A H(e)art for European penology: Commentary on Freiberg
Abstract
Commentary A H(e)art for European penology: Commentary on Freiberg SAGE Publications, Inc. 201110.1177/1477370810386936 © The Author(s) The Author(s) TomDaems Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, tom.daems@law.kuleuven.be Corresponding author: Tom Daems, Department of Criminal Law & Criminology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Hooverplein 10, B-3000 Leuven, Belgium. Email: tom.daems@law.kuleuven.be A great continental European criminal lawyer and sociologist of law once speculated that throughout modern history good lawyers have displayed a tendency to be critical of crim- inal law: often they have wanted to restrain it or even abolish it. Reform, humanization and restraint have therefore, so Antonie Peters argued, become essential features of modern criminal law (Peters 1990: 211). Arie Freiberg’s important and thought-provoking paper has been written in a similar spirit. The paper addresses a major set of problems that have for a long time haunted modern criminal justice systems across the globe, irrespective of their adversarial or inquisitorial inclinations. The remedy Freiberg offers to us, however, is much more specific. Freiberg is convinced that European inquisitorial criminal justice sys- tems can learn a great deal from the path taken by Anglo-American adversarial systems. More specifically, Freiberg suggests that we Europeans could benefit from the influence of a body of work that