Between concepts and context: protection of "personal freedom" : a comparative case study of German and Canadian criminal law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to its pervasive affinity for conceptual abstractions, German criminal law has been said to suffer from a rationalist hubris that leads to the formulation of artificial rules and lacks respect for the realities of life. The following study will examine this hypothesis with respect to one area of German criminal law that is particularly characterized by an abstract, conceptual way of thinking: the area of what in Germany is called "offences against personal freedom". A case where a store detective suggested to a 16 year old female shoplifter that he would abstain from making a larceny report to the police if she engaged in sexual intercourse with him has caused a lot of debate in German criminal law as to the question of whether the detective infringed the shoplifter's "personal freedom" in a way prohibited by criminal law. This debate will be presented and contrasted with the approach Canadian criminal law would be likely to adopt had the case occurred in Canada. The thesis adopts a comparative, analytical approach that focuses on law reform: • comparative, because the question of whether German criminal law does lack respect for the realities of life will be examined by comparing German legal reasoning with Anglo-Canadian legal reasoning. • analytical, because when exploring what German and Canadian law regarding "offences against personal freedom" is, the focus will be on familiar, formal techniques of legal reasoning, such as those which draw on legislative texts, legislative history, underlying principles, academic commentary, fundamental values in the constitution, and theoretical concerns. • law reform, because the question is explored of whether German criminal law can learn from Canadian criminal law how to be more open to taking varying social locations of people affected by criminal law into account. In particular it is asked whether one can reconcile the traditional German conceptual approach that promises certainty of the law and the Canadian contextual approach that is better able to be attentive to equality as a fundamental right. It will be argued that such a reconciliation of approaches is possible and consists in a method that might be called egalitarian conceptualism. This approach unites the advantages of conceptual, abstract legal reasoning with the advantages of contextual thinking by merging equality as a fundamental concept with the existing conceptual framework of criminal liability. The principle "in dubio pro aequalitate" will be added to the principle "in dubio pro libertate".
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".