Daniel Jousse - Traité de la justice criminelle - 1771

Daniel Jousse. Treatise on Criminal Justice. Paris, Debure, 1771, lxxi-837 pp., 848 pp., 843 pp., 792 pp.

4 volumes in-4 (260x200 mm), full calf, gilt fillets on spine, title and volume labels in red and black morocco, red edges (bindings of the period). Lower corner of the second leaf from the front of volume I split otherwise very good overall condition. Interior very fresh, no foxing.

Original edition of this treatise published by Daniel Jousse, one of the greatest jurists of the Ancien Régime; complete in 4 volumes.

This treatise represents the most complete and systematic exposition of French criminal law as it was practiced under the Ancien Régime, on the eve of the major reforms of the 1780s and of the Revolution: criminal procedure, organization of the courts, the distinction between cases investigated under the extraordinary process (the grand criminal, subject to the criminal chamber or the parliamentary tournelle) and minor cases (the petty criminal, under the chamber of inquiries), as well as penalties and their application.

Written at a time when Beccaria's ideas were beginning to permeate the debate on reforming penal justice, Jousse’s work remains representative of the classical doctrine, more focused on procedural questions and on conceptions inherited from Christian tradition than on the new concerns for the individual fate of offenders.