ABSTRACT
The teaching of criminal law should be extended beyond a focus on a relatively narrow taxonomy of offences and contestable principles - such as subjective culpability - to incorporate regulatory criminal wrongdoing. It is hardly contentious that our criminal justice system is founded on the identification of public protection and security as 'essential goods' to enable us to flourish and go about our lives free from the threat of injury or harm. At a more technocratic level, many aspects of regulatory crime operate in opposition to the general trend of paradigmatic criminal law which permits general defences, demands both a conduct element and a fault element, and respects procedural standards such as a legal burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt. The number of administrative agencies that have entered the criminal justice arena, colonising the power to investigate regulatory crimes in specific areas and to prosecute summarily, has increased dramatically in Ireland in recent years.
