Ateneo - UPO

General outlines of criminal law Legitimacy and tasks.
Criminal law: the principle of legality and its corollaries; the principle of offensiveness.
Limits to the application of criminal law: temporal, spatial, personal.
The offence: notion and structure.
The fact of crime.
Culpability.
The causes of justification.
Punishability.
The circumstantiated offence.
The attempt.
The concurrence of persons in the offence.
Concurrence of norms and concurrence of offences.
The legal consequences of the offence:
- punishment

- security measures

- causes of extinction

Giovanni Fiandaca Enzo Musco
Diritto penale Parte generale
9th ed. 2024

The course informs on the basic orientations of the current penal debate and adopts the tendency to break down the analysis of the crime into as many ‘autonomous’ chapters as there are main criminal models: namely, wilful commission, culpable commission, proper omission (wilful and culpable) and improper omission (wilful and culpable). Hence the attempt to summarise and fine-tune the results of the so-called separate construction of the fundamental types of criminal offence, in the conviction that the time is now ripe to transform into acquisitions not only for students, but also for practitioners in general, the less transient results of an evolutionary process that has seen European criminal doctrine engaged for several decades. The decision to preface the analysis of the most important institutions with ‘casuistic’ examples obeys the need for didactic efficacy and aims to satisfy the need - increasingly felt especially by students - to make the link between theoretical elaboration and practical application more comprehensible. In this ninth edition, the treatment has been extensively and articulately updated in various directions, starting with the reference in the various chapters to the most recent literature and case law, both constitutional and ordinary.

It is required to have taken at least the Constitutional Law examination.

lectures

Students with disabilities or Specific Learning Disorders (SLD) or Special Educational Needs (SEN) can request specific services and tools dedicated to them by contacting the Career Development and Coordination and Student Services Staff and consulting the dedicated page on the University website: https://uniupo.it/it/servizi/servizi-studentidisabili-e-dsa Once they have contacted the University Staff, students with disabilities, SLDs or SEN can contact the course lecturer to discuss the exam format and other teaching aspects.

Oral exams

The first part of the lectures will focus on an introduction to criminal law, its special features and historical development. This will be followed by an analysis of the principle of legality, reservation of law, taxability, non-retroactivity of criminal law, materiality, offensiveness and culpability, as well as the principles governing the application of criminal law in space. The constituent elements of the offence will then be dealt with (active subject, conduct, event, causal link, legal object, offence, unlawfulness, causes of justification, suitas of conduct, subjective element, etc.). Subsequently, the forms of manifestation of the offence will be examined (circumstantiated offence, attempted offence, concurrence of persons in the offence), the unity or plurality of offences (concurrence of offences, apparent concurrence of norms). A further group of lectures will deal with the offender (the responsible offender, imputability, capacity to commit offences, recidivism, the irresponsible offender, causes of exclusion or reduction of imputability, the dangerous offender). Lastly, the consequences of the offence will be dealt with (notion, foundation and function of punishment, types of sanction in the Italian system, the problem of commensuration of punishment, causes of exclusion from punishability, security measures).
In the course of the various topics, ample space and attention will be devoted to methods of legal research and source management.

The student is asked to fully understand the institutions dealt with and to give due emphasis to the most important innovations brought about by the most recent reforms, with particular reference to the regulation of alternative punishments, the grounds for non-punishability and the provisions - for the first time in the Italian legal system - of an organic regulation of so-called Restorative Justice, intended to perform a ‘complementary’ function with respect to the criminal trial. The student must have a thorough knowledge of the classic themes of the general part also with the addition of references to constitutional and ordinary case law. The aim is to encourage comparisons between theory and practice, make the exposition clearer and facilitate learning.