The subject matter of research carried out in the Department of Criminal Law is the limits of criminal law. These limits are apparent in the societal, economic, and political changes occurring in the global, information, and risk society, changes that, in turn, bring out fundamental changes in crime, criminal law, and criminal policy.
The research goal of the Department of Criminal Law is to examine the limits of criminal law with respect to actual changes in security risks and schools of thought about security in a changing society and to develop new responses to the criminal policy challenges that emerge from this development. In order to realize this aim, the research program of the Department of Criminal Law addresses the two central challenges facing the criminal law today by means of two research focuses and a focus on the methodology of criminal law science:
- The goal of the first research focus is the construction of a theory of the international integration of criminal law. To this end, the increasingly transnational nature of crime in the "global society" and its consequences are examined. Transnational crime pushes classical, national criminal law to its territorial limits and renders the development of new models of transnational criminal law and of criminal law integration – such as those that can be seen at the level of the European Union and the United Nations – necessary.
- The goal of the second research focus is the construction of a theory of the functional limits of criminal law. To this end, the increasingly complex nature of crime in the "risk" and "information society" and its consequences are examined (in particular terrorism, organized crime, white-collar crime, and Internet crime). This criminal activity is characterized by new risks and by proof problems that push the traditional, liberal criminal law to its functional limits and lead to new forms of social control. This is accompanied by an increase in the public perception of crime’s threat potential and by criminal policy security discourses on the legitimatization of shifting the limits of criminal law.
- In order to study the central changes – changes that can only be captured from a global perspective – in a methodologically controlled fashion, the goal of the third research focus is the construction of a theory of comparative criminal law and the development of a doctrine of international criminal law.
In order to realize its individual research goals, the research program consolidates the studies on the limits of criminal law into research fields: the construction of a theory of criminal law integration is – in addition to the general harmonization of criminal law – primarily concerned with "European Criminal Law" and "international criminal law," while the construction of a theory of the functional limits of criminal law concentrates on "terrorism," "organized crime," "white-collar crime," "computer crime," and "criminal law control of the life sciences."
The following diagram clarifies this theory-governed process of the selection and concentration of the research projects, which are determined by both the Institute’s central research focus and by the specific research topic that is relevant to the analysis.