Criminal Law in England

In English law there is a rather long common law definition of murder. The unlawful killing of a human being under the Queen's Peace, with malice aforethought, so that the victim dies within a year and a day.

Malice aforethought refers to the mens rea of the crime and is a way of saying that the murderer intended to commit a crime. Of course, the court can never know exactly what was in the head of the killer at the time of the killing, so it has the difficult task of deciding what his intentions must have been. The judgements in many recent cases show that English law is constantly developing its definition of intent.

Although most criminal laws in the world refer to acts of violence or theft, there are laws regulating almost every kind of human behavior: for example, what we do with our land; what we say and write; how we run our businesses; even what we wear. Sometimes governments "create new crimes" by identifying a form of behavior and passing a new law to deal with it. In most industrialized countries existing theft laws were not adequate to deal with computer crimes where complex kinds of information are stolen, altered or used to deceive others and thus, new laws have been passed. Technical change is one reason why the criminal law is one of the fastest growing areas of the law. Another reason is that the number of crimes committed in some countries seem to be increasing rapidly - although sometimes it is not clear whether people are breaking the law more, being caught more, or reporting other people's crimes more. One more reason is that different societies, or perhaps it is different governments, continually review their ideas of what should and shouldn’t be a considered crime.