Anders Nørgaard Jensen

The Role of Legal Feeling in the Criminal Legislation Anders Nørgaard Jensen

This work is based on a change in the Danish criminal law whose legal doctrinal implications are quite banal: Prior to the change, only 15-year-olds, were punished - now is also on the 14th. It is a quite deliberate distillation; fiddling dogma away to ascertain the problems surrounding the weighting of the sense of justice in criminal law, without taking the traditional, legal basis - it is quite clear from the responses from the legal institutions that balk at a reduction the age of criminal responsibility. It proves very clearly that the sense of justice in a political context relates to the collective experience of violation: Condemnation of the crime and the offender, the interests of the victim, the victim's family and the aggrieved communities. Crime is of course one of the few phenomena in a pluralistic society that suffers universal antipathy. Flemming Balvig aptly defines the legal feeling as an insatiable "danaid sieve". It is therefore imperceptible when a politician or a mass media feeds off of people's emotions in an effort to secure as many votes or viewers.