Rivista trimestrale (Quarterly Review for Criminal Justice) which we have, meanwhile, transformed into an international (and multilingual) legal journal, dedicated to papers submitted to a peer review process according to international standards.
We also created special sections for open access e-books edited by Criminal Justice Network or other publishers, as well as for videos of international events, interviews, etc. of potential interest for our international readers.
Of course, our readers will be updated with the new publications on Criminal Justice Network and on the Quarterly Review through our newsletter service, available on the horizontal bar at the top of our home page.
But this is more than enough for a simple presentation post. For, at the end of the day, we all know that the success of our initiative will entirely depend on our readers, and their disposition to become themselves authors, taking actively part in our discussions and bringing new subjects to the debate through their posts or papers. We sincerely hope that our brand new Criminal Justice Network will contribute to make the results of our research more easily accessible to foreign audiences, and will ultimately strengthen the scientific and personal connections among criminal law academics and practitioners beyond our respective national borders.