Defining cybercrime across legal cultures and genres: A comparative study of legal definitions in German, Austrian, Swiss and Italian computer crime law

The present paper reports the findings of a comparative pilot study on forms and functions of definitions in recent Italian, German, Austrian and Swiss computer crime law. Although definitions are seen as indispensable tools for delimiting legal meaning, the definitional practice in law has always been the subject of heated debate. Particularly in the area of criminal law, definitions are considered critical in fine-tuning the balance between semantic precision and functional openness of legal terms, thus reducing the uncertainties often associated with the legal treatment and regulation of new fields of action. On the basis of selected samples from different legal texts (laws, court decisions, teaching materials, legal essays) and systems, it is shown how criminal law practitioners tackle the problem of defining key concepts of cybercrime and how they deal with the interpretation of new criminal offenses committed over computer networks. The comparative (text-based) analysis of the linguistic formulation of definitions (in this referred to as defining phraseology) was ultimately aimed at assessing the potential impact of culture-specific legal conceptualizations on definitional issues.