Modern criminal law - both in Sweden and abroad - is characterised by a constant tension between the interests of efficiency on the one hand and the interests of legal certainty and humanity on the other. As a field of legal research, criminal law includes, among other things, questions of how existing law should be constructed, conceptual and theoretical development, what is the purpose and justification of criminal law, how criminal law is designed today and how it should be designed in the future.
In practice, criminal law is inextricably linked to criminal procedural law. Criminal procedural law is strictly speaking part of the research field of procedural law, but at least as far as the research side is concerned, it is impossible to maintain this demarcation. This is particularly true as international criminal procedural law is usually assigned to criminal law in terms of subject matter.
