Abstract
The collective monograph Criminal Law with Human face originated as a remembrance of a leading expert on criminal law and a long term member of the Department of Criminal Law of the Charles University Faculty of Law JUDr. Marie Vanduchová, CSc., who untimely left her colleagues, friends, and close ones after a serious illness in February 2020.
Twenty-eight authors decided to pay homage to this woman and honour her memory. They were her colleagues, friends or students and valued her not only for her undisputable criminal law erudition but also and especially for her human qualities as is expressed in the name of the book.
The publication is primarily focused on the topics which Marie Vanduchová paid attention to in her professional activities. Many attractive, problematic or disputed sanctioning issues are thus analysed: from the proposition and imposition of punishments in general (through the lens of experiment performed) and sanctioning of juveniles, through selected aspects of the sentence of imprisonment (conditional release, adjournment and interruption of punishment, education of prisoners), pecuniary punishment, and prohibition of possession and breeding of animals, to the still rich well of remarkable topics connected to sanctioning legal entities (disqualifying penalties, the absence of court supervision for legal entities in our country or the future direction of sanctioning legal entities).
In addition to penalties, protective measures were not left out either, be it in terms of their temporal scope or their position in the system of sanctioning legal entities. Following the example of Marie Vanduchová, attention is paid to crimes against family and children and related topics: the phenomenon of domestic violence or the possibility to avoid criminal responsibility for surrogate motherhood.
With their chapters, several authors recall that Marie Vanduchová was no stranger to criminological (treatises on criminology in the Czech lands, youth delinquency, electronic monitoring, and the positivistic school of criminology and its influence on the regulation of protective measures are included in the book) and procedural law topics (e.g., in the chapter focused on expert evidence) as well. More general topics mapping the criminal law itself and its pillars are not absent either: the concept of criminal reform and the subsidiarity of criminal repression are both subjected to analysis, and, finally, neither are chapters which thematically branches into other areas of law - healthcare law and law of administrative offences.
The book will therefore find its readers among academics and law practitioners devoting themselves (not only) to criminal law, law students, and undoubtedly other representatives of both professional and lay public.