Zur Identität der Strafrechtswissenschaft in der Mehrebenen-Rechtsordnung

The general scenario of the contemporary multi-level legal system raises several questions for the criminal law science, ranging from the relations between national and supra-national sources of law, to the interaction between different courts that, however, equally play a role in the protection of fundamental human rights. These new kinds of relationships among different legal sources and different courts are governed by new forms of mutual influence and interaction which are largely different from the traditional, deductive, mainly hierarchical, approaches. Upon clarifying the significance and the context in which these new relationships between the criminal law science and the multi-level legal system take place, this paper shall provide a contribution to the debate by focusing on three main areas, i.e. the attitude of criminal law scholars towards the supra-national harmonization of criminal law among EU Member States; the idea of a consistent criminal law theory; and the role of internationalization in the evaluation of criminal law research.