Decision making on criminal legislation

Abstract

This work intends to present briefly the most important aspects of a crucial problema for current Criminal Law which is the improvement of law-making processes, as well as a proposal for its consideration from our Executive and Legislative powers. The subject is approached from a interdisciplinary approach to analyse from different perspectives the institutional and political structure that sustains a drafting technique to which quality is not an essential goal. On this premise I pretend to set the basis of a criminal policy decision making new model. Such model integrates several partial models of decisionmaking currently existing: the first of them combines contributions from organizational theory, public administration and public policy analysis; the second one is the current legislative process formed by successive stages, to which information about criminal legislation production in several countries is added (regarding both governmental and parliamentary phases in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States); and the third is the criminal legislative decisions model of rationality, recently described, which uses five levels of rationality: ethic, teleological, pragmatic, formal and linguistic.