Criminal liability and the three-part concept of a crime

Abstract

The study, situated within the field of dogmatic criminal legal science, critically examines the doctrinal tendency to reduce the offense to a typical and unlawful act, relegating culpability to the mere status of a presupposition for punishment. Starting from the distinction between the material, formal, and analytical concepts of crime and tracing the historical evolution of the categories of typicity, unlawfulness, and culpability, the author adopts a structuralist perspective, drawing on Maggiore, Zaffaroni, Bettiol, Miguel Reale, and Figueiredo Dias, to show that these elements mutually imply one another within an indissociable unity, unintelligible in isolation. Analyzing provisions of the Brazilian Criminal Code on mistake of fact, excusatory necessity, and irresistible coercion, he concludes that wrongdoing and culpability together, not separately, constitute the presupposition of punishment, warning that the criticized methodological split paves the way for an unacceptable offender-based criminal law.