01 / Reading Guide
Reading Guide
Citation
Horder, J. (2019). Ashworth's Principles of Criminal Law (9th ed.). Oxford University Press.
Chapter Summary
Context and Approach
The ninth edition, prepared by Jeremy Horder, keeps the book's distinctive aim: to cover the topics found on criminal law courses while explaining the principles and theoretical foundations of the law and analysing it in context. The publisher calls it uniquely theoretical. Its thirteen chapters begin with how the criminal law operates and what it protects, move through the general part (conduct, capacity, fault, defences), then cover specific offences, and end with complicity and inchoate liability. A stated aim of the book is to bring business activity, including small business, closer to the centre of attention, which shows in its treatment of regulatory offences and financial crime.
Chapter 1: Criminal Law Process
The chapter looks at official discretion, the criminal law in action and the role of bureaucracy, with an outline of sentencing powers. Patterns of decision-making by criminal justice officials are presented as one of four pillars alongside principles, rules and standards, structured by techniques designed to reduce contested trials.
Chapter 2: Criminal Law History
The main focus is the influence of religious, especially biblical, thought on the criminal law, which helps explain its attitudes to theft, homosexuality and murder. The chapter also considers efforts to codify the law, and warns that legal development has not been continuous moral improvement, ending with threats to civil liberties.
Chapter 3: Criminal Law Values
The chapter examines the values that criminalisation protects. It distinguishes intrinsic values such as bodily integrity and sexual autonomy from public goods, such as the security of the state, integrity in corporate governance and public life, and the welfare system.
Chapter 4: Criminal Law Fabric
The chapter analyses the rules, standards and principles from which criminal law is built, with attention to secondary legislation and to offences regulating business. It covers the values the law should respect, including human rights and autonomy, explains the harm principle and the debate over punishing immoral behaviour, and treats principles of offence construction and interpretation such as strict construction.
Chapter 5: Criminal Conduct: Actus Reus, Causation, and Permissions
This is the start of the general part. The chapter covers involuntary conduct, challenges to the voluntary act requirement posed by state-of-affairs offences and possession, omissions, causation and justifiable conduct.
Chapter 6: Criminal Capacity, Mens Rea, and Fault
Capacity comes first, including infancy and insanity and the special factors in corporate criminal liability. The chapter then examines fault requirements, the arguments for and against them and the main varieties such as intention and recklessness.
Chapter 7: Excusatory Defences
The chapter treats defences concerned with the absence of culpability even where the fault element is present, including duress and coercion, reasonable mistake and putative defences, and it also deals with intoxication.
Chapter 8: Homicide
It covers murder, defences to murder and involuntary manslaughter, and newer offences created by Parliament, such as causing or allowing the death of a child or vulnerable adult and causing death by driving, before asking whether the structure of homicide law is adequate.
Chapter 9: Non-Fatal Violations of the Person
The first part treats offences against the person, including the limits of consent and reform proposals. The second concerns sexual offences under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, centred on the definition of consent, and ends by assessing the law's successes and failures.
Chapter 10: Property Offences
Theft receives the most detailed treatment, with taking a conveyance, robbery, blackmail, burglary, handling stolen goods and criminal damage. The chapter asks whether a 1968 definition of theft, stretched to cover electronic holdings and transfers, has become too wide.
Chapter 11: Financial Crime
Fraud, bribery and money laundering are examined, with attention to how they reflect corporate activity and why vigorous prosecution matters.
Chapter 12: Complicity
The chapter distinguishes principals from accessories and analyses the conduct and fault elements, joint ventures, accessorial liability for different results, derivative liability and special defences.
Chapter 13: Inchoate Offences
It explains incomplete offences, then the justifications for penalising attempt and its elements, followed by conspiracy, encouraging or assisting crime, voluntary renunciation and the place of inchoate liability.
Key Concepts
Chapters 1–4: Foundations
- Official discretion: the decisions of police, prosecutors and other officials that shape how the criminal law operates in practice.
- Intrinsic values and public goods: the two kinds of interest the criminal law protects.
- Harm principle: the idea that criminalisation should be justified by harm, set against arguments for punishing immorality.
Chapters 5–7: The General Part
- Voluntary act and omission: the conduct requirement and its limits.
- Mens rea and fault: intention, recklessness and the reasons for requiring fault.
- Excuse: defences based on lack of blame, such as duress.
Chapters 8–13: Offences and Extensions
- Homicide structure: murder, manslaughter and the specialised homicide offences.
- Consent: central in non-fatal and sexual offences.
- Complicity and inchoate liability: liability for helping, agreeing and attempting.
Critical Analysis
Strengths
- Principle before rules. The first four chapters are given to process, history, values and the construction of the criminal law, which gives the later doctrinal chapters a framework.
- Attention to how law operates. Official discretion and bureaucratic management are treated as part of the subject, not as background.
- Evaluation of the rules. Chapter openings and closings ask whether the structure is adequate, for example of homicide or the definition of theft or the sexual offences.
- Business and financial crime. Chapter 11 and the discussion of business offences in Chapters 3 and 4 treat corporate-related offending as central to the modern criminal law.
Limitations
- A theoretical approach is demanding. The publisher calls it uniquely theoretical, so students seeking only a short statement of the rules to memorise may need a more compact text.
- Scope. The chapters on offences are selective (homicide, non-fatal and sexual offences, property and financial crime); offences such as public order or drugs are not among the chapter titles.
- Law is of a date. The edition was published in 2019, so later statutory and case developments are outside it.
Where It Fits in the Course
Among the criminal law books on the list, this one is the theory-led undergraduate text. Herring's Criminal Law is an undergraduate introduction covering history, liability, offences and defences; Norrie's Crime, Reason and History is a critical introduction; Wells's Reconstructing Criminal Law is a text-and-materials collection; and Simester and Sullivan's Criminal Law: Theory and Doctrine is a detailed account that pairs the doctrine with theory.
It can serve as the main text for a student who wants reasons as well as rules, or as the second book after a more conventional text.
How to Use This Book
The book is for undergraduate law students taking a first or second criminal law course, especially where the course asks for evaluation as well as description. No prior knowledge is assumed beyond a general introduction to the legal system.
A plan: read Chapters 1 to 4 early as the framework; study Chapters 5 to 7 with the lectures on the general part; then read the offences chapters (8 to 11) as the syllabus reaches them and finish with Chapters 12 and 13. The chapters on offences each close with an assessment of the law, which makes useful starting points for essay questions. The online resources the publisher mentions (a bibliography and web links) support further reading.