The Importance Of Criminal Law

At first thought, we associate laws as prohibited activities and lawyers as people who have high quality suits and expensive brief cases. However, law is not nearly as simple as it appears to be on the surface. There has been no time within human civilization where law was not present. Implementation of laws can be recalled back to New Testament times in the Bible where murder was a condemned crime that would be punishable by death. Law is defined as the principles and regulations created by a community or some authority applicable to its people. If we did not enforce laws or punishments, how many more crimes would be committed on a daily basis? In this paper, I will be discussing what Criminal law is, its historical contributors and its

For example, Brown v. Board of Education was a pivotal historical Supreme Court case during the Civil Rights Movement that challenged the fourteenth amendment in 1954. It challenges the illegitimate racial segregation of schools made legal by Plessy v. Ferguson 1896, which stated that segregated public facilities were lawful as long as white facilities were equal to one another. However, during the mid-twentieth century, civil rights groups challenged racial segregation legally and politically. Alex McBride a former law student at Tulane Law School stated that “it put the Constitution on the side of racial equality and galvanized the nascent civil rights movement into a full revolution.” Although Brown v. Board of Education did not fully succeed in desegregating public schools, it showed that separate is essentially unequal. Another influential case was Gideon v. Wainwright 1963, a Supreme Court case that occurred in favor of the sixth amendment when Gideon was denied a defense attorney because he could not afford a lawyer. These are two of many landmark cases that show how the Federal Constitution promotes

Criminal law is intended to protect people from public harm, maintain social order, support social values, punish those who commit crimes and most importantly assuage victims of crime. An old definition of a crime by William Blackstone is “an act committed or omitted in violation of a public law either forbidding or commanding it.” However, Frank Schmalleger uses a more descriptive definition which defines a crime as “any act or omission in violation of penal law, committed without defense or justification, and made punishable by the state in a judicial proceeding.” Criminal cases brought before the court are separated into three main categories misdemeanors, felonies or treason. Misdemeanors are minor offenses that can be settled with fines or jail sentences less than a year. Felonies are severe crimes that require harsher penalties such as being sentenced to a federal penitentiary. Lastly, treason is the violation of allegiance to one’s own country most commonly known as selling government