Crime, Criminal Policy, and Law Reform in Seventeenth-Century Irish Parliaments

Abstract

This article examines the development of criminal law, policy, and also the legislation of the Irish Parliament in the seventeenth century. In particular it questions how important matters pertaining to crime were to Members of Parliament and members of the government, and whether this had any material effect on the development of the corpus of criminal law in early modern Ireland. It also questions what role criminal law might have played in the colonizing process, whether in practice or in theory, as such asking to what extent criminal law and the notion of crime in society might or might not have been weaponized in a crusading, civilizing mission in Ireland.