Book Description

. . . this work is an important contribution to the global discourse on pursuing property, money or resources linked to crime. Michelle Gallant, Journal of Business Law Informed and informative, Civil Forfeiture of Criminal Property is a seminal work of impressive scholarship and strongly recommended for professional, academic, and governmental judicial studies collections in general, and criminal justice reference collections in particular. Library Bookwatch, Midwest Book Review This book is interesting because there is a dearth of writing on the subject. It must be read for that reason. Sally Ramage, The Criminal Lawyer Once called the monster that ate jurisprudence , civil forfeiture is now an established weapon in the fight against organized crime, terrorism, drug trafficking and corruption. This fine collection of essays covering civil forfeiture regimes in ten diverse jurisdictions, written by leading practitioners, provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the jurisprudential, legal, political and practical dimensions of the new generation of these powerful and controversial laws. I commend this book to criminal, civil, comparative and human rights lawyers who have an interest in how serious and profit-motivated crime, and responses to it, develop over time and in different legal cultures. Arie Freiberg, Monash University, Australia In this book, which is the first of its kind, leading experts examine the civil and criminal forfeiture systems in Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the fight against organized crime and international money laundering, there is a global trend for countries to enact forfeiture and confiscation laws that are applied through the civil process rather than the traditional criminal justice system. The authors gathered here analyze the appeal these civil forfeiture laws have for governments for their potential to disrupt criminal organizations and for their quantifiable benefits to the state. But without the usual safeguards of the criminal process, civil forfeiture laws are controversial, attracting constitutional challenges, particularly on human rights grounds. This book will be of great interest to policy-makers in government, and law enforcement agencies who are thinking of reforming their own laws, as well as to law reform agencies or select parliamentary committees where the issue of reform is topical. It will also appeal to students in criminal law, criminology and human rights.