Criminal law is a branch of law that deals with crime. Crime is defined as an act forbidden by law and will attract punishment from the state. Criminal law has changed over time to take its current form in today’s society. Initially, when a crime was committed, the responsibility to seek any redress lay with the victim or their family. The other third parties did not participate in this process in any way. This resulted in retributive justice, which asserts that perpetrators of crime suffer in equal proportion to the crime they committed. After a while, societies began classifying some offences as crimes against the state and meted out punishment to those individuals who committed these offences. It is this particular practice that formed the basis of the current criminal law.
Earlier on, the perception and approach of criminal law were different. It failed to consider the responsibility of the accused. It did not consider the reasons why an individual committed a particular crime or whether they were accountable for their actions. Defenses applicable today, such as intoxication, infancy, excuse and insanity, were not considered initially. Today commission of crime alone is not enough to make an act criminal unless there is no proper defense to prevent conviction (Duff, 2018) .
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The law in the United States borrows from both common law and civil law. These are two distinct systems of law that took shape in different parts of the world. Common law came about due to individual habits and customs of groups. The common law was brought to America by the English colonists who settled there. This law was used predominantly in English colonies with certain modifications. This is because some elements of the English common law were viewed as oppressive, and this is what made the English settlers move to America. On the other hand, civil law has its origin dated back to the Roman Empire, where laws were formed by rules of state and imposed on people. The difference between these systems is that under civil law, all crimes are statutory, whereas common law still follows the old laws that are not found in statutory form (Pollock, 2017) . The federal-state relationship under the constitution provides that every state is allowed to choose the common law system or the civil law as the basis of their criminal law.
Currently, all states have codified most of their criminal laws. These legal codes or statutes form the existing criminal law and have primarily replaced the common law. Most crimes are statutory nowadays. However, a few states have enacted 'reception' statutes, which then implies that common law crimes continue to apply where a statute does not provide a punishment for the crime. Today, such states have the distinct advantage of using common law components to establish crimes that are not covered by statutory law in their jurisdiction.
References
Duff, R. A. (2018). Criminal law. The Realm of Criminal Law . https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199570195.003.0002
Pollock, J. (2017). Law and society. Crime and Criminal Justice in America , 221-258. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315269702-7
